School of History, UCC

Professor Peter Jackson, Chair in Global Security, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow

Thursday 11 February 2021, 16.00 (4 PM)
The paper will be delivered via MS TEAMS Please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel, School of History, UCC, for a Teams link j.aandewiel@ucc.ie

Paper This lecture considers and compares the fundamental assumptions underpinning British, American and French conceptions of a new international organisation at the close of the First World War. Key questions under debate both within civil society and policy elites centred on the role the new international organisation should have in maintaining peace. Three general lines of reasoning are identifiable in these debates. The first envisaged the new League or Society of Nations as a vehicle for the promotion of peaceful relations between states through the exercise of global popular opinion. A second school of thought envisaged it as an institution to facilitate the peaceful resolution of disputes between states, a kind of global forum for negotiation. A final conception assumed that a Society of Nations must assume the responsibility for imposing and enforcing peace. This lecture explores the origins and fate of these contending conceptions at the Paris Peace Conference and after. Professor Peter Jackson FRSE holds the Chair in Global Security at the University of Glasgow and is Director of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Historical Society. Before taking up his chair at Glasgow, he taught at Carleton University, Yale University, Aberystwyth University and the University of Strathclyde. He has been Professeur invité at the Université de Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris. His most recent books are: Le Renseignement et relations internationales de 1789 à nos jours (Paris, Editions Nouveau monde, 2021) [forthcoming with Bloomsbury as The Rise of Modern Intelligence, 1789-2020]; La France et la menace nazi. Renseignement et politique, 1933-1939 (Paris, Editions Nouveau monde, 2017); Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2014).