The West, Civil Society and the Construction of Peace (Electronic book text)

How do you make peace and how do you keep it? The West, Civil Society and the Construction of Peace studies the debates on peace, world order and security following the victory of the Western powers in the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War. The West believed that a lasting peace could only be made with 'civil societies'. This belief in the civil nature of liberal societies has defined the Western way of peacemaking from Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George to George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Focusing on civil society, Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen puts democratic peace theory in perspective by analysing Adam Ferguson's and Immanuel Kant's notions of peace. Democratic peace is not a fact but a political practice which has defined the west as a unique unit of international agency, but the West is no longer the community that it once was. The Europeans and the United States have increasingly different conceptions of peace.