Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The concept of peace has always attracted radical thought, action, and practices. It has been taken to mean merely an absence of overt violence or war, but in the contemporary era it is often used interchangeably with 'peacemaking', 'peacebuilding', 'conflict resolution', and 'statebuilding'. The modern concept of peace has therefore broadened from the mere absence of violence to something much more complicated. In this Very Short Introduction, Oliver Richmond explores the evolution of peace in practice and in theory, exploring our modern assumptions about peace and the various different interpretations of its applications. This second edition has been theoretically and empirically updated and introduces a new framework to understand the overall evolution of the international peace architecture. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In From Victory to Peace, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter brings the Russian perspective to a critical moment in European political history. This history of Russian diplomatic thought in the years after the Congress of Vienna concerns a time when Russia and Emperor Alexander I were fully integrated into European society and politics. Wirtschafter looks at how Russia's statesmen who served Alexander I across Europe, in South America, and in Constantinople represented the Russian monarch's foreign policy and sought to act in concert with the allies. Based on archival and published sources—diplomatic communications, conference protocols, personal letters, treaty agreements, and the periodical press—this book illustrates how Russia's policymakers and diplomats responded to events on the ground as the process of implementing peace unfolded. Thanks to generous funding from the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the Mellon Foundation the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Kolsbun tells the surprising story of the peace sign in words and pictures, from its origins in the nuclear disarmament efforts of the late 1950s to its adoption by the antiwar movement of the 1960s, through its stint as a mass-marketed commodity and its enduring relevance now.

When the stakes of public words and actions are global and permanent, and especially when they involve war and peace, can we afford not to seek their meaning? For three decades, Francis Beer has pioneered the effort to discover, describe, and connect pieces of the complex puzzle of war, peace, their interrelationship, and their causes. In this volume, Beer (joined by colleagues as co-authors of some chapters) examines the cognitive, behavioral, and linguistic dimensions of war and peace. Language, he shows, is important because it mediates between thought and action. It expresses beliefs about war and peace and affects the perceptions of potential adversaries about one's own intentions. Using multiple perspectives and methods, he explores the uses of communication in international relations and the development of "meaning" for war and peace. In this unique and innovative post-realist analysis, Beer examines how language transmits and creates meaning through interaction with specific audiences. His case studies include the Somalian intervention, Sarajevo and the Balkan conflict, and the Gulf War. Moving beyond the discrete words of war, the book takes a broader view of how political participants interact in war and peace through continuous streams of communication that reflect and construct worlds of meaning. This stimulating and challenging volume brings together insights and evidence from political science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, history, and rhetorical studies and applies them in a focused way to the problem of war and peace.

This groundbreaking book provides the first systematic comparison of America’s modern wars and why they were won or lost. John D. Caldwell uses the World War II victory as the historical benchmark for evaluating the success and failure of later conflicts. Unlike WWII, the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraqi Wars were limited, but they required enormous national commitments, produced no lasting victories, and generated bitter political controversies. Caldwell comprehensively examines these four wars through the lens of a strategic architecture to explain how and why their outcomes were so dramatically different. He defines a strategic architecture as an interlinked set of continually evolving policies, strategies, and operations by which combatant states work toward a desired end. Policy defines the high-level goals a nation seeks to achieve once it initiates a conflict or finds itself drawn into one. Policy makers direct a broad course of action and strive to control the initiative. When they make decisions, they have to respond to unforeseen conditions to guide and determine future decisions. Effective leaders are skilled at organizing constituencies they need to succeed and communicating to them convincingly. Strategy means employing whatever resources are available to achieve policy goals in situations that are dynamic as conflicts change quickly over time. Operations are the actions that occur when politicians, soldiers, and diplomats execute plans. A strategic architecture, Caldwell argues, is thus not a static blueprint but a dynamic vision of how a state can succeed or fail in a conflict.

Perhaps in defiance of expectations, Roman peace (pax) was a difficult concept that resisted any straightforward definition: not merely denoting the absence or aftermath of war, it consisted of many layers and associations and formed part of a much greater discourse on the nature of power and how Rome saw her place in the world. During the period from 50 BC to AD 75 - covering the collapse of the Republic, the subsequent civil wars, and the dawn of the Principate-the traditional meaning and language of peace came under extreme pressure as pax was co-opted to serve different strands of political discourse. This volume argues for its fundamental centrality in understanding the changing dynamics of the state and the creation of a new political system in the Roman Empire, moving from the debates over the content of the concept in the dying Republic to discussion of its deployment in the legitimization of the Augustan regime, first through the creation of an authorized version controlled by the princeps and then the ultimate crystallization of the pax augusta as the first wholly imperial concept of peace. Examining the nuances in the various meanings, applications, and contexts of Roman discourse on peace allows us valuable insight into the ways in which the dynamics of power were understood and how these were contingent on the political structures of the day. However it also demonstrates that although the idea of peace came to dominate imperial Rome's self-representation, such discourse was nevertheless only part of a wider discussion on the way in which the Empire conceptualized itself.

Examines the problems and possibilities facing the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, from the threat of nuclear war and the military's strategic thinking, to the interplay of politics, personality, and history.

In his "Atoms for Peace" speech of 1953, President Dwight David Eisenhower captured the tensions--and the ironies--of the atomic age. While nuclear devastation threatened all nations, Eisenhower believed only nuclear preparedness offered protection; while nuclear weapons loomed as the ultimate war cloud, nuclear power offered progress and hope. In this thought-provoking consideration of Eisenhower's speech and others leading up to it, Ira Chernus views the "Atoms for Peace" speech, presented to the General Assembly of the United Nations, not merely as a legitimation of American foreign policy but as itself an act of policy. Indeed, he frames the policy in a new interpretation of Eisenhower's broad discursive goal, which he calls "apocalypse management," a plan to allow the United States to manage threats and crises around the world. Chernus sheds new light on the internal consistency of Eisenhower's thought, which many observers have found inconsistent, as well as on the ways in which the president's rhetoric backed him into a policy corner he had not intended to occupy. Chernus also reviews the domestic impact of the speech through a detailed examination of media interpretations in the United States. This tightly reasoned, clearly written study offers a new understanding of the evolution of cold war nuclear policy, the power of presidential rhetoric, and the political understanding of America's "man of peace," Dwight David Eisenhower. The full text of Eisenhower's speech is presented in the text. Those interested in American foreign policy will find it compelling reading; scholars and students will find it challenging and rewarding analysis.