Beyond appeasement

The interwar peace movements were, according to conventional interpretations, naive and ineffective. More seriously, the standard histories have also held that they severely weakened national efforts to resist Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. In Beyond Appeasement, Cecelia Lynch provides a long overdue reevaluation of the peace movements. She challenges earlier interpretations, particularly regarding the postwar understanding of Realism, which forms the basis of core assumptions in international relations theory. Lynch focuses on the construction of the United Nations as evidence that the conventional history is incomplete as well as misleading. Why, she asks, if the League of Nations was the failure that posterity paints it to be, did states form a new global international organization? She brings to light the important role of social movements in the formation of normative underpinnings of the U.N., thus requiring scholars to rethink their understanding of the repercussions of the interwar experience as well as the broader significance of social movements for international life.