The Internationalists

Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro tell the story of the 1928 Peace Pact, signed in Paris and also called the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which made war illegal for the first time. Nearly every state ratified it within a year, yet within a decade each of its signatories was at war, and the pact came to be mocked as a failure. The authors argue instead that it began a long, continuing shift toward peace. They follow the lawyers, politicians and intellectuals behind it, the centuries of argument over war's place in a just order, and the later world in which sanctions and tariffs took the role of armies. The book appeared in 2017.

Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, named it in The Guardian among books to make readers optimistic, calling it possibly the most surprising pick for arguing that the long-mocked 1928 pact banning war deserves a large share of the credit.