In the long nineteenth century, powerful political, legal, economic, and cultural developments made a radical and lasting impact on the possible representations of peace. Traditional balance of power reasonings made way for attempts to reduce the prevalence of armed conflict in parts of the world. Significant sections of European and American society came to define peace not simply as the mere ‘absence of war’, but as a desirable, long-term condition in which disputes were consistently settled pacifically.
Legal history has yet to uncover the full extent of normative peace-thinking in the long nineteenth century, stretching beyond treaty practice and doctrinal texts. Legal vocabularies from various legal cultures strongly informed the imagination of statesmen, sovereigns, lawyers, philanthropists, and social reformers. As bricoleurs, they grasped any materials at hand to imagine normative solutions to the myriad problems related to the peaceful co-existence of states and peoples.
A first approach to outline these new voices will be the international conference “Imagining Peace in the Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914)” organized by Wouter De Rycke and TRACE research associate Raphaël Cahen on September 15 in Brussels, where leading researchers in the field of war, peace, and international law history such as Martti Koskenniemi, Stella Ghervas and Miloš Vec are invited. Martti Koskenniemi will deliver the keynote address.
PRIF’s Hendrik Simon will give a lecture on emerging discourses of prohibiting war in the early 19th century, highlighting core content from his forthcoming book A Century of Anarchy? War, Normativity, and the Birth of Modern International Order (Oxford University Press 2023). Contradicting some influential narratives (most recently Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, The Internationalists, Simon & Schuster 2017), Hendrik Simon argues that the modern prohibition of war did not emerge with a big bang in the early 20th century. Rather, it slowly formed as an emerging norm in the 19th century.
Date
15 September 2023
Location
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
You can download the full provisional programme here.