Description
Interest in the idea of ‘peaceful change’ has resurged in recent years. The rediscovery of this idea is taking place amidst increasing disillusionment with the idea of collective security. The concurrence of these two trends is worth noting given that peaceful change was widely viewed as inextricably linked to collective security during the interwar years when these ideas entered the lexicon of international politics. How did it come about that peaceful change was decoupled from collective security? To address this puzzle, this paper takes a fresh look at the interwar debate on peaceful change and offers a critical reappraisal of contemporary discourse on peaceful change characterised by the decoupling of peaceful change from collective security. The paper particularly focuses on the international political thought of David Davies (Lord Davies of Llandinam) who in the 1930s argued for creating an international police force with the goal of effectively combining peaceful change with collective security. By comparing and contrasting Davies’s proposed solution to the problem of peaceful change with various solutions offered by contemporary IR theorists, such as Karl Deutsch, Robert Gilpin, and Robert Keohane, this paper seeks to reveal and problematise the unstated assumptions underlying contemporary discourse on peaceful change—assumptions which work to preclude discussion of structural level solutions to the problem of peaceful change, including those based on the understanding of the symbiosis of peaceful change and collective security.
