The Study of Peaceful Change in World Politics

This introductory chapter offers an overview of the core themes addressed in The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations. It begins with a discussion of the neglect of peaceful change and the overemphasis on war as the source of change in the discipline of international relations. Definitions of peaceful change in their different dimensions, in particular the maximalist and minimalist varieties, are offered. Systemic, regional, and domestic level changes are explored. This is followed by a discussion of the study and understanding of peaceful change during the interwar, Cold War, and post–Cold War eras. The chapter offers a brief summary of different theoretical perspectives in IR—realism, liberalism, constructivism, and critical as well as eclectic approaches—and how they explore peaceful change, its key mechanisms, and its feasibility. The chapter considers the role of great powers and key regional states as agents of change. The economic, social, ideational, ecological, and technological sources of change are also briefly discussed.

A Research Agenda for the Study of Peaceful Change in World Politics

This concluding chapter offers a summary and evaluation of the key ideas contained in the chapters of this Handbook. The chapter discusses peaceful change in terms of conceptual clarity; historical evolution of scholarship in the area, especially the interwar, Cold War, and post–Cold War era efforts at analyzing the concepts; and the policy innovations in this realm. This is followed by an evaluation of the key umbrella theories of international relations—realism, liberalism, and constructivism—and how they approach peaceful change. Some important sources and mechanisms of change are analyzed. This is followed by discussion of the policy contributions of selected great and rising powers toward peaceful change. The chapter then offers a summary of contributions and progress that various regions have made in the area of peaceful change. It concludes with some ideas for future research while highlighting the significance of the subject matter for international relations and the world order.

Gender and Peaceful Change

This chapter examines the interplay between gender and peaceful change. It elaborates on how the concept of peace is inherently gendered by drawing upon feminist scholarship. There are a number of ways to conceptualize gender and peaceful change. The “women-peace hypothesis” assumes a proximity between women’s peacefulness and their experiences of maternal care. However, such a construction needs to be treated with caution since transformative peace requires deconstruction of that assumption, while staying attentive to women’s contributions to peacemaking. Debates on strategic essentialism and inclusive peace are also assessed as a way of gaining deeper and more meaningful understandings of gender-just peaceful change. We argue that women’s unique experiences pertaining to peace and conflict should be considered alongside those of men. In addition, we examine the assumption about states with a poor record on gender inequality are more likely to be involved in intrastate conflicts. The last part of the chapter focuses on policy practice, including the adoption of UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security and the reorientation in some states toward feminist foreign policy as a platform for peaceful change.

Science, Technology, and Peaceful Change in World Politics

This chapter undertakes a three-dimensional survey of the role of science and technology in peaceful change in world politics. One dimension is a sociology of knowledge on S/T and change in IR and its influence on the subdisciplines of security studies, international organization, and international political economy. The second dimension is the manner in which S/T has shaped the emergence of actors, interests, material power, social purposes, and grammars of international order to produce our contemporary late-modern Anthropocene age. Woven through this survey is the third dimension, contestation over S/T and its effects—at the micro and meso levels of analysis—that create the dynamic, open-ended movements and countermovements that brought humankind from the preindustrial order to the Anthropocene. The chapter considers next how IR can improve its theories of change and the prospects for this volume’s maximalist definition of peaceful change, beginning with some criteria for distinguishing what actually constitutes “peaceful” change. One of the most profound changes the world faces is rethinking both our paradigms and governance structures in light of climate change and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as these will profoundly alter the actual workings of economies and societies, remaking global politics in the process.

Japan and Peaceful Change in the International System The Persistent Peace Nation

Since 1945 Japan has espoused the principles of peace and peaceful change in the international system. At the same time, it has built a powerful military and has been a key ally for the United States in the Asia-Pacific region. This has opened it up to the charge of being hypocritical. In recent years this charge has gained credence as the government of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has sought to systematically dismantle many of the institutions on which the notion of Japan as a “peace nation” is founded. What is frequently forgotten is the extent to which the notion of the Japanese peace nation has been contested from the beginning. Japan today remains strongly committed to the principles of peace and peaceful change, and while it has pragmatically sought to adjust its military policies to reflect the increased security threats it faces in the region, it has also expanded its commitment to building regional institutions and relying on diplomacy and trade, rather than military might, as a tool for resolving foreign policy differences.

Peaceful Change: The Interwar Era and the Disciplinary Context

The first thorough discussion of “peaceful change” took place in 1936–1937 in two international conferences sponsored by the League of Nations. The League was prompted by the uncertainties and tensions that followed decisions by Germany, Italy, and Japan to leave it. Teachers and scholars of international relations convened in these League-sponsored conferences to assess the demands of the three dissatisfied powers. As they debated how the demands of these powers could best be tackled, one answer tended to emerge: through a policy of peaceful change. But what was “peaceful change”? And how did the early IR scholars approach the concept scientifically? This chapter seeks to answer these two questions.

International Law and Peaceful Change

This chapter argues for and adopts a constructivist perspective on international law as closely interrelated with international politics and as having regulative, constitutive, and permissive effects. It begins by illustrating how rules that have the status of law are not simply functional solutions to dilemmas of cooperation among states, but also expressions of prevailing conceptions of legitimate action and key resources for practices of justification and legitimation. The chapter then examines law’s role in effecting change—both in the practices and patterns of relations among the key units of the international system (sovereign states) through the law prohibiting the use of force, and in the number of those units over time through the law relating to state recognition. The chapter shows that while international law has made significant contributions to peaceful change—particularly through the gradual delegitimization of wars of conquest and territorial aggrandizement—its understanding of self-determination and its stance toward civil conflict have also helped to preserve a system of states that assumes both the political and territorial legitimacy of sovereign units. In short, international law can also be a force for peaceful, and not so peaceful, continuity.

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.

Critical Theories and Change in International Relations

Critical theories advocate fundamental change in world politics. They attack the structural inequalities of power that maintain the status quo and are, in turn, maintained by it. Ideational power is seen to work in tandem with material power, which calls for a strategy of radical resistance that incorporates a battle for hearts and minds. One of those battlefields is the discipline of International Relations (IR) itself. This chapter begins by clarifying what critical theories in IR are and then explains why and how they problematize the notion of “peaceful change.” The changes desired by critical theories are fundamental and urgent, which imbues those theories with a level of radicalism that can justify violent means. At the same time, critical theories spotlight dimensions of power beyond the material on which material power vitally depends. This reveals possibilities for transformation by peaceful means.

Peaceful Change in Northeast Asia: Maintaining the “Minimal Peace”

Northeast Asia is usually associated with conflict and war. Out of the five regional order transitions from the Sinocentric order to the present post–Cold War period, only one was peaceful, the Cold War to post–Cold War transition. In fact, the peaceful transition led to a state of minimal peace in post–Cold War Northeast Asia. As the chapter discusses, this was due to three realist-liberal factors: America’s hegemonic role, strong economic interdependence, and a stable institutional structure. These factors not only ensured development and prosperity but also mitigated the negative effects of political and strategic tensions between states. However, this minimal peace is in danger of unraveling. Since 2010, the region is arguably in the early stages of another transition fueled by the worsening Sino-US competition. While the organizing ideas of liberal internationalism—economic interdependence and institutional building—will remain resilient, whether or not minimal peace is sustainable will be determined by the outcome of the US-China competition.