Spring 2026 – Challenging War

Peace in the Age of Forever Wars

Temple University (Gladfelter Hall, 10th Floor, Global Studies Lounge)

April 3-4, 2026

Conference Description

The relationship between war and peace is complex and uneasy. Sometimes, war and peace are understood as opposites – war is bad and peace is good, war is destructive and peace is constructive. Sometimes, the relationship between the two is seen as much more sympathetic, such as when we justify going to war so that we might have peace. War is seen, then, not the opposite of peace, but a means of producing peace. The relationship between war and peace has become even more fraught, in the age of forever wars, and stands in even greater need of examination and theorization.

This interdisciplinary symposium will bring together academics from the humanities and social sciences to present new scholarship on how to achieve and maintain peace in the age of forever wars. The hope is to reexamine old frameworks and to bring to light new ones, to understand more deeply the core questions of peace and conflict in historical and transnational context. The symposium is hosted by Temple’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy (CENFAD).

Keynote Speakers

Mary Dudziak (Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law)

“War and Peace in Time and Space – or – Peace as a Form of Privilege”

Ideas about peace and war are contested in American history. They are often thought to be temporal concepts, with wartime and peacetime alternating in history. When we consider the broad range of American wars, big and small, ongoing military conflict seems to blot out any time that is truly free of war. In spite of this, peace is the felt experience of many Americans. This presents a conundrum: how to reconcile peace as a felt reality with war as ever-present. The conceptual difficulty is heightened in this moment of militarized domestic conflict. Ultimately peace is neither a time nor a place but is a form of privilege.

Samuel Moyn (Kent Professor of Law and History, Yale University)

“Gaza, the Humanization of War, and the Politics of International Law”

Graham Parsons (Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Vassar College)

“From Forever Wars to Wars Forever: Explaining America’s Undying Faith in War”

The forever wars that composed the US’s war on terror began under the belief that military superiority is sufficient to achieve strategic goals. The realities of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan quickly undermined that belief. As General Anthony Zinni put it way back in 2003, “The military does a damn good job of killing people and breaking things.” But, “We are lousy at solving the strategic problems, having a strategic plan, understanding about regional and global security, and knowing what it takes to wield the power to shape security and to move it forward.” These wars revealed the danger of thinking of war as a violent competition wherein the winner is the one who dominates the battlefield. Nevertheless, not five years since its ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan, America has again embraced a foreign policy that assumes military superiority is sufficient to achieve strategic goals, declaring wars on drug traffickers, Venezuela, and Iran. This talk seeks to explain this commitment to the power of martial violence as an expression of masculinity. I will argue that 9/11 and the failures of the war on terror were experienced as forms of emasculation and that these experiences motivate war for its own sake, not for a strategic goal.

Participants

David Chan (Professor of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham)

“Is Asymmetric Peace Possible?”

Recent discussions of asymmetric wars have noted how common such wars have become and how difficult it is to apply just war principles to these wars. And many so-called forever wars have been asymmetric. My paper examines the issue of asymmetry from a different starting point. Can peace be a reality in a world with superpower rivals that do not expect to lose wars with states that are vastly inferior? This question has often been examined in terms of maintaining a balance of power between superpowers but less in terms of how powerful states ought to behave towards weaker states. It may seem that peace is possible only if asymmetries between states are greatly reduced. But the elimination of superpowers is unrealistic. My focus is instead on whether powerful nations are necessarily driven to seek global dominance in ways that drive resentment and resistance? The answer I propose is that internal political and economic arrangements often drive powerful states to exploit weaker states. What I will discuss is the need to address domestic inequalities between the rich and the poor, which is usually framed as a matter of internal social justice. I will discuss how internal inequalities have spillover effects into the foreign policy of a state and are an important factor in determining how a powerful state behaves towards other states. This opens the possibility of reducing military conflicts by reducing domestic wealth inequalities so that powerful states are more likely to co-exist peacefully with weaker states.

Mikkel Dack (Associate Professor of History, Rowan University)

“Manufacturing Peace: Innovation and Interconnectivity in Post-WWII Democratic Reconstruction”

This paper examines the immediate post–World War II period as a formative but understudied moment of democratic reconstruction, when Allied military governments launched ambitious programs to punish, reform, and ideologically reorient defeated Axis societies. Moving beyond siloed national case studies such as denazification in Germany or educational reform in Japan, it situates these initiatives within a comparative, transnational framework spanning Italy, Germany, Austria, and Japan. Between 1943 and the mid-1950s, unprecedented collaboration between military authorities and civilian experts—drawing on the applied social sciences, civil affairs institutions, and extensive wartime resources—produced innovative experiments in political rehabilitation, including purges, media reform, civic education, and psychological reorientation. Allied planners actively exchanged ideas, personnel, and methods across occupied zones, revealing a level of interconnectedness and shared intellectual foundations largely absent from existing historiography. Rather than viewing these efforts solely as precursors to Cold War policy, the paper argues that they constituted historically autonomous experiments in peace preservation that sought to balance punitive justice with long-term democratic transformation. Their mixed successes and failures offer enduring insights into the possibilities and limits of non-violent de-radicalization and post-conflict reconstruction, underscoring the value of interdisciplinary and comparative approaches for understanding how durable peace can be manufactured and sustained.

Christian De Vos (Visiting Assistant Professor, CUNY School of Law)

“Beyond the Forever War: State Capture, Violent Peace, and Cooperative Accountability Structures”

This paper questions the continued usefulness of the “forever war” paradigm for understanding contemporary conflict. While the term emerged from the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and has regained renewed purchase in recent years, its focus on duration—and its implicit reliance on inter-state conflict—arguably obscures the structural drivers of violence in many conflict-affected settings today. Drawing on scholarship on macro-criminality, I argue that entrenched networks of corruption, organized crime, illicit financial flows, and captured state institutions increasingly blur the boundaries between wartime and peacetime, generating chronic insecurity and atrocity-linked harm that persists outside traditional battlefield contexts. In response, the paper considers whether new mechanisms of international cooperation—including hybrid investigative commissions, emerging treaty frameworks for cross-border criminal investigation, and evolving debates around crimes against humanity—may offer more effective ways of confronting structural criminality and supporting accountability as part of peacebuilding.

Dario Fazzi (Professor of Transatlantic Environmental History, Leiden University and the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in the Netherlands)

“‘War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things’: The Socio-Ecological Impacts of America’s Forever Wars”

At the height of the Vietnam War, young New York artist Lorraine Schneider created a small but unforgettable artwork: a hand-painted picket sign reading “war is not healthy for children and other living things.” Her two-inch square piece, Primer, soon entered the vocabulary and symbolism of modern peace activism. Although it drew on familiar tropes of early feminism and arguably idealized nature, its message struck a deep chord in American society because of the profound and hard-to-contest truth it expressed. Yet the seeming universality of that statement stands in stark contrast to the rise of America’s forever wars and the consolidation of the militarism that has sustained them, a system powered by an extraordinarily influential military-industrial complex whose operations and global reach have been profoundly damaging to the natural environment and have become a major driver of the anthropogenic transformation of the contemporary world. Environmental historians widely agree that the United States has been a central force in what scientists call the Great Acceleration, the post-1950 surge in human activity that has radically altered Earth’s systems through socio-economic and biogeochemical shifts such as ozone depletion, ocean acidification, rising energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions, and in my presentation I argue that among the most destructive engines of America’s planetary footprint has been the continuous expansion and almost unrestrained reach of the U.S. military-industrial complex, whose power has not waned but intensified into the twenty-first century. What, then, have been the environmental consequences of this perpetual war system? I will show that they include the global spread of chemical toxic substances, extractive practices, and hazardous industrial processes with severe and enduring socio-ecological effects, from soil and water contamination to disrupted precipitation cycles, altered plant growth, damaged vegetation, and birth defects in humans and animals.

Christin Hansen (Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Department of History – Modern History, University of Trier)

“Damned to Fail: Peace Agreements Without the Involvement of Women: The WILPF and Its Criticisms of the 1919 Peace Negotiations”

Research shows that peace agreements are significantly more stable when women are involved in the negotiations. Even without scientific evidence, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) already proclaimed such assumptions during the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the founding of the League of Nations. They called for equal participation of women in international politics and developed various ideas for creating a lasting peaceful global community that took gender-specific issues into account. The presentation focuses on the ideas of the WILPF and examines their concepts of how long-term peace can be achieved.

Sari Kisilevsky (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Queens College CUNY)

“Peace is the Way”: Non-Violence and the Right of Self-Defense

Kant’s groundbreaking essay Toward a Perpetual Peace lays out the conditions for an everlasting peace, which he takes to be the “entire and final” end of right, his political philosophy. Peace, understood as a global federation of states, is the realization of right, the condition in which every person on earth’s freedom is secured, and disputes are settled by law not violence. Kant’s preliminary articles for peace set out the conditions necessary for states to achieve peace, and his definitive articles set out the conditions for maintaining it. Although Kant calls for the abolishment of standing armies and a prohibition on violent interference with the governance of a foreign state, he also leaves open a national right of self-defence, and prohibits states from signing peace treaties with a “secret reservation” or cause for future war. States must relinquish all claims against each other when signing peace treaties, lest peace devolve into a military détente, or “mere truce, a suspension of hostilities” (8:344). I argue that despite Kant’s aspirations, this leads to a conception of peace that is unstable and uncertain, and that leaves individual freedom and well-being less secure than under alternative models. Resolving conflicts with violence is inherently unstable. I draw on Ghandi’s principle of non-violent resistance for both individuals and states to argue that even on a non-instrumental view of the state, a principle of non-violence better achieves Kant’s aims of securing people’s freedom globally than do Kant’s articles of perpetual peace.

Jen Kling (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs)

“A Feminist Approach to Modern Imperialism and Peace”
While contemporary technological interdependence blurs traditional lines between military, civilian, and commercial domains—what I call constitutive technologized entanglement—this does not, contra some contemporary narratives, warrant imperial aggression. Drawing on feminist political theory and indigenous theory, I reconceptualize politics as an embodied, relational space that materializes freedom through democratic and connective action rather than domination. On this view, war marks the failure of politics, and modern imperialism emerges as an “eliminatory dreaming” that destroys the conditions for political life. I conclude by articulating a feminist conception of peace rooted in sustaining relational webs, offering both a critique of modern imperialism and a framework for resisting it.

Ryan Liss (Assistant Professor of Law, University of Western Ontario, Faculty of Law)

“Human Rights: Between Peace and Dignity”
Today, it seems self-evident that human rights are enshrined at the international level because they protect universal human dignity—a cosmopolitan entitlement that cannot be left to the contingencies of domestic law. The prevalence of this received wisdom, however, masks a fundamental transformation in the idea of human rights over the last century. When human rights were first enshrined in international law—during and following the Second World War—their international status was not seen to be justified primarily by the inherent dignity of persons, but by the instrumental role human rights were understood to play in securing interstate peace. This article uncovers the history of these dual justifications for the international status of human rights and the interactions between them. And it shows that as one justification and then the other dominated prevailing thinking over the last century, this had a significant effect on both human rights law and the structure of the contemporary international legal order as a whole. As it concludes by observing, by better understanding the arc of the relationship between human rights and interstate peace over the past century, we can better understand challenges that have emerged for this relationship today.

Margot Minardi (Professor of History and Humanities, Reed College)

“Nineteenth-Century American Peace Reform and the Problem of ‘Utopian’ Peace”

This paper examines how participants in the nineteenth-century American peace movement refuted the argument that the realization of permanent peace on earth was a utopian fantasy. In particular, the paper analyzes the campaign for a “congress of nations” conducted under the auspices of the American Peace Society from the 1830s to the 1850s. Though this effort to get the U.S. to lead the way in forming an international governing body had limited short-term effects, it generated broader popular awareness of, and participation in, the movement to abolish war. As such, the congress of nations campaign constituted one of the most significant efforts to render the pursuit of permanent peace a practical, as opposed to merely utopian, initiative.

Adam Stone (Doctoral Candidate, History, Rutgers-New Brunswick)

“Contested Public Diplomacy: Women Peace Activists’ Conceptions of a World Beyond the Cold War in the 1980s”

Elad Uzan (Lecturer, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford; Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford)

“Ending War Through Compromise”

Jessica Wolfendale (Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University)

“Collateral Voices: Civilian Perspectives and the Ethics of War”
From its origins, just war theory has been largely driven by the interests and perspectives of belligerents above those of civilians. In this paper I show how this normative imbalance is not only theoretically problematic but has had devastating consequences for civilians. The failure to consider civilian experiences has sustained an unjustifiably narrow conception of collateral harm, contributed to the spread of excusing narratives for war crimes, and led to the failure to recognize or address significant forms of injustice and moral injury inflicted on civilians through armed conflict and its aftermath. This paper argues for the inclusion and prioritization of civilian perspectives—including research on civilian experiences as well as first-person testimonies—in academic, policy, strategic, and legal analyses of war. Doing so, as I explore in the final sections of this paper, has radical implications not only for scholarly work on ethics of war (and even the concept of a just war) but also on social, legal, and policy approaches to armed conflict and its aftermath.

Schedule

The schedule can be found here.

Organizers

Lee-Ann Chae

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Temple University

Petra Goedde
Professor of History