Activism and International Thought: The Women's International League of Peace and Freedom and the Problem of Statelessness in the Interwar Period

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) as an important site of women's international theorizing on the normative problem of statelessness in the League of Nations era. The problem of statelessness covered several issues connected with the loss of nationality, a new condition of human vulnerability associated with the dissolution of four empires after World War I. It opened up a series of questions about the Versailles system, where the ethical value of sovereignty was assumed, rather than examined for its consequences for individuals. WILPF developed programs of political and epistemic activity on global and local fronts that explored what it might mean to approach the statelessness question in terms of a transnational public interest, as opposed to the state interest privileged by the Versailles order. The article argues that WILPF's international thought is distinctive for the symbiotic relationship that exists between WILPF women's transnational activism and their theoretical conceptualization of the international. This is illustrated through an analysis of Jane Addams's thought, which provides a crucial link between late-nineteenth-century American pragmatism and the early twentieth-century progressive internationalism exemplified by WILPF. WILPF's interwar advocacy on the statelessness question shows how knowledge production and theory building were done in ways that are quite different to the mainstream neo-positivist idea of theory today, and which need to be included as part of our historical understanding of the origins of the twentieth-century field of international relations.