Roehrlich: Inspectors for Peace: A History of the International Atomic Energy Agency

Elisabeth Roehrlich (Univ. of Vienna - History) has published Inspectors for Peace: A History of the International Atomic Energy Agency (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 2022). Here's the abstract:

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The International Atomic Energy Agency, which sends inspectors around the world to prevent states from secretly developing nuclear bombs, has one of the most important jobs in international security. At the same time, the IAEA is a global hub for the exchange of nuclear science and technology for peaceful purposes. Yet spreading nuclear materials and know-how around the world bears the unwanted risk of helping what the agency aims to halt: the emergence of new nuclear weapon states. In Inspectors for Peace, Elisabeth Roehrlich unravels the IAEA's paradoxical mission of sharing nuclear knowledge and technology while seeking to deter nuclear weapon programs.

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Founded in 1957 in an act of unprecedented cooperation between the Cold War superpowers, the agency developed from a small technical bureaucracy in war-torn Vienna to a key organization in the global nuclear order. Roehrlich argues that the IAEA's dual mandate, though apparently contradictory, was pivotal in ensuring the organization's legitimacy, acceptance, and success. For its first decade of existence, the IAEA was primarily a scientific and technical organization; it was not until the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons entered into force in 1970 that the agency took on the far-reaching verification and inspection role for which it is now most widely known. While the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Iran negotiations made the IAEA's name famous, the organization's remarkable history remains strikingly absent from public knowledge.

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Drawing on extensive archival research, including firsthand access to newly opened records at the IAEA Archives in Vienna, Inspectors for Peace provides the first comprehensive, empirically grounded, and independent study on the history of the IAEA. Roehrlich also interviewed leading policymakers and officials, including Hans Blix and Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency's former heads. This book offers insight not only for students, scholars, and policy experts but for anyone interested in the history of the nuclear age, the Cold War, and the role of international organizations in shaping our world.

Muschik: Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965

Eva-Maria Muschik (Univ. of Vienna) has published Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia Univ. Press 2022). Here's the abstract:

Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process.

Eva-Maria Muschik argues that the UN played a key role in the global proliferation and reinvention of the nation-state in the postwar era, as newly independent states came to rely on international assistance. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, she traces how UN personnel—usually in close consultation with Western officials—sought to manage decolonization peacefully through international development assistance. Examining initiatives in Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, the Congo, and New York, Muschik shows how the UN pioneered a new understanding and practice of state building, presented as a technical challenge for international experts rather than a political process. UN officials increasingly took on public-policy functions, despite the organization’s mandate not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its member states. These initiatives, Muschik suggests, had lasting effects on international development practice, peacekeeping, and post-conflict territorial administration.

Casting new light on how international organizations became major players in the governance of developing countries, Building States has significant implications for the histories of decolonization, the Cold War, and international development.

Conference: International Organizations and the Cold War

On June 2-3, 2022, a conference will be held in Vienna on the topic "International Organizations and the Cold War." Program and registration are here.

Richard S. Dunn (1928-2022)

I wrote almost two years ago about John M. Murrin, one of my graduate school professors, and now sadly I must do the same for Richard S. Dunn, my undergraduate advisor at the University of Pennsylvania, who died yesterday. I believe I first met Richard in 1989, before my junior year. Richard (Rick) Beeman, for whom I worked as a research assistant the previous academic year (and for whom I would continue to work until I graduated), was off to a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he suggested that I take a course with Richard. I had no idea who Richard was. Rick taught the first half of the U.S. survey course (which is where I first met him in the fall of 1987), and he was well-known to undergraduate history majors for that, as well as for his bow ties and his bubbly and engaging personality. Richard appeared to be the opposite. At the time, he looked exactly as he did in this photo: serious and perhaps somewhat stern and severe-looking, with a resemblance one couldn't help but think to the Winthrop family (of whom he wrote). He taught a course on U.S. colonial history from time-to-time, and had made a point of advising (and publishing) undergraduate research papers from seminars he led, but I had missed all that in my first two years. Rick said that Richard was significantly underappreciated by undergraduates (who were more likely to take a course covering the colonial period from the hipper Michael Zuckerman), and he was right. I remember knocking on Richard's office door one day and asking him whether he would supervise an independent reading course with me (since he wasn't teaching his colonial course that year). Perhaps Rick told him I was coming. Perhaps Richard was astonished by my audacity. Perhaps both. Whatever it was, he said yes.

So there I was in the fall of 1989, one of ten thousand undergraduates and countless history majors at a major research university, meeting every week or two with one of the preeminent historians of seventeenth-century America, just the two of us in a high-ceilinged office, off a side-corridor on the third floor of College Hall. I still remember the first book he assigned - Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost, which completely blew my mind (and which only last month I purchased for one of my sons). Next up was James B. Hedges's The Browns of Providence Plantations. And then I'm prettry sure it was Richard's own Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 and maybe also Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom. I imagine there was something about Pennsylvania too, as Richard (with his wife Mary Maples Dunn) had recently finished editing the papers of William Penn. Like many twenty-year olds, I didn't know enough to realize or appreciate what I had stumbled into. But I wasn't completely clueless, and wanting to have the guidance of both Richards, I asked Richard to be my major adviser. He said yes again, even though my main interests were in the late eigteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I took just that one course with him, and yet he wrote a letter for my grad school applications. Later when I was at Princeton, Richard offered me an office and a visiting title at what was then known as the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies (now the McNeil Center) so that I could have a research home in Philadelphia where I was living with my future wife.

For me, Richard's distinguishing features - leaving aside his scholarship and brilliance and much else - were his generosity, modesty, and openness to others. He used his elevated position to promote not himself but the careers of others. In the academy, and in life, there is very little that is more estimable. He did this writ large through organization-building at the Phiadelphia Center, and he did it at the individual level, with graduate students, Center fellows, and colleagues, and even with undergraduate students who just knocked on his office door. I will always be grateful.

Mulder: The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War

Nicholas Mulder (Cornell Univ. - History) has published The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale Univ. Press 2022). Here's the abstract:

Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.

Tracing the use of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder uses extensive archival research in a political, economic, legal, and military history that reveals how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations. This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.

Rodogno: Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930

Davide Rodogno (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies) has published Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930 (Cambridge Univ. Press 2022). Here's the abstract:

Night on Earth is a broad-ranging account of international humanitarian programs in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Near East from 1918 to 1930. Davide Rodogno shows that international 'relief' and 'development' were intertwined long before the birth of the United Nations with humanitarians operating in a region devastated by war and famine and in which state sovereignty was deficient. Influenced by colonial motivations and ideologies these humanitarians attempted to reshape entire communities and nations through reconstruction and rehabilitation programmes. The book draws on the activities of a wide range of secular and religious organisations and philanthropic foundations in the US and Europe including the American Relief Administration, the American Red Cross, the Quakers, Save the Children, the Near East Relief, the American Women's Hospitals, the League of Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Klose: In the Cause of Humanity: A History of Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century

Fabian Klose (Universität zu Köln - History) has published In the Cause of Humanity: A History of Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge Univ. Press 2022). Here's the abstract:

In the Cause of Humanity is a major new history of the emergence of the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention during the nineteenth century when the question of whether, when and how the international community should react to violations of humanitarian norms and humanitarian crises first emerged as a key topic of controversy and debate. Fabian Klose investigates the emergence of legal debates on the protection of humanitarian norms by violent means, revealing how military intervention under the banner of humanitarianism became closely intertwined with imperial and colonial projects. Through case studies including the international fight against the slave trade, the military interventions under the banner of humanitarian aid for Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire, and the intervention of the United States in the Cuban War of Independence, he shows how the idea of humanitarian intervention established itself as a recognized instrument in international politics and international law.

Jensen & Walton: Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History

Steven L. B. Jensen (Danish Institute for Human Rights) & Charles Walton (Univ. of Warwick - History) have published Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (Cambridge Univ. Press 2022). The table of contents is here. Here's the abstract:

This pioneering volume explores the long-neglected history of social rights, from the Middle Ages to the present. It debunks the myth that social rights are 'second-generation rights' – rights that appeared after World War II as additions to a rights corpus stretching back to the Enlightenment. Not only do social rights stretch back that far; they arguably pre-date the Enlightenment. In tracing their long history across various global contexts, this volume reveals how debates over social rights have often turned on deeper struggles over social obligation – over determining who owes what to whom, morally and legally. In the modern period, these struggles have been intertwined with questions of freedom, democracy, equality and dignity. Many factors have shaped the history of social rights, from class, gender and race to religion, empire and capitalism. With incomparable chronological depth, geographical breadth and conceptual nuance, Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History sets an agenda for future histories of human rights.

Chaponnière: Henry Dunant: The Man of the Red Cross

Corinne Chaponnière has published Henry Dunant: The Man of the Red Cross (Bloomsbury 2022). Here's the abstract:

A pioneer of humanitarianism and founder of the International Red Cross, Henry Dunant was many things over his lifetime. A devout Christian and social activist, an ambitious but failed businessman, a humanitarian genius, and a bankrupt recluse. In this biography, Corinne Chaponnière reveals the tumultuous trajectory of Henry's life. From his idyllic childhood in Geneva, she follows Henry through the horrors of the Battle of Solferino, his creation of the Red Cross and role in the Geneva Conventions, the disgrace of his bankruptcy and his resurrection as a Nobel Peace Prize winner. It shows how this champion of wounded soldiers and prisoners of war was not an unblemished picture of piety and goodness, but that his empathy and good works played out in tandem with his social ambition and personal drive. It shows how even the best of us fall on hard times, and that the Red Cross was born out of humanitarian ideals coupled with a desire for personal success. This book reveals the story of Henry Dunant, blemishes and all, against the backdrop of the horrors of war, the weight of religion and the birth of humanitarianism in the 19th century.

Call for Papers: Fifth International History and Diplomacy Conference

A call for papers has been issued for the fifth annual International History and Diplomacy conference, to be held at Liverpool John Moores University, on May 13, 2022. IHD’s 2022 conference will explore the history of human rights and humanitarianism, broadly construed. The call is here.

Baughan: Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire

Emily Baughan (Univ. of Sheffield - History) has published Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire (Univ. of California Press 2021). Here's the abstract:

Saving the Children analyzes the intersection of liberal internationalism and imperialism through the history of the humanitarian organization Save the Children, from its formation during the First World War through the era of decolonization. Whereas Save the Children claimed that it was "saving children to save the world," the vision of the world it sought to save was strictly delimited, characterized by international capitalism and colonial rule. Emily Baughan's groundbreaking analysis, across fifty years and eighteen countries, shows that Britain's desire to create an international order favorable to its imperial rule shaped international humanitarianism. In revealing that modern humanitarianism and its conception of childhood are products of the early twentieth-century imperial economy, Saving the Children argues that the contemporary aid sector must reckon with its past if it is to forge a new future.

Fitzmaurice: King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century

Andrew Fitzmaurice (Queen Mary Univ. of London - History) has published King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton Univ. Press 2021). Here's the abstract:

Eminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809–1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian Britain, and a close collaborator of Prince Metternich, the architect of the Concert of Europe. Yet Twiss’s life was defined by two events that threatened to undermine the order that he had so stoutly defended: a notorious social scandal and the creation of the Congo Free State. In King Leopold’s Ghostwriter, Andrew Fitzmaurice tells the incredible story of a man who, driven by personal events that transformed him from a reactionary to a reformer, rewrote and liberalised international law—yet did so in service of the most brutal regime of the colonial era.

In an elaborate deception, Twiss and Pharaïlde van Lynseele, a Belgian prostitute, sought to reinvent her as a woman of suitably noble birth to be his wife. Their subterfuge collapsed when another former client publicly denounced van Lynseele. Disgraced, Twiss resigned his offices and the couple fled to Switzerland. But this failure set the stage for a second, successful act of re-creation. Twiss found new employment as the intellectual driving force of King Leopold of Belgium’s efforts to have the Congo recognised as a new state under his personal authority. Drawing on extensive new archival research, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter recounts Twiss’s story as never before, including how his creation of a new legal personhood for the Congo was intimately related to the earlier invention of a new legal personhood for his wife.

Combining gripping biography and penetrating intellectual history, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter uncovers a dramatic, ambiguous life that has had lasting influence on international law.

Lesaffer & Nijman: The Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius

Randall Lesaffer (KU Leuven; Tilburg Univ.) & Janne E. Nijman (Univ. of Amsterdam; Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies) have published The Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius (Cambridge Univ. Press 2021). Here's the abstract:

The Cambridge Companion to Grotius offers a comprehensive overview of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) for students, teachers, and general readers, while its chapters also draw upon and contribute to recent specialised discussions of Grotius' oeuvre and its later reception. Contributors to this volume cover the width and breadth of Grotius' work and thought, ranging from his literary work, including his historical, theological and political writing, to his seminal legal interventions. While giving these various fields a separate treatment, the book also delves into the underlying conceptions and outlooks that formed Grotius' intellectual map of the world as he understood it, and as he wanted it to become, giving a new political and religious context to his forays into international and domestic law.

Aloni: The League of Nations and the Protection of the Environment

Omer Aloni (Bar-Ilan Univ.) has published The League of Nations and the Protection of the Environment (Cambridge Univ. Press 2021). Here's the abstract:

In the history of how the law has dealt with environmental issues over the last century or so, the 1920s and 30s and the key role of the League of Nations in particular remain underexplored by scholars. By delving into the League's archives, Omer Aloni uncovers the story of how the interwar world expressed similar concerns to those of our own time in relation to nature, environmental challenges and human development, and reveals a missing link in understanding the roots of our ecological crisis. Charting the environmental regime of the League, he sheds new light on its role as a centre of surprising environmental dilemmas, initiatives, and solutions. Through a number of fascinating case studies, the hidden interests, perceptions, motivations, hopes, agendas and concerns of the League are revealed for the first time. Combining legal thought, historical archival research and environmental studies, a fascinating period in legal-environmental history is brought to life.

Conference: Law and Policy in European Integration (1960s-1990s)

On June 1-2, 2021, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory will host a online conference on "Law and Policy in European Integration (1960s-1990s)." Details are here.

Stinsky: International Cooperation in Cold War Europe: The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 1947-64

Daniel Stinsky has published International Cooperation in Cold War Europe: The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 1947-64 (Bloomsbury 2021). Here's the abstract:

Formed in 1947, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) was the first postwar international organization dedicated to economic cooperation in Europe. Linking the universalism of the UN to European regionalism, both Cold War superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, were founding members of the UNECE. Building on the League of Nations' difficult heritage, and in an increasingly challenging political environment, the UNECE's mission was to facilitate European cooperation transcending the boundaries set by the Cold War. With a number of competitor organizations set against it, the UNECE managed to carve out a niche for itself, setting norms and standards that still have an impact on the everyday lives of millions in Europe and beyond today. Working against an overwhelming geopolitical trend, UNECE succeeded in bridging the Cold War divide on several occasions, and maintained a broad system of contacts across the Iron Curtain. This book provides a unique study of this important but hitherto under-researched international organization. Incorporating research on the Cold War, the history of internationalism and European integration, Stinsky weaves these different threads of historical enquiry into a single analytical narrative.

Biltoft: A Violent Peace: Media, Truth, and Power at the League of Nations

Carolyn N. Biltoft (Graduate Institute) has published A Violent Peace: Media, Truth, and Power at the League of Nations (Univ. of Chicago Press 2021). Here’s the abstract:

The newly born League of Nations confronted the post-WWI world—from growing stateless populations to the resurgence of right-wing movements—by aiming to create a transnational, cosmopolitan dialogue on justice. As part of these efforts, a veritable army of League personnel set out to shape “global public opinion,” in favor of the postwar liberal international order. Combining the tools of global intellectual history and cultural history, A Violent Peace reopens the archives of the League to reveal surprising links between the political use of modern information systems and the rise of mass violence in the interwar world. Historian Carolyn N. Biltoft shows how conflicts over truth and power that played out at the League of Nations offer broad insights into the nature of totalitarian regimes and their use of media flows to demonize a whole range of “others.”

An exploration of instability in information systems, the allure of fascism, and the contradictions at the heart of a global modernity, A Violent Peace paints a rich portrait of the emergence of the age of information—and all its attendant problems.

Kaiga: Britain and the Intellectual Origins of the League of Nations, 1914–1919

Sakiko Kaiga (Univ. of Tokyo - Institute of Social Science) has published Britain and the Intellectual Origins of the League of Nations, 1914–1919 (Cambridge Univ. Press 2021). Here's the abstract:

In this innovative account of the origins of the idea of the League of Nations, Sakiko Kaiga casts new light on the pro-League of Nations movement in Britain in the era of the First World War, revealing its unexpected consequences for the development of the first international organisation for peace. Combining international, social, intellectual history and international relations, she challenges two misunderstandings about the role of the movement: that their ideas about a league were utopian and that its peaceful ideal appealed to the war-weary public. Kaiga demonstrates how the original post-war plan consisted of both realistic and idealistic views of international relations, and shows how it evolved and changed in tandem with the war. She provides a comprehensive analysis of the unknown origins of the League of Nations and highlights the transformation of international society and of ideas about war prevention in the twentieth century to the present.

Parr: Solving world problems: the Indian women’s movement, global governance, and ‘the crisis of empire’, 1933–46

Rosalind Parr (Univ. of St. Andrews - History) has published Solving world problems: the Indian women’s movement, global governance, and ‘the crisis of empire’, 1933–46 (Journal of Global History, Vol. 16, no. 1, March 2021). Here's the abstract:

This article examines global processes of decolonization through an analysis of Indian women’s interactions with world governance during the interwar ‘crisis of empire’. This distinct form of activism asserted anti-colonial claims through engagements with transnational civil society networks and the social work of the League of Nations and the International Labour Office. In doing so, it undermined imperial legitimacy, shifted the terms of liberal internationalism, and prepared the ground for later developments at the United Nations.

Brock & Simon: The Justification of War and International Order: From Past to Present

Lothar Brock (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main - Politcal Science) & Hendrik Simon (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt) have published The Justification of War and International Order: From Past to Present (Oxford Univ. Press 2021). The table of contents is here. Here's the abstract:

The history of war is also a history of its justification. The contributions to this book argue that the justification of war rarely happens as empty propaganda. While it is directed at mobilizing support and reducing resistance, it is not purely instrumental. Rather, the justification of force is part of an incessant struggle over what is to count as justifiable behaviour in a given historical constellation of power, interests, and norms. This way, the justification of specific wars interacts with international order as a normative frame of reference for dealing with conflict. The justification of war shapes this order, and is being shaped by it.

As the justification of specific wars entails a critique of war in general, the use of force in international relations has always been accompanied by political and scholarly discourses on its appropriateness. In much of the pertinent literature the dominating focus is on theoretical or conceptual debates as a mirror of how international normative orders evolve. In contrast, the focus of the present volume is on theory and political practice as sources for the re- and de-construction of the way in which the justification of war and international order interact.

With contributions from international law, history, and international relations, and from Western and non-Western perspectives, this book offers a unique collection of papers exploring the continuities and changes in war discourses as they respond to and shape normative orders from early modern times to the present.