The Evolution of Peace Concepts

By the watershed years 1912 to 1919 most of the major leaders of the peace movement in Europe were either dead or in prison. In Austria the pacificist Bertha von Suttner, closely associated with Nobel and the Prize and one of Europe's leading peace writers and orators, died just before the war. Keir Hardie, another tireless anti-militarist campaigner and leader of the British Independent Labour Party, died soon after hostilities started. Jean Jaurès, the French socialist leader who was a key figure in the reformist peace movement, was assassinated days before mobilization began. The left-wing socialist peace agitator and Reichstag deputy Karl Liebknecht, who was the only deputy to vote against war credits in Germany, was imprisoned along with fellow anti-militarist Rosa Luxemburg. Both were murdered in January 1919, by which time Eugene Debs and other American anti-militarist leaders were also in prison.

Of the peace traditions that had existed before the war, two were secular and derived from the Enlightenment humanism and the cosmopolitan rationalism of the 1750s. These were translated into liberal and socialist international ideals, which bifurcated during the nineteenth century. The more optimistic idealist versions of these had been sorely battered—first by the carnage of the Napoleonic wars, then of the Great War—and they were further sobered by the cessation of the liberal internationalist dreams symbolized by the Peace Palace and The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 and the failure of the Second Socialist International in its strategy to prevent war.

The efforts to create international organizations prior to 1914 left few legacies. The Red Cross, the League of Nations, and the institutions located at The Hague represented the closest continuities with these aspirations. But, more importantly, these liberal institutions incorporated the more “realist” Westphalian framework—one in which armed sovereign states agreed to arrange a “systemic peace” (a system attempted, to some extent, by the Congress of Vienna after 1815). After World War I there were initiatives to outlaw certain weapons, even war itself. This conception of peace, rooted in treaty law, negotiation, and contractual agreement, was based on hopes for international consensus, or negotiation and arbitration. It did not include enforcement mechanisms, however, and the Versailles treaties themselves merely postponed renewed rivalries and war in Europe, mainly between the same protagonists, but in new forms. The idea of outlawing war appeared with the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), as well as in the basic principles of international law, which were more clearly enunciated in the 1920s and 1930s. The breakdown of diplomacy in 1914 and again in the 1920s encouraged the academic study of international relations, which in turn helped provide the beginnings of peace research.Footnote ¹

Although organizational continuity was minimal, and while the Great War largely destroyed the peace strategies of socialist antimilitarists and most socialist internationalists, alternative peace concepts survived the cataclysm on 1914–1918.Footnote ² The second tradition that derived from the remnants of anti-militarism and left internationalism—war resistance and anti-conscription—evolved and overlapped with the evolution of a new radical secular pacifism and conscientious objection (addressed below).

A third tradition, one that survived the war but was drastically changed in the more secular and pessimistic age following 1918, was that of the religious peace movements, which included radical Protestants and other remnants of left-wing Puritanism, such as the Quakers and the other prophetic minorities who had maintained several centuries of witness against war as an ungodly institution.Footnote ³ Although at its core this was a tradition encompassing tens of thousands—or at most hundreds of thousands, rather than millions—its importance for peace was far in excess of its size. The peace churches, and those institutions with similar beliefs, were small; but both in peace movements and a wide range of humanitarian projects they constituted a powerful lobby, with influence even on state policy. For example, the expansion of conscientious objection to military service as a human right was part of this legacy.

These three peace traditions were essentially Western: European, North American, and from the English-speaking diaspora of the Commonwealth. But a fourth was emerging by 1918 that, while it included these Western influences, brought non-Western values into a global dialogue. First and foremost, after Gandhi's arrival in India from South Africa in 1917, the growing impact of his theory and practice of nonviolent action (satyagraha) was felt beyond both countries. Hindu as well as other elements (for example, Sikh) were added to a blend of Tolstoyan and Quaker Christianity. So were elements of Thoreauean civil disobedience, and a humanist socialism.Footnote ⁴ This blend of utopianism and pragmatism was fused in a philosophy that rooted “truth” in social action.Footnote ⁵

Gandhian ideas spread from India to other parts of the world.Footnote ⁶ They were incorporated first by radical pacificists in Holland, France, and England, and then traveled to North America, where even labor unions took them up. These ideas have proved to be the most significant innovation in peace theory and peace praxis in the past hundred years. They added a moral dimension to methods already used by some in the West, such as the labor movement's use of strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts. They also added a theory of conflict and a dialectic of action in a struggle that became an “experiment with truth”: testing ideas through political dialogue, exemplary conduct, and communication during conflict, rather than through political violence. In the United States, Gandhi's ideas of nonviolent resistance blended with Reinhold Niebuhr's pacifism, John Dewey's pragmatism, and other strands of peace thought and civil disobedience.Footnote ⁷ By the 1950s, Martin Luther King, Jr., achieved such a synthesis through the civil rights campaigns, and the anti-nuclear campaigns also absorbed Gandhian methods. Gandhi never saw nonviolence as merely a method of achieving Indian swaraj (independence), but instead as a universally applicable model of action. The worldwide range of peace and social transformation projects that have adopted such methods is a tribute to its power and relevance.

The Contribution of the West: Peace through Social Practice

Since 1913 a few issues loom disproportionately large in relation to the peace of the world. These include the “exceptional” roles, both positive and negative, of the United States in world affairs and the role of peace movements in the public sphere. American exceptionalism is one of the great unexamined paradoxes of twentieth-century peace thought. With its “divine” global vision, Fortress America is at once colonialist and universalist—in its ambivalent, contradictory attitudes regarding its place in the world, and in its self-appointed civilizing mission. Criticism has been rightly leveled at the West for its over-reliance on military intervention, its acceleration of the militarization of the planet, as well as for the intense militarization of its domestic cultures, particularly in the United States. Nevertheless, the West's practical contributions to peace have been preeminent. This may seem contradictory, but while the Anglo-American world in particular has lagged behind the rest of the world in terms of peace theory, in terms of practical innovation from international law, and the development and application of methods of nonviolent action, it is arguable that the West has been the leading force in moving humanity away from militarism.

Sociologists have long understood that societies may simultaneously move in contrasting or contradictory directions. This paradox was true for Western societies in the period before 1914, which saw the emergence of both the largest arms race and the most extensive mass peace movements in history. In the years following the war, concepts of peace have evolved especially through social movement practice. Many such movements—including those that believed in “the abolition of war” as a reachable goal between 1920 and 1935 or “general and complete disarmament” between 1945 and 1961, as well as such globalist advocates as the World Federalists and Esperantists—have been universally seen as manifest failures, or at best only partly effective on specific (often marginal) issues. But in changing our overall frame of reference—the ways in which we view and practice peace—a myriad of such projects played a critical role, not least by helping us break free from the cage of nationalist-statist orientations.

Before 1914 pacifism was a term describing a general orientation opposing war. With the mobilization of August 1914, pacifism in its modern sense was born, out of the splits among those who opposed war for different reasons. Many, though generally opposed to war, felt there was no alternative but to support their respective belligerent country and its participation in war. But a substantial section of the peace movement was made up of groups that included absolute and radical pacifists and a variety of other freethinkers, humanists, and anarchists. Openly refusing to collaborate in the war effort on political or religious grounds, or both, these people became the “war resisters” and the conscientious or socialist “objectors” (and in some cases the deserters and mutineers) who sought to keep the faith of internationalist socialism or liberalism.Footnote ⁸ By 1915 the dividing line was drawn between those individuals who opposed war and militarism in general (the pacificists) and those pacifists who actively refused war, the draft, or other military activity. This distinction has remained an important one.Footnote ⁹

The opposition to war as an institution is one of the major legacies of the twentieth century. Pacifists, a “prophetic” minority (they have always been a minority in modern states), provide a moral compass for civilization, becoming the principled core of a society that refuses to cooperate with the essential barbarism of war. Most pacifists do not actually refuse to fight in wars (most are not eligible for service), but rather take a nonviolent stand against war as an institution, just as abolitionists took a stand against slavery without necessarily sheltering fugitive slaves themselves. By refusing to conform to a national mobilization for war, however integral or absolute, pacifists risk taking an “unpatriotic” stance, which is unpopular, radical, and, in many modern societies, dangerous.Footnote ¹⁰

War Resistance: Conscientious Objection and Conscription

One of the most important peace-related ideas to evolve from World War I was that of war resistance as a collective phenomenon, rather than one constituted by individual witness, draft refusal, or conscientious objection. This phenomenon is rarely discussed in the context of peace or peace movements.Footnote ¹¹ Given the tendency to focus on peace as a relation between states, the widespread phenomenon of resistance to conscription, which emerged in the nineteenth century and has continued up to the present, has been largely overlooked. Certainly conscription is now being replaced by smaller, highly-trained professional armies in many technologically advanced countries, such as the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. Yet globally, war resistance has gone far beyond the normal constituencies of “peace activism” and has had radical implications for long periods, especially in developing societies, where the draft is often deeply unpopular.

One of the first of such groups to emerge (in 1915) was the “No Conscription Fellowship” in the United Kingdom. Led by Bertrand Russell and others, it linked the anti-militarist socialism of the Independent Labour Party to an international network of refusers that was to become, in 1921, the War Resisters International.Footnote ¹² Compulsory military service had spread throughout continental Europe in the previous century, which led to the mass conscripted armies of 1914. This remained the norm after 1918 and into the cold war, and such service is still enforced in the majority of states worldwide. Peacetime conscription, however, ended in the 1960s and 1970s in a number of industrialized societies, including the United States and Germany, after the spectacular rise of draft refusal in the United States during the last five years of the Vietnam War. In Europe the right to alternatives to military service became a legal one, and was established as a human right by the 1980s.Footnote ¹³

In developing societies, the conflict over military service became part of the general social struggle against authoritarian rule by unpopular elites.Footnote ¹⁴ Such resistance often had an ethnic or political base, with the support of the labor movement, religious bodies, and/or churches. This repeated the pattern of European war resistance between 1789 and 1918, when it helped drive migration to nonconscripting states, notably the United States, Canada, and Australia. Throughout the twentieth century—as in the nineteenth—anti-conscriptionism did overlap with the peace movement, and with a general anti-militarist mood, and generated both religious and political lobbies for expanding human rights to be embodied in law. The slow, unspectacular global spread of this “peace right” is one of the less remarked on changes of the past century.

At only one point, however, did the issue of whether to obey the “call to arms” become institutionalized into a formal peace movement organization, the Peace Pledge Union. This was between 1920 and 1940, in reaction to the carnage of World War I.Footnote ¹⁵ The peace movement held a “peace ballot” and adopted a “peace pledge”—which became the Peace Pledge Union—under the slogan “Wars will cease when men refuse to fight.” This utopian-pacifist scenario, like the myth of the general strike of the anarcho-syndicalists (most often attributed to Georges Sorel), would only work if enough people in enough countries acted on the belief. Although anarchism had produced strikes, mass unrest, and interruptions of conscription at some points in some countries, the actual number of people refusing was a tiny, if prophetic, minority. Yet such protests tested the limits of the will and power of some states, and they still have the potential to do so, as they indicate the limits to a society's willingness to support the draft. Few countries, however, followed Costa Rica's example when in 1948 it abolished the army outright—though the Swiss came close, via a referendum, to approving such a move, and unpopular drafts elsewhere contributed to revolutionary movements.

While it is easy to dismiss war resistance as futile and doomed to failure, the idea of “peace rights”—even the duty to refuse to serve in an illegal and immoral war, which was how many viewed the U.S. war in Vietnam—has achieved a much wider currency. As a result of war-resistant communities and groups, conscientious objection is now an important part of the peace culture and one in permanent tension with conscripting governments around the globe.

A less auspicious peace evolution after 1918 was the fifty-year peace project of the communist parties (mainly led by the Soviet Union) both in the Communist International and beyond. Actual Soviet policy (which supported anti-fascist violence on the one hand, while entering into the Nazi-Soviet pact on the other) made this a contradictory, and in some cases a palpably fraudulent, exercise; but its “double-speak” was no worse than much of the cold war language of its anti-communist, anti-Soviet counterparts.Footnote ¹⁶ The main effect of this “movement”—the main strategy of which was to create national peace councils or committees (fronts) in each country (led covertly or openly by communist parties)—was the increasingly negative connotation of the very term “peace” between 1930 and 1960. By the late 1950s it was clear that this tactic had failed, and the Soviets had adopted a new one: to infiltrate non-communist peace movements and parties (entrism) and to attempt to steer them toward pro-Soviet (or at least pro-communist) positions. The impact was often divisive and undermined genuinely nonaligned projects. Sometimes it backfired, as when those entering such movements became converts to genuine peace policies and, rather than recruiting for the Communist Party, they left it.Footnote ¹⁷

A neutral and nonaligned movement also emerged during this era, a third force consisting of developing countries, all of which aspired to stand outside the cold war. (Even though this movement included communist Cuba, it also included the more clearly nonaligned India and socialist Yugoslavia.) The nonaligned movement argued for détente, a role for the developing world, nuclear free zones, and an end to nuclear testing, and at times critiqued both the Eastern and Western blocs.

Multilateralism, Unilateralism, and the Threat of the Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction

Part of the catalyst for the shift from the “old Left” was the mass anti-nuclear weapons movement after 1957. This so-called “nuclear pacifism” or “ban-the-bomb” campaigns (a slogan largely coined by the media, which was keen to belittle the movement) had very specific demands, unlike the broad anti-war or popular front coalitions of the 1930s or the largely communist-inspired Stockholm peace appeal of the 1950s, which assembled millions of petition signatures for general and complete disarmament.Footnote ¹⁸ Except for in the United States and the Soviet Union, however, the “nuclear pacifist” movements were largely unilateralist, and sought to rid their own states of the manufacturing, testing, stockpiling, deployment, and basing of such weapons. Threatening nuclear annihilation was not a kind of “peace” that the peace movement and nuclear disarmers sought. While bilateral nuclear terror (mutually assured destruction) inhibited the use of atomic weapons, it did not guarantee nonuse. As for “general and complete disarmament,” that seemed a chimera by the mid-1950s. Steps toward peace were the best that could be hoped for, and this translated into “unilateralism” for many peace activists.

This key peace policy innovation to reverse the nuclear arms race was popularized by nuclear disarmament campaigns, such as Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in 1958 and continuing to the present day. Unilateralism proposed that individual countries, regardless of what other states do, should initiate unilateral first steps, including stopping nuclear tests, refusing to host nuclear bases, renouncing nuclear first use, and even rejecting the acquisition or retention of nuclear weapons (for example, by France, India, and, in particular, the United Kingdom). Seen as radical, if not utopian, at the height of their influence the nuclear disarmament coalitions attained a remarkable level of public support—between 30 and 40 percent of their respective populations. This was a significant sign of immense public disquiet regarding the threat of weapons of mass destruction.Footnote ¹⁹

Moreover, the rising levels of radiation from nuclear tests, the Berlin face-off, the Cuban missile crisis, and a series of drastic accidents and alerts finally led to public demand for a change in state policy, resulting in some arms limitation and precautionary agreements as well as the slow elimination of atmospheric testing (though nuclear weapons proliferation continued in Asia and the Middle East). Some pacifists were prepared to join these peace coalitions, while others refused because they campaigned against only one type of war and weapons: nuclear. Though unilateralist, the movements were not neutralist in the sense of taking no stance on such issues as democracy or human rights. Critical nonalignment better describes their position than “positive” neutralism (and this remained true during the 1980s resurgence of such movements). Similar organizations developed in Scandinavia and much of Western Europe, Australia/Asia, Canada, and Japan in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ²⁰

Such was the mood of moral unease after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the mass bombing of other civilian targets in Germany and Japan, that nuclear states tended to censor or suppress nuclear information.Footnote ²¹ This “conspiracy of silence” was broken by the nuclear disarmament movement of the early 1960s, but efforts to re-educate the public on the subject were still required twenty years later, during the Reagan administration. In each case these education campaigns lasted a decade, but a deep silence about nuclear weapons followed them, except regarding those weapons that did not exist (as in Iraq) or those at an early stage of development (as in Iran). Nuclear denial (including over Israel's nuclear arsenal) remains a key obstacle to an honest global peace discourse.Footnote ²² Only toward the end of the cold war, with Gorbachev's initiatives, did more comprehensive disarmament once again seem feasible, albeit briefly. However, cold war attitudes and structures (especially NATO) were not easily removed.

Toward a Definition of the Peace Movement

The debates from the mid-1950s to the end of the cold war (1990) were highly ideologized, and as a result competing concepts of peace proliferated. At one end of the spectrum, “peace” was used to describe the goals of nuclear deterrence. For example, one U.S. nuclear missile was named “The Peacekeeper,” and the U.S. Strategic Air Command's motto was “Peace is our Profession.” At the other extreme, peace became associated with hippies, flower power, and the 1960s counterculture.

Few have exercised clear thinking in analyzing the aims and goals of peace-organizing. What the nuclear disarmament campaigns achieved was continuity over two half-decades (1957–1964 and 1980–1986), a relatively stable base of supporters, as well as coherent policies and a defined structure. These were qualities the movements opposing the war in Indochina and the overlapping groups of the new Left signally lacked.Footnote ²³ The inchoate and evanescent character of the unstable coalitions of the late 1960s and early 1970s created huge problems of definition—for instance, it was questionable whether they could be termed peace movements at all, given their frequent identification with “liberation movements,” which were often violent. The most useful definition is that to qualify as a peace movement a movement must be nonaligned, nonviolent, and autonomous (nongovernmental)—which would exclude those solely identified with the policies of any one state.Footnote ²⁴

In this context, the transnational European Nuclear Disarmament (END) movement of the 1980s not only made a key civil society contribution to ending the cold war in Europe but it also linked the East and West in strategically innovative ways. It transcended the one-country limitations of unilateralism (without abandoning the principle of first-steps reciprocity and local and continental nuclear-free zones). It campaigned for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal—or (more radically) from the Atlantic to the Urals. END sought to create a symmetric relationship between the independent peace and disarmament campaigns in the West and the independent human rights movements emerging in the autonomous and dissident groups of Eastern Europe. While the relationship was fraught with tensions, complexities, and mutual suspicion, it increased contacts transnationally, and gave groups such as Charter 77 and Solidarity, as well as conscientious objector campaigns in the East, a major Western arena for their views and actions. It also bypassed the issue of nonalignment, and was clearly neither pro-Soviet nor pro-NATO. As a model of nonviolent, nongovernmental cross-border linkages, it presaged the subsequent incorporation of most of Eastern Europe into the European Community.Footnote ²⁵

The Study of Peace

The evolution of peace research and education over the past fifty years, under the umbrella of Peace Studies, can be seen as a continuation of Andrew Carnegie's work on public education and his conviction that knowledge and its dissemination is a force for peace. Peace research institutes and their libraries represent a belief in the benefits of rational analysis and appraisal, independent of the influence of national governments. The early years of this research, in the 1950s, were auspicious, as centers sprang up in Scandinavia, Holland, and the United States, presenting a fresh outlook on global conflict. Moreover, the founding of these centers was contemporaneous with the burgeoning world nuclear disarmament movement. In contrast to the dominant theories in International Relations, researchers such as Johan Galtung in Norway (a founder of the Peace Research Institute Oslo), Anatol RapoportFootnote ²⁷ at the University of Michigan, and Kenneth BouldingFootnote ²⁸ at Stanford University offered sane alternatives to the “Dr. Strangelove” approach of mutual assured destruction (MAD) theorists such as Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn, as well as the other apostles of nuclear deterrence and the cold war. Their posture of deterrence was also critiqued by other U.S.-based researchers, such as Thomas Schelling and Seymour Melman. During this same period, important centers for peace studies in Australia, Canada, and the German-speaking countries also emerged.

Some approaches clearly paralleled the ideas of the burgeoning peace campaigns. For example, Charles Osgood's enunciation of “GRITS” (Graduated Reciprocal Tension-Reducing Initiatives) can be seen as an academic application of the unilateralist idea of “first steps.”Footnote ²⁹ Given the normative and ethical basis of peace ideas, the interaction between academic peace research (inside and outside universities) and the peace movement—demanding partisan policy-oriented work—has remained complex and problematic. Moreover, the idea that such peace scholarship, which was still in its infancy in the late 1960s, could be taught in academic Peace Studies departments or programs was a controversial one. Peace Studies sought to overcome this after 1970 by drawing knowledge from a range of established fields—such as anthropology, biology, physics, and the social sciences, among others—and by promoting transdisciplinary approaches as well as transnational ones.Footnote ³⁰ Despite such challenges, however, peace education grew, even at the high school level, in the 1970s and 1980s, especially as a result of the Vietnam “teach-ins” of the early 1970s, and later because of the increasing global tensions of 1979 to 1983.Footnote ³¹

The most dramatic intellectual challenge to peace research came from radical critiques in the wake of the 1960s movements. Ekkehart Krippendorff's The State as a Focus of Peace Research suggested that unless peace theory accepted the essentially militarist nature of the modern state as the key problematic, it was irrelevant.Footnote ³² The anarchist implications of the rejection of the system of sovereign nation-states as the object of peace research were not lost on the moderate mainstream of peace theory and analysis, since the critique raised issues that questioned the whole approach of academic research within existing frameworks. The postmodernism of the 1980s was to develop these queries even more radically. These challenges did lead to more serious analysis of war and militarism from a quasi-Marxian standpoint;Footnote ³³ they also affirmed the need for transnational approaches, and implicitly questioned the U.S.-centric “State Department” approach of traditional International Relations, which was still dominant in Anglo-Saxon discourse.Footnote ³⁴

The academic approaches to peace action, peace and anti-war movements, and the goals and methods of peace action evolved slowly and to a large extent outside formal peace research, which had its roots in a more scientistic positivist—and often quantitative—approach to conflict. There were two important innovations, however. The first was the work of Gene Sharp on civilian resistance and nonviolent action. The second was the move from conflict resolution to “conflict transformation,” which was inspired by the work of John Paul Lederach in the last decade of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁵ Lederach articulated the concern that much conflict theory was pacificatory, and while ameliorative, ultimately favored the status quo. In this regard, the early work of Johan Galtung in the 1960s had promised much, but its results after fifty years have been limited. The framework he established after 1959—which cross-tabulated direct and indirect violence, positive and negative peace (the latter defined as the absence of direct or physical violence), and active and passive reactions to social injustice or structural violence—provided a paradigmatic grid in which to analyze conflict, war, “somatic violence,” and the social reactions to them. Galtung's approach was rooted in a nonviolent perspective and remains a frequently-used referential frame for peace analysis.Footnote ³⁶ It is particularly appropriate for analyzing social and political orientations to peace—from active, positive, nonviolent reactions to the passive, pacificatory acquiescence in a negative “peace.”Footnote ³⁷

An Emergent Peace Culture

What are the aspects of peace that have emerged in the past century that are truly new and innovative? Some would probably focus on institutional creativity in the international arena, from the League of Nations through the United Nations and its various agencies and organizations. The emergence of the European Union has been a key project, as have developments in international law and justice. But my focus here has been more on peace culture, on social movements, and on the ideas and practices of peace, rather than interstate arrangements. What are the most important developments in these areas over the past hundred years? Has a more global, universalistic peace concept emerged? I have emphasized as most notable the emergence, both in theory and in active use, of Gandhian nonviolence as a method of civil resistance and social and political change. This has been an evolving methodology, with hundreds of applications and theoretical developments. In the West the concept of nonviolence has served to reactivate various utopian traditions, many of which were shattered by the catastrophes of 1914–1945; and it has often served as a refuge from the realities of war and genocide. However, the rise of transnational movements and nongovernmental organizations using these methods has been spectacular and has been accelerating since the 1960s.Footnote ³⁸

As noted above, the bifurcation of pacifism in 1915 around issues of resistance to war as an institution was a significant break with the past. Refusal of military service remains an important form of opposition in conscripting states, even though it is not necessarily an example of “absolute” pacifism. Such refusal reflects a growing public and scientific acceptance that “war is not in our genes”—an idea affirmed in the UNESCO Seville Statement on Violence in 1986.Footnote ³⁹ One can also make the argument that there is an emergent “peace culture.” This is a much more conscious and global cultural construction of universal peace, and there are more peace institutions and projects to support this culture than ever before. These cultural and intellectual movements are certainly stronger than at any time since Carnegie's projects, and they have paralleled political movements and peace mobilizations. These programs do not focus on history, but on peace memory and “truth-telling” when remembering war and genocide, as well as on creating memorials of opposition to both.Footnote ⁴⁰ The emergence of peace libraries, institutes, and museums, and even a global peace encyclopedia—The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace—are key examples of this trend, as is the proliferation of cross-border peace parks, trails, and monuments.

Peace theory since 1950 has also more clearly articulated a critique of nationalism and the system of armed states. This was accompanied by an emphasis on transnational theory, as well as the creation of transnational linkages that have begun to rival the internationalist approaches of the past. Complementary changes include the spread of a “lingua franca” (currently English), enabling a more widespread global dialogue aided by new electronic networks, information, and communication technology.Footnote ⁴¹ There is some evidence that this has increased cross-cultural understanding.Footnote ⁴² The greater visibility and action of disempowered groups have also moved conflict analysis from a focus on “resolution” to one that seeks the nonviolent “transformation” of conflicts. Three great social movements of modern times—the environmental movement, the women's movement, and the civil rights movement—are notable examples of this trend.

While visions of a more positive peace remain important, it was—in the words of the poet Wilfred Owen, killed one week before the end of the Great War—“the pity of war, the pity war distilled” that remains the key component of peace.Footnote ⁴³ Compassion, the ongoing and perhaps growing sense of oneness with others, and the recognition of a common humanity even across borders and in the midst of atrocity have become the secular as well as spiritual values of peace; and they express an underlying anti-militarism and a democratizing impulse that returns to a source in the cosmopolitan humanism and rationalism of the liberal enlightenment, which became so disastrously distorted with the rise of the nation-state.