Research project

International Coalitions for Peace in the Era of Decolonization, 1918-1970

How did peace movements navigate decolonization? This five-year global history project studies how local peace movements across the decolonizing world connected to international peace organizations. Each subproject focuses on a specific region, which we bring together in a shared analytical framework and a data visualization of the international connections of the peace advocates we study.

Duration: 2024 - 2029
Contact: Carolien Stolte
Funding: ERC StG; NWO Vidi Grant

In this project, we study attempts at building large international coalitions for peace in the period 1918-1970, asking how different understandings of peace work impacted that coalition building. How did different intellectual genealogies of peace activism interact, collide, and change in the process? Our project hypothesizes that moments of friction and failure in attempts to connect the largely Euro-American world of peace internationalism to the decolonizing world was caused by a number of misunderstandings, produced by the difference in weight that peace workers from different regions attached to anti-imperialism. In other words, was the pursuit of political independence a prerequisite for world peace, or did the pursuit of world peace supersede the struggle for political independence?

This project brings historical depth to an issue of continuing relevance to the international order. We challenge the focus on the Cold War in relevant literatures as the primary factor in the development of international peace organizations. Instead, we take a longue durée perspective that incorporates precedents set by peace movements after the First World War, and we turn the lens on the long decolonization process rather than on superpower competition. We hypothesize that the challenges posed by decolonization and the end of empire were the dominant drivers of success and failure in building international coalitions for peace.

Do your research interests align with ours? Please get in touch!