SYMPOSIUM: Imagining Peace in the Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914). In Search of New Actors and Vocabularies (Brussels: VUB, 15 SEP 2023)

drs. Wouter De Rycke and dr. Raphaël Cahen convene a symposium Imagining Peace in the Long Nineteenth Century (1789-1914) on 15 September in Building I and the Building of the Brussels School of Governance (across the Avenue de la Plaine).

This symposium takes place in the framework of the FWO Junior Fundamental Research Project G015420N The legal construction of peace, 1815-1870. Networks and arguments (supervisor-spokesperson: Prof. Frederik Dhondt; supervisor: dr. Raphaël Cahen; PhD-researcher: drs. Wouter De Rycke), with the support of the Research Group CORE.

The symposium aims to investigate unofficial forms of normative peace-thinking in the long nineteenth century. In the period roughly between 1789 and 1914, political, legal, economic, and cultural developments made a radical and lasting impact on the possible representations of peace. Significant sections of European and American society came to define peace not simply as the mere ‘absence of war’, but as a desirable, long-term condition in which disputes were consistently settled pacifically. Changing patterns of communication and political agency increasingly enabled new actors from within civil society to contest these realities. Outside of the narrow circles of government and high diplomacy, a plethora of new actors campaigned for a new kind of international law. Their ideal was ‘peace through law’. Our symposium investigates the legal imagination of ordinary lawyers, philanthropists, economists, feminists, nationalists, and pacifists. In his public opening lecture, professor Koskenniemi will engage with these questions. What were the roads not taken?   

Full program.

For more information, please contact: wouter dot de dot rycke at vub dot be or raphael dot cahen at vub dot be