Fellow seminar by Nicholas T. Parsons, Historian, Sen. Research Fellow, iASK.

Date: 27th of October (Tuesday), 2026, 10:00 a.m.

Place: Bibó Room (Europe House)

Title of the seminar: Pacifism and Conflict Resolution in a Geostrategic and Historical Perspective

Abstract: This talk, based on a study with the same title that will be appearing online with iASK later, looks at the history of pacifism both as a moral imperative for those who espouse it and a philosophical concept. It appears in the works of antiquity, in religious works of the East and the West and in the writings of the Humanists from the early modern period onwards.

In particular I will look at the concept of a Just War, first propounded by St Thomas Aquinas in 1271-1272, an attempt to reconcile pacifist principles with the necessity of self-defence. With the Humanists came the formulation of international laws and with the Enlightenment the theory of lasting peace (Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, 1795.) The rationalists argued that war was irrational, since ultimately both sides lose by it, therefore it would be abandoned as counter-productive; others believed that there was an underlying ”natural law” that made war contrary to the innate morality of humankind.

In the 19th and 20th century war has been a constant and horrific reality; at the same time there has been marked progress in international law, the formulation and defence of universal human rights and a growth in academic peace studies and conflict resolution. The Bretton Woods conference towards the end of World War II established an era of peace and growing prosperity for Western Europe. However peace was largely maintained by the doctrine of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) due to parity of nuclear weapons between the democracies and the Soviet Empire. On the other hand the USA’s five significant wars, ostensibly fought to defend the interests of democratic captalism against Marxist Leninism, were all (with one exception) either inconclusive or failures.

We are now witnessing the collapse of the ”rules-based international order” founded at Bretton Woods in 1944 and Europe is no longer securely anchored defence-wise to the USA. Futhermore the Russian attack on Ukraine is described by Russia’s Patriarch Kyril as a ”Holy War,” which throws us back to the Middle Ages. Israel, hitherto the West’s most reliable ally in the Middle East, faces declining sympathy from a generation of intellectuals apparently influenced by so-called Islamo-Gaucheism, while the mainstream press and the UN’s International Court of Justice claims that  Israel’s retaliation to a genocidal attack by Hamas is itself genocidal. Nevertheless there have been impressive pacifists who achieved most of their aims in the twentieth century, including Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. It was Gandhi who expressed the idea of pacifism in its purest form when he said: ” There are many causes that I am prepared to die for, but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.”

Readable Literature that pursues various aspects of Pacifism and attemped Conflict Resolution includes:

Tim Marshall: Prisoners of Geography:Ten Maps that Tell you Everything you Need to Know about Global Politics

Henry Kissinger: World Order: Reflections on the Characters of Nations and the Course of History

William Shawcross: Deliver Us From Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict