Charles Kupchan, "How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace"
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
12:15 - 1:15 pm | Room 3037
Duke Law School
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Book Description
Is the world destined to suffer endless cycles of conflict and war? Can rival nations become partners and establish a lasting and stable peace? How Enemies Become Friends provides a bold and innovative account of how nations escape geopolitical competition and replace hostility with friendship. Through compelling analysis and rich historical examples that span the globe and range from the thirteenth century through the present, foreign policy expert Charles Kupchan explores how adversaries can transform enmity into amity--and he exposes prevalent myths about the causes of peace.
Kupchan contends that diplomatic engagement with rivals, far from being appeasement, is critical to rapprochement between adversaries. Diplomacy, not economic interdependence, is the currency of peace; concessions and strategic accommodation promote the mutual trust needed to build an international society. The nature of regimes matters much less than commonly thought: countries, including the United States, should deal with other states based on their foreign policy behavior rather than on whether they are democracies. Kupchan demonstrates that similar social orders and similar ethnicities, races, or religions help nations achieve stable peace. He considers many historical successes and failures, including the onset of friendship between the United States and Great Britain in the early twentieth century, the Concert of Europe, which preserved peace after 1815 but collapsed following revolutions in 1848, and the remarkably close partnership of the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s, which descended into open rivalry by the 1960s.
In a world where conflict among nations seems inescapable, How Enemies Become Friends offers critical insights for building lasting peace.
Official Book Website
About the Author
Dr. Charles Kupchan is currently Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Kupchan was Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council during the first Clinton administration. Before joining the NSC, he worked in the U.S. Department of State on the Policy Planning Staff. Prior to government service, he was an Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He has served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs, Columbia University's Institute for War and Peace Studies, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Centre d'Etude et de Recherches Internationales in Paris, and the Institute for International Policy Studies in Tokyo. He is the author of "How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace"(2010), "The End of the America Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty�'first Century"!
(2002), "Power in Transition: The Peaceful Change of International Order" (2001), "Civic Engagement in the Atlantic Community" (1999), "Atlantic Security: Contending Visions" (1998), "Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe" (1995), "The Vulnerability of Empire" (1994), "The Persian Gulf and the West" (1987), and numerous articles on international and strategic affairs.
A book sale and signing will follow immediately after in the third floor loggia.
Co-sponsored with the Duke University Program in American Grand Strategy and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies
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