Organizing For Peace

The League of Nations - pre-cursor to the United Nations - was founded in 1919 as a response to the First World War to ensure collective security and prevent the outbreak of future wars. It was set up to facilitate diplomacy in the face of future international conflict, but also to work towards eradicating the very causes of war by promoting social and economic justice. The philosophy behind much of the League's fascinating and varied roles was to help create satisfied populations who would reject future threats to the peace of their world. In this new volume for Seminar Studies, Martyn Housden sets out to balance the League's work in settling disputes, international security and disarmament with an analysis of its achievements in social and economic fields. He explores the individual contributions of founding members of the League, such as Fridtjof Nansen, Ludwik Rajchman, Rachel Crowdy, Robert Cecil and Jan Smuts, whose humanitarian work laid the foundations for the later successes of the United Nations in such areas as: the welfare of vulnerable people, especially prisoners of war and refugees dealing with epidemic diseases and promoting good health anti-drugs campaigns Supported by previously unpublished documents and photographs, this book illustrates how an understanding of the League of Nations, its achievements and its ultimate failure to stop the Second World War, is central to our understanding of diplomacy and international relations in the Inter-War period.

After a review of the historical roots of American peacefare, the study examines five key bureaucratic entities involved in peace-building. The analysis is Washington-centered, focused on organization and the interagency process, and gives relatively little space to overseas implementation. It is based largely on more than 120 interviews with current and previous government officials. The study begins with the National Security Council (NSC), covering the Cabinet-level officials meeting with the President as a council, as well as the NSC staff, which serves as the foreign policy/national security staff of the President. It goes on to consider the role of the State Department, exercised both through the diplomacy of its geographic bureaus and the specialized programs of certain functional bureaus. A separate chapter is devoted to the State Department's new formal mechanism for coordination, the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. The following chapter outlines the zigzag route followed by the Defense Department under the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations in dealing with stability operations.USAID's increased attention to shaping foreign assistance and development to the dynamics of conflict is then chronicled. The survey of agencies ends with the unique and evolving role of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan body formally independent of the executive branch. The budget process for U.S. peacefare is traced through Function 150 (international affairs) and more cursorily through Function 050 (defense) to the actions ofauthorizing and appropriating committees in the Congress. The book ends with recommendations to the Obama administration for strengthening U.S. peacefare, drawing from the experience of the past two decades.

In this groundbreaking and controversial critique of the selections of Nobel Peace Prize winners, an eminent Norwegian lawyer and peace activist calls for its return to legal and moral compliance with the will of Alfred Nobel who wished to support disarmament to prevent war. The Nobel Peace Prize is the world's most coveted award, galvanizing the world's attention for 110 years. In recent decades, it has also become the world's most reviled award, as heads of militarized states and out-and-out warmongers and terrorists have been showered with peace prizes. Delving into previously unpublished primary sources, Fredrik Heffermehl reveals the history of the inner workings of the Norwegian Nobel Committee as it has come under increasing political, geopolitical, and commercial pressures to make inappropriate awards. As a Norwegian lawyer, Heffermehl makes the case that the Norwegian politicians entrusted with the Nobel peace awards have brushed aside the legal requirements in Scandinavian estate law using the prize to promote their own political and personal interests instead of the peace ideas Alfred Nobel had in mind. Evaluating each of the 119 Nobel Peace Prizes awarded between 1901 and 2009, the author tracks the ever-widening divergence of the committee's selections from Nobel's intentions and concludes that all but one of the last ten prizes are illegitimate under the law.