A Cultural History of Peace in the Modern Age

257 Pages·2022·2.864 MB·English

by  Ronald Edsforth

A CULTURAL HISTORY
OF PEACE
VOLUME 6
i
A Cultural History of Peace
General Editor: Ronald Edsforth
Volume 1
A Cultural History of Peace in Antiquity
Edited by Sheila L. Ager
Volume 2
A Cultural History of Peace in the Medieval Age
Edited by Walter Simons
Volume 3
A Cultural History of Peace in the Renaissance
Edited by Isabella Lazzarini
Volume 4
A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment
Edited by Stella Ghervas and David Armitage
Volume 5
A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Empire
Edited by Ingrid Sharp
Volume 6
A Cultural History of Peace in the Modern Age
Edited by Ronald Edsforth
ii
A CULTURAL HISTORY
OF PEACE
IN THE
MODERN AGE
Edited by Ronald Edsforth
iii
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2020

Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020

Ronald Edsforth has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identifi ed as Editor of this work.

Series design by Raven Design

Cover image © JOHN THYS / Stringer / Getty Images

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any
third- party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this
book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret
any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist,
but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-3839-7
Set: 978-1-4742-4135-9

Series: The Cultural Histories Series

Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
To fi nd out more about our authors and books visit w ww.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters .
iv
CONTENTS
LI ST OF IL LUSTRATIONS vi
G ENERAL ED ITOR’S P REFACE ix
Introduction 1
Ronald Edsforth
1 Defi nitions of Peace 21
Charles Webel and Marcel Kaba
2 Human Nature, Peace, and War 41
Douglas P. Fry and Geneviè ve Souillac
3 Peace, War, and Gender 61
Donna Pankhurst
4 Peace, Pacifi sm, and Religion: Just War Traditions, Nonviolence, Peace Building,
Social Justice, Human Rights, Sustainable Development, and Interfaith Dialogue 83
Toh Swee-Hin
5 Representations of Peace 105
Rune Ottosen and Ronald Edsforth
6 Peace Movements 127
Cecelia Lynch
7 Peace, Security, and Deterrence 145
John Mueller
8 Peace as Integration 163
Genevi è ve Souillac
N OTES 181
BI BLIOGRAPHY 185
C ONTRIBUTORS 225
IN DEX 227
v
ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
0.1 Woman weeps over her husband’s body, 1965. 2
0.2 Bertrand and Edith Russell lead sit-d own demonstration in Whitehall,
London protesting deployment of nuclear weapons, February 1961. 6
0.3 Earth Day Poster, The Whole Earth is Watching. 18
CHAPTER 1
1.1 Activist Wangari Maathai. 28
1.2 Gandhi leading the Salt March, March 1930. 29
1.3 The Dalai Lama speaking in Tokyo, October 31, 2009. 30
1.4 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. being arrested for “loitering” in Montgomery,
Alabama 1958. 34
CHAPTER 2
2.1 A temple stands as a remnant of ancient Greek civilization on the southern
coast of Sicily. 43
2.2 Anasazi ruins from Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. The prehistoric
Anasazi made the transition from nomadic foraging to settled,
village farming, and co-existed peacefully in their farming villages with
their neighbors for hundreds of years. 47
2.3 Nomadic forager societies are windows to the human past. 48
2.4 The Iroquois Confederacy was a peace system known as Haudenosaunee,
which means people of the long house. 51
2.5 The Hiroshima Dome Memorial, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Japan. 53
2.6 Bonobos relax and groom each other. 55
2.7 Grand’ Place market square, Brussels. 58
CHAPTER 3
3.1 War workers modeling an assortment of protective goggles, visors,
respirator masks, and helmets. 65
3.2 Eritrean People’s Liberation Front female guerilla soldiers training. 67
vi
ILLUSTRATIONS vii
3.3 A new female voter preparing to cast her vote 1920. 70
3.4 Women at the head of an anti-Vietnam War peace march, San Francisco 1971. 72
3.5 Women protestors sitting at gateway to Greenham Common
Airbase, England. 73
CHAPTER 4
4.1 Mohandas Ghandi. 88
4.2 Palestinians remove a roadblock while a member of the Christian
Peacemaker Team stands behind them. 90
4.3 Thich Nhat Hanh in Paris, 2006. 91
4.4 Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights who campaign to
stop house demolitions on the West Bank, October 2012. 92
4.5 Environmental activist Vandana Shiva, 2013. 95
4.6 Asia-Pacifi c Interfaith Symposium: Women, Faith, and a Culture of
Peace; Multi-Faith Centre, Griffi th University, Brisbane, Australia
February 2008. 98
4.7 Imman Muhammed Ashafa and Pastor James Wuye of Nigeria at the
eighth annual gala of the We Are Family Foundation, New York City,
October 2010. 103
CHAPTER 5
5.1 Peace sign designed by Gerald Holtom for Ban the Bomb March London
to Aldermaston, April 1958. 106
5.2 Philippines President Corazon Acquino salutes the crowd celebrating the
victorious People Power Revolution, March 2, 1986. 107
5.3 Children fl eeing their homes, Phan Thi Kim Phuc on right, after napalm
bombing of Trang Bang, South Vietnam, June 8, 1972. 108
5.4 Zulu Chief and President of the African National Congress Albert Lutuli
accepts the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize. 114
5.5 Neville Chamberlain at Heston Airport after Signing the Munich agreement. 117
5.6 Johan Galtung in 1989 when he was a Professor of Peace Studies at the
University of Hawaii. 120
CHAPTER 6
6.1 Margaret Bondfi eld addresses Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom rally at the World Disarmament Conference 1932. 130
6.2 King Felipe VI of Spain and Barack Obama view G uernica in the Reina
Sofi a Museum in Madrid, July 2018. 131
viii ILLUSTRATIONS
6.3 Bayard Rustin 1964. 133
6.4 Hiroshima’s fi rst Peace Festival, 1948. 136
6.5 Dutch artists protest in Amsterdam against the Vietnam War,
December 1966. 137
6.6 Liberian women demand peace in front of ECOMIL headquarters in
Monrovia, August 28, 2003. 140
6.7 Prisoner liberated by crowd in Kasserine during People Power revolution
in Libya 2010. 142
CHAPTER 7
7.1 I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier , Sheet Music USA 1915. 146
7.2 American delegates arrive in the Netherlands for Women’s Peace Congress,
April 1915. 147
7.3 Children of farm workers in Kent, England have their gas masks checked,
August 29, 1939. 149
7.4 Adolf Hitler addressing a meeting in Berlin, January 1, 1937. 151
7.5 Memorial for Fallen Soldiers World War I, in Ohlsdorf, Germany
overlooks graves of 3,400 Germans, 230 Russians, 6 Serbs, 6 Poles,
2 Romanians, and 1 French soldier. 160
CHAPTER 8
8.1 Memorials honoring soldiers who were killed in World War I, like this
one in Saint Cyprien, Dordogne are located in every village and town
in France. 166
8.2 Poster by Alain Carrier in 1991 by the United Nations to celebrate the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 169
8.3 Reading Jean Monnet, the author’s book collection. 171
8.4 The expansion of the UN as a forum for cooperation on matters of
common interest is evidence of a new institutional global order. 172
8.5 Medieval city hall Frankfurt am Main, displaying the fl ags of Frankfurt,
Germany, and the EU. 177
8.6 Kristof Wodiczko’s Arc de Triomphe, Institut mondial pour l’abolition
de la guerre, Abolition of War Exhibition, Kuntsi Musen of Modern
Art, Vaasa, Finland, 2014. 179
GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
RONALD EDSFORTH
When people learn that I study and teach peace history, they often look puzzled and ask
me, “Does peace have a history?” A Cultural History of Peace is an emphatically positive
response to that question. Yes, peace has a history. The original scholarly essays collected
in these six volumes clearly show that peace has always been an important human concern.
More precisely, these essays demonstrate that what we recognize today as peace thinking
and peace imagining, peace seeking and peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding
have long recorded histories that stretch from antiquity to the twenty-fi rst century. All of
us who have contributed to A Cultural History of Peace believe that present and future
generations should have the opportunity to recognize and understand the importance of
this peace history.
Very few universities and colleges had faculty who taught and researched peace history
before the end of the Cold War. Even today, most professors who do peace history moved
into it from other specializations in History or other academic disciplines. Most
contributors to A Cultural History of Peace are professional historians, but Anthropology,
Sociology, Political Science, Journalism, Art History, Religion, and Classical Studies are
also represented. These fi fty- six contributors work on four continents in thirteen different
countries. Their participation in this project tells us that peace history has earned a global
recognition in academia that not so long ago was unimaginable. Their essays build upon
prior scholarship, but they also introduce new research and new interpretations. As a
whole A Cultural History of Peace highlights our humanity, something that has been for
too long overshadowed in history by the inhumanity of war and other forms of violent
confl ict. Pursuing answers to new and seldom-a sked questions, these collected essays
expand our knowledge of when, how, and why people in the past pursued peace within
their own societies and peaceable relations with people from other societies.
The South African novelist Nadine Gordimer wisely observes, “The past is valid only
in relation to whether the present recognises it” (2007: 7). In other words, what happened
in the past is not necessarily history. History is made when scholars produce meaningful
answers to the questions they ask about the past. The past cannot change, but history can
and does change when scholars ask new questions, and when they use previously
undiscovered or ignored evidence to develop new interpretations of the past. Evidence of
what people said or did, or said they did, are basic materials out of which scholars shape
answers to questions like “Does peace have a history?” Of course, to answer this particular
question about the past, we must have in mind some defi nition of peace. Like most people
we probably immediately think of peace as n ot war , a classic defi nition that describes
peace in negative terms, as an absence of the type of violent confl icts that still loom so
large in popular histories and stories about the past. The American psychologist and peace
activist William James succinctly summed up this common way of framing of the past,
simply stating, “History is a bath of blood” (1910: 1).
James’ description of history still plays well in a world that during the last century
experienced the massive casualties and devastation of two world wars, genocides, and
ix