JAMES TURNER JOHNSON
On the older conception, the sovereign could use force against behavior that he understood as endangering the order, justice, and peace of his political community. But the division of Europe into Protestant and Catholic polities changed that.
Americans have registered one set of lessons too well—those deriving from the seventy-five year war against German imperialism and Soviet communism. They have forgotten, or want to forget, another set of lessons—those deriving from the history of U.S. involvement in the Philippines and Vietnam, in Nicaragua and Panama, and on to Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Great War and its imagery imprinted itself on the human imagination. In poetry and prose, photography, art, film, and other modes of expression, its influence on cultural memory and identity, on modern meaning and human sensibility, has been remarkable.
Feminist theorizing of peace suggests a number of transformative observations. Feminist perspectives focus a critical lens on the meaning of peace, often making invisible violence visible; help to critically interrogate the role of the United States in furthering “peace” in the international arena; and make different theoretical and policy prescriptions than perspectives that omit gender from their analyses.
Today’s optimists stress the degree to which globalization appears much more firmly institutionalized than it was a hundred years ago, the rather striking success of global economic governance in responding to the financial crisis of 2007–2008, and the longer-term trend within international society to move away from major-power war. Pessimists are less sure.