Rationale

Peace History as an academic current emerged in the course of the 1960s in the United States, when it sought to bring together diplomatic and international historians with historically-interested political scientists and historians of organised pacifism. While there are several peace research institutes and while a Peace History Society exists in the USA, the discipline has been institutionalised outside the US only in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the ‘Association for Historical Peace Research’ (Arbeitskreis Historische Friedensforschung) was founded in 1984. Currently, major collective research projects on the traditions of non-violent conflict resolution are under way in Denmark, Italy and Norway, and there are historians with an interest in the history of peace and non-violence in many European countries. Moreover, for the first time, in the countries which were part of the Soviet bloc, it has become possible to gain access to archives, and to research topics, which previously were out of bounds ('bourgeois pacifism').

We propose to found a network of European peace historians for three main reasons. First, from an academic perspective, new research topics have emerged. The end of the bloc confrontation and the inclusion of many Eastern European countries into the European Union, for example, makes the historical analysis of non-aligned peace-movements during the Cold War and of related issues in the histories of these countries an important item on the research agenda. There is also a need for more comparative research. The history of NATO and the ongoing dynamics of armaments are examples for developments which need to be reflected and analysed in peace history, and can be dealt with properly only in comparative perspective. Second, there are institutional reasons. In a time of shrinking resources in the humanities, peace historians in Europe should be able to rely on a visible presence in academia in order to increase the chances for successful funding applications. Not least, there are also political reasons why a network of peace historians is timely. Amidst the ‘War on Terror’, justifications for war and the use of collective violence have once again found an increased resonance in the public. An international network would enable peace historians to reach out to a wider public with the results of their research, at the European level.