- What did Frédéric Passy do over four decades to promote international arbitration instead of war?
- Why did the first Peace Prize split between a man who mitigated war's damage and one who worked to prevent war entirely?
Peace Movements and Pacifism
Organized efforts and advocacy against war.
- What was the International Peace Bureau, and what did Élie Ducommun's role in it actually involve?
- What was the Inter-Parliamentary Union that Albert Gobat administered, and what problem was it trying to solve?
- What proposition did Randal Cremer spend four decades campaigning for?
- What was the Inter-Parliamentary Union founded to accomplish, and does it still exist?
- How did Cremer's working-class origins as a carpenter's apprentice contrast with his later political career?
- What kind of work did the Institute of International Law actually do in its first decades?
- Why was the Institute of International Law founded in Ghent in 1873?
- What was the Institute's underlying theory of why codifying rules of war mattered, even if they could be broken?
- How did Bertha von Suttner's brief employment with Alfred Nobel lead to a decades-long correspondence?
- What impact did her novel Lay Down Your Arms have on public sentiment about war?
- What role might von Suttner have played in Nobel's decision to establish a Peace Prize?
- What were the two very different approaches to peace represented by Moneta and Renault?
- What did the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 actually attempt to codify about warfare?
- How thoroughly were the Hague Conventions violated within a decade of being signed?
- What lasting legal legacy did Louis Renault's work leave despite the conventions' fragility?
- Why did Klas Pontus Arnoldson resign from the Swedish parliament to pursue pacifism?
- What institutional role did Fredrik Bajer play in organizing the international peace movement?
- What argument did Arnoldson make for why small nations benefit more from arbitration than alliances?
- What role did Auguste Beernaert play in drafting the laws of war at the Hague Conventions?
- What did the Permanent International Peace Bureau actually do for the European peace movement?
- Why did the Nobel committee choose to honor an institution rather than an individual peace advocate in 1910?
- What historical event, four years later, would test the peace movement the Bureau had built?
- What kinds of cross-border legal disputes did the Hague Conferences on private international law that Asser organized try to standardize?
- What argument did Alfred Fried make in the German Peace Society about why wars between states happen?
- How did the Hague Conventions that Asser helped build survive the outbreak of the First World War?
- What bilateral arbitration treaties did Elihu Root negotiate as U.S. Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt?
- Why did the diplomatic machinery Root built fail its first serious test in August 1914?
- What institutional machinery did La Fontaine help build to promote international arbitration?
- How soon after La Fontaine's prize did the First World War begin?
- What role did Léon Bourgeois play at the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907?
- What role did Christian Lous Lange play as secretary-general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union?
- What civic work did Ferdinand Buisson do to build pacifist opinion in France?
- Why did Ludwig Quidde's pamphlet about Caligula get him into trouble?
- What did Nathan Söderblom do during the war to try to bridge divided churches?
- Why had Jane Addams been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize since 1916 before finally winning in 1931?
- How did Nicholas Murray Butler's approach to peace through academic diplomacy differ from Addams's grassroots work?
- How does the fate of Jacques Thibault illustrate the collision between pacifism and 1914?
- What was the Peace Ballot of 1935 and why did its result go unheeded?
- How did Hesse's pacifist writing during World War I affect his standing in Germany?
- Why did Wellesley College dismiss Emily Greene Balch from her professorship in 1919?
- What organization did Balch co-found with Jane Addams, and what was its mission?
- What was the logic behind pairing Balch and Mott as co-laureates in the same year?
- How did Jouhaux's early work dipping matchsticks in a phosphorus factory shape his later career?
- How did Jouhaux's imprisonment at Buchenwald during the war affect his later work?
- What was the significance of Lutuli being the first African laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize?
- What campaign had King been conducting since the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott that led to this recognition?
- What happened in Belfast in August 1976 that led Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan to found the Community of Peace People?
- How did the Peace People marches bring together Catholic and Protestant citizens who had been on opposite sides of the Troubles?
- Why did the Nobel Committee award the 1976 Peace Prize to Williams and Corrigan a year later than the events that inspired it?
- How did Leymah Gbowee's Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace help end the civil war?