Peaceful Change after the World Wars

This chapter traces the travelogue—and marginalization in particular—of peaceful change in International Relations (IR) after the world wars. It argues that its marginalization is explained not (only) by its intellectual merits but also by political, institutional, and material changes that were unfavorable to the peaceful change agenda. The first section outlines how the changing geopolitical context, bipolarity and nuclear weapons, meant that the overarching concern of great powers was to stabilize and consolidate, not change, the order. The second section argues that the conflation of peaceful change with an appeasement policy and the 1938 Munich Agreement contributed to political and intellectual stigma in the postwar era. The third section argues that decolonization changed the articulation of the problem: where interwar articulations were primarily concerned with peaceful change through colonial redistribution, in effect to maintain European peace and supremacy, some postwar articulations used it in the anticolonial struggle to argue for revision of the imperial and colonial legacies of international law. The fourth section turns toward institutional changes, pointing to the demise of the interdisciplinary International Studies Conference (ISC) along with the postwar disciplinarization of IR within political science, which excluded much of the international law discourse that had earlier informed peaceful change. The fifth section argues that intellectual developments, notably the postwar stigma on interwar IR as “idealist,” contributed to the marginalization of some versions of peaceful change, while realist and neorealist versions survived. The final two sections trace two such ostensibly “idealist” lineages: peaceful change in international law and in (neo)functionalist IR.