Cold War Peace Research Articles

Women Crusade for Peace: Claudia Jones and the Cold War Peace Movement

After World War II, peace became a central tenet of the Black freedom struggle. But it was also a liability to be associated with peace because the Soviet Union was a major advocate of the peace movement during the Cold War. Claudia Jones, a communist leader and theoretician, was an outspoken, vocal advocate for peace. She argued that war and nuclear weaponry were capitalist tools to limit freedom struggles, contain non-white populations globally, and undermine women's liberties. She argued for women's leadership in the peace movement and advocated a gendered internationalism. Jones, an immigrant herself, believed that American women should advocate for peace beyond national boundaries to secure their own independence, freedom, and equality. This was a particular imperative for Black and colonized women, who, Jones argued, were the most oppressed strata. In order to free all working people and secure a global alliance, women had to become leaders in the peace movement. She saw peace as a necessary prerequisite to undermining capitalist power and reach the full potential of a socialist state. Her advocacy and leadership in the peace movement came at great personal cost. Jones would be arrested, convicted, and deported for her determined political advocacy, all the while her health declined, leading to her premature death. This article argues that Jones's gendered internationalism and peace were central tenets in her vision of a socialist future.

A Flawed Framework: Why the Liberal International Order Concept Is Misguided

Well before President Donald Trump began rhetorically attacking U.S. allies and the open international trading system, policy analysts worried about challenges to the liberal international order (LIO). A more fundamental issue, however, has received little attention: the analytic value of framing U.S. security in terms of the LIO. Systematic examination shows that this framing creates far more confusion than insight. Even worse, the LIO framing could lead the United States to adopt overly competitive policies and unnecessarily resist change in the face of China's growing power. The “LIO concept”—the logics that proponents identify as underpinning the LIO—is focused inward, leaving it ill equipped to address interactions between members of the LIO and states that lie outside the LIO. In addition, the LIO concept suffers theoretical flaws that further undermine its explanatory value. The behavior that the LIO concept claims to explain—including cooperation under anarchy, effective Western balancing against the Soviet Union, the Cold War peace, and the lack of balancing against the United States following the Cold War—is better explained by other theories, most importantly, defensive realism. Analysis of U.S. international policy would be improved by dropping the LIO terminology entirely and reframing analysis in terms of grand strategy.

The “New” Normal: Instability Risk Assessment in an Uncertainty-Based Strategic Environment

‘’The post–Cold War peace dividend has been spent; the perception of the global strategic environment is one based in uncertainty with multiple, simultaneous, and diffuse threats wherein “crisis” is constant, conflict is pervasive, and instability is contagious. In such a dynamic, complex, and volatile environment, it is necessary to develop a comprehensive risk assessment mechanism to focus attention, funnel resources, and drive activities prior to acute instability. By leveraging existing academic and DoD forecasting models with diverging strengths and weaknesses, this framework will map the social and structural factors that shape the character of instability to depict states in which there is a volatile environment; identify the destabilizing conditions and existing friction points that are likely to drive the development of instability; and detect specific triggering events and tipping processes that could aggravate those conditions and ignite acute instability.

Waging Peace in a Disarmed World: Arthur Waskow's Vision of a Nonlethal Cold War

This article explores the writings of Arthur Waskow, who epitomized what the historian Charles DeBenedetti has termed the “Cold War peace opposition.” Writing on topics that included disarmament, civil defense, an international police force, and “nonlethal equivalents of war,” Waskow offered a nuanced critique of the Cold War. Far from being a utopian idealist, Waskow, as this article shows, offered a series of pragmatic proposals to end the nuclear arms race and prevent an atomic war. Waskow's involvement with the Peace Research Institute, furthermore, sheds light on the often ignored peace research movement that developed in the 1950s and early 1960s as an alternative to the think tanks occupied by defense intellectuals. Despite his best efforts, Waskow could convince neither pacifists nor Cold Warriors of the benefits of a nonlethal Cold War.