This chapter revisits Herder’s debate with Kant in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind, paying particular attention to Herder’s ideas on individual self-determination and his history of modern liberty and enlightenment. In this work, Herder reinterpreted human self-determination as a distinctive capacity and moral duty, whilst also viewing it as the highest form of self-preservation and sociability exhibited across the spectrum of natural beings. Kant, by contrast, invoked human ‘unsocial sociability’, presenting morality as a late development in human history as well as underlining the role of the modern state in facilitating this development. Herder rejected all the constitutive elements of Kant’s idea for a universal history, whilst also seeking to refine his account of the history of ‘state-machines’ and political government in Europe. He accordingly proposed an alternative vision of the prospects for greater peace in Europe and the world, drawing attention to a moral learning process in human history and the role of commercial cities in the rise of modern liberty. He set up the ‘Hanseatic league’ as an example for a future European union as well as predicted the empowerment of the subjugated peoples of Europe thanks to growing international trade and improved government.

Herder was deeply committed to finding ways to achieve moral and political reform in Livland, Russia, Germany and Europe in general. Herder’s reform ideas were embedded in Enlightenment discussions about the moral psychological foundations of ‘modern liberty’ and international peace. In responding to Rousseau’s challenge in The Second Discourse, Herder engaged with the new mid-eighteenth century work on human psychology, sensibility, physiology, whilst also delving into literary and cultural history. In the 1770s, Herder developed a theologically framed understanding of the history of mankind as a gradual ethical formation of humanity, which was still largely compatible with his earlier naturalistic approach. In the 1780s, Herder came to view human history as part of a more encompassing ‘natural process’, whilst continuing to take an interest in distinct national histories. In contrast to Kant, Herder interpreted individual human self-determination as a voluntary ‘life according to nature’, emphasising the cultivation of ‘purified patriotism’ and ‘dispositions of peace’ as essential for modern liberty and international peace. He welcomed the French Revolution and, as a ‘German patriot’, encouraged Germans to ‘self-constitute’ themselves by pursuing cultural, moral and constitutional change.

It is important to differentiate between various kinds of appropriations of Herder’s ideas. Herder cannot rationally be seen as encouraging oppression of national minorities or aggressive foreign policies. Such instances of reception would have to be qualified as misappropriations, whilst there have been other, substantively more justified lines of political reception. Herder’s ideas resonated with post-revolutionary liberals outside Germany, pre-1848 radical republicans, representatives of smaller peoples and national minorities as well as some socialist thinkers with anarchist leanings. Herder inspired both those emphasising the need for a vibrant and culturally distinct public sphere in representative democracies as well as those opposing the top-down ‘nationalising’ attempts of ‘state-machines’. His ideas not only encouraged national liberation and awakening movements but also those for humanitarian cosmopolitanism. Important unifying elements for these different appropriations are a commitment to the ‘humanisation’ of states and to combining local attachments with humanitarian aspirations. Authors sympathetic to Herder have characteristically rejected power politics, putting forward the ideal of a culturally diverse and vibrant as well as peaceful and interconnected Europe.

Early modern people wrote a lot about peace. The Christian logic of reconciliation was facilitated by a combination of the judicial system, community pressure and ubiquitous letters of pardon. Civil society mediated conflict through its institutions: the efflorescence of law courts, civic institutions and associational groups, such as guilds and confraternities, were the greatest legacy of the late Middle Ages. The desire for a well-regulated and ordered society was enshrined in the term ‘police’, which began to be used from the fourteenth century. It signified the regulations and the means that would advance the common good through the securing of peace and order, protecting private property and improving the conditions of life. In urban communities, in particular, the law articulated and ordered social, economic and political relationships that underpinned the ideal of good neighbourliness. This chapter seeks to go beyond the existing literature on peacemaking and ask what happened after the settlement, exploring the ways in which people lived alongside their former enemies and assessing the ways in which the official justice was modified by people to suit their emotional and spiritual needs.

Chapter 9 chronicles the postwar trajectory of extrajudicial killings within the Guatemalan police. It first examines state violence during the transition period and subsequent postwar police reforms, which included the creation of the new National Civilian Police (PNC) in 1997. The chapter then analyzes how the dominant wartime distributional coalition managed to survive peacebuilding reforms and uphold the undermining rules governing extrajudicial executions to eliminate “undesirables.” In an important contrast from the case of Guatemala’s customs administration, the PNC saw the direct reentry of these groups into the upper echelons of the security cabinet, highlighting a different pathway of institutional persistence.

Chapter 8 examines the survival of the undermining rules within Guatemala’s customs apparatus from the discovery of the Moreno Network in 1996 to the uncovering of La Línea in 2015. Specifically, it discusses the series of reforms implemented by the Arzú government in the aftermath of the Moreno Network revelations to curb customs fraud and contraband, including (1) the expulsions of high-ranking security officials implicated in the scheme, (2) the restructuring of Guatemala’s port system, and (3) the creation of a new fiscal apparatus in the form of the Superintendent of Tax Administration (SAT). The chapter then evaluates how the undermining rules in customs outlasted these sweeping reforms, illustrating how the wartime distributional coalition, while largely displaced from the state sphere, penetrated new semi- and extra-state spaces like political party channels and private port concessions.

Ch 2: The second chapter looks at the complex confrontation of Christian lyric with death. Finality lends meaning to the life of the faithful, and lyric allows the poet and the reader to undo that death, to turn it into “love.” More concretely, Clément Marot’s word manipulations consistently use the praise of the deceased as a means of promoting the pursuit of peace, as if death on earth were unmade, at the same time, by the turning of “mort” into “amour.”

Service is not always a virtue. It can be a drudgery, or an enslavement if not physical or legal, then economic. But Paul inverted this meaning to illustrate the greater commitment of the believer to God, a virtue that levels social divisions and asserts a broader community of faith. This chapter examines the ways that Shakespeare adopts or reshapes Paul’s use of service elevating it as a community virtue where one serves another, often toward no gain for oneself in order to support a greater good. Two plays illustrate this focus of Shakespeare’s, King Lear where service, though more poignant, is more brittle and precarious, and Cymbeline, a play that revels in the necessity of collective service to establish an enduring peace.

How do the virtues of toleration and hospitality manifest in early-modern drama? This chapter defines the virtues of toleration and hospitality through their intimate association with Ancient Persia, its rulers and foundational Zoroastrian ideology of promoting order and unity in diversity in the kingdom for communal harmony and felicity. Although an unexpected parallel, early modern writers call upon the locale of Persian as a concept with the capacity to inspire English monarchs to model themselves on paradigms of intercultural hospitality found in vignettes of Persia’s rulers, such as Cyrus and Artaxerxes, in Greek texts. These stories of cooperation between Persians and Greeks provide the context for Shakespeare’s enigmatic reference to Persian clothing in Act 3 when Edgar momentarily inhabits a Persian persona from Lear’s delusional perspective. Shakespeare’s use of ancient Persian virtues draws attention to the subtle forms of intercultural cooperation that hover in the background of his tragedy and radically contribute to a form of historical revisionism that privileges the forces of cooperation over conflict between oppositional groups such as Persian and Greeks of antiquity.

We will turn now to two symbolic images: The allegory of Injustice in the Arena Chapel (Padua) by Giotto di Bondone (1303–1305) and the allegory of War in the Palazzo Pubblico (Siena) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1338–1339). They are major milestones in the visualization of rape in European art, condemnatory representations intended for a public audience. Despite the extensive secondary literature on these sites, the representations of sexual violence have never been examined or compared to each other, even in specialist studies. They can potentially reconfigure our views of wartime rape before modernity.

Understanding the climate-security nexus requires framing risks and resilience, which often reflects a negative cycle of fragility, climate vulnerability, and human insecurity. Climate actions, however, can enhance a society’s climate resilience and generate pathways toward improved peace and security. These actions include constructing a tighter continuum from humanitarian assistance to development processes, providing early warnings for food security planning, building local capacity to translate early warnings and climate-informed advisories, climate-smart mapping and adaptation planning, designing adaptive safety net programs, and enabling risk finance to facilitate early action. Additional changes and interventions, such as improving multi-level governance, utilizing climate security evidence, creating conflict-sensitive policy, and linking innovation with resilience, can also help break the cycle between climate and conflict, align climate actions to peace objectives, and thereby contribute to a climate-resilient peace.

Pacifist activism flourished in Britain and America during the first half of the twentieth century, and peace was a central preoccupation for writers and intellectuals before and during both world wars. Vera Brittain, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, and Aldous Huxley were all actively engaged in some form of peace writing. This chapter examines this history in the British context, from the impact of conscription during the First World War to the grave challenges to peace of the 1930s. It investigates a variety of texts by conscientious objectors, peace campaigners, feminist pacifists, anti-war poets, public intellectuals, and internationalist reformers. This literary and political history reveals how the notion of peace shifted radically during this period. What began as a moral imperative – inherited from Christian teachings and the liberal legacy of the Enlightenment – was transformed into a secular notion with extensive political potential. As this chapter shows, pacifist thought underpinned arguments towards socio-political reform, and it shaped the language of rights central to political discourse after the Second World War.

The conclusion draws together the main themes discussed in the book, and briefly examines what happened after the end of the war, in 1815. Suddenly, with the decommissioning of the fleet, most (though not all) ‘foreign’ seamen were no longer needed, and many of them were reduced to beg in the streets. The utilitarian system of ‘pragmatic inclusiveness’ that had directed naval recruitment collapsed, and displacement was the trigger for legal and cultural forms of discrimination which had been suppressed by the Navy during the war. Thus, its exceptional bubble eventually burst. Different types of labels and demarcations, which had been treated as, and proven to be, utterly unimportant, all of a sudden became a convenient framework for both individuals and the state to harken onto, crystallising ‘foreign Jack Tars’ into a group. The legal categories that were twisted in one direction during wartime now further proved their flimsiness by being twisted in the opposite direction. Caught in between states, the same men who were previously wanted by all were now rejected by all.

This article was published in the Journal of Negro Education and adapted in his 1947 World and Africa. Du Bois develops a classic anti-imperial argument of the imperial boomerang, arguing that Nazi atrocities have historical precedents in the violence and dehumanization of the colonized world where the color line had justified and elided this domination. The crisis and collapse of Europe signaled by the rise of Nazism indicates for Du Bois the decadence of European civilization, which he describes as a “self-worshiping” structure bound to fall.

This chapter sketches a potential architecture of global federal government, framing it as the end-goal of a century-long, incremental process of reforms and innovations in governance. Humankind, in this scenario, will be strongly motivated to undertake these innovations because of escalating dangers and crises that can only be handled effectively through stronger forms of global cooperation and coordination. The key challenges here are: revamping the UN Security Council so it more accurately reflects the realities of global economic and military power; replacing the Security Council veto system with a new principle of weighted voting in all UN institutions, so that key policies can be implemented effectively; creating a world constitution to lay out the basic rules and principles through which the system will operate, as well as a world court to adjudicate disputes among the players; and establishing a UN Office for Emerging Technologies, a more dynamic WHO, and a dedicated UN Office for Climate Change Mitigation.