Co-Directors

Dr Luc-André Brunet is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary International History at the Open University and Visiting Fellow at LSE IDEAS. His research interests include European integration, NATO, nuclear disarmament, and the foreign relations of both France and Canada. He recently edited NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative: A Transatlantic History of the Star Wars Programmeand he is currently finishing a book on Canada, nuclear weapons and the end of the Cold War.

Dr Eirini Karamouzi is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Sheffield and Visiting Fellow at LSE IDEAS. She is the author of Greece, the EEC and the Cold War, 1974-1979. The Second Enlargement and co-editor of the volume Balkans in the Cold War. She works on the history of European integration, Modern Greece and previously ran a Max Batley peace studies funded project on peace movements in Southern Europe during the Euromissile crisis. She tweets @EiriniKaramouzi.

Past events

Global Anti-Nuclear Activism, Past and Present
26 March 2021 

Concluding a major two-day international conference, this public panel discussion explores how global anti-nuclear activism has influenced policymaking since the late Cold War, and what strategies are available to anti-nuclear activists today. This event, chaired by Dr Luc-André Brunet, brings together Professor Mary Kaldor, Nick Dunlop, and Beatrice Fihn.

Watch the event recording 

Global Histories of Anti-Nuclear and Peace Activism in the late Cold War
22 and 23 May 2021

One of the most dynamic areas within the historiography of the Cold War and social movement studies in recent years has been the study of peace and anti-nuclear activism in the last decades of the Cold War. Existing scholarship in this area has for the most part focused on the largest countries within NATO, notably the US, the UK, and West Germany. This conference aims to broaden the scope beyond the North Atlantic by inviting papers on protest that opposes various aspects of nuclear technologies in any country, and to widen the periodisation beyond the Eurocentric account that solely focuses on the Euromissile crisis. One of the objectives of the conference is to bring together historians, political scientists, sociologists and academics from cultural and media studies who are conducting empirical research on peace protests globally during the late Cold War in order to tell a global story of anti-nuclear and peace activism

This conference is co-organised by the LSE IDEAS Peace and Security Project, The Open University, the University of Sheffield, Università Roma Tre, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.

View the event brochure

Towards a new Euromissile Crisis? Implications of the end of the INF Treaty
21 November 2019

In light of the American and Russian withdrawals from the landmark 1987 INF Treaty, this event discusses the implications for European security, transatlantic relations, and nuclear disarmament.

Star Wars: A View from the Commentariat
31 May 2019

Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman from King's College London delivered the keynote lecture entitled 'Star Wars: A View from the Commentariat'. This was part of the conference 'Towards an International History of the Strategic Defence Initiative'.

Peace Activism in the UK during the Cold War is an online resource that features newly digitised documents from the collection of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), housed at LSE Library, providing new insights into different aspects of the British peace movement in the 1980s. These are complemented with video commentary by activists, policymakers, and academics. This resource allows us to re-examine UK peace activism in the 1980s along several themes.

The pervasive impact of the nuclear arms race is still debated, decades into the nuclear age. But scholarship has focused mainly on questions of development, deployment and diplomacy of nuclear arsenals and has neglected how the nuclear arms race nurtured the identity, economy, culture and politics of societies; and, most importantly the role played by concerned citizens to avert a nuclear disaster. The contours and implications of anti-nuclear mobilisation has been fairly well researched for key western European countries over the past decade. Developments in Southern Europe, however, have not yet been substantially studied.

The key objective of this exhibition is to shed light on anti-nuclear and anti-militarist Peace protests in Southern European countries during the late 1970s and the 1980s. The focus will be on Greece, Italy and Spain. During the nuclear crisis, people in Southern Europe like in the rest of the continent sought to re-evaluate their own past, present, and future. The societal response to arms deployment was an expression of rapid sociocultural and technological changes that started in the 1960s and continued with the transformations of the 1970s and 1980s. As activists united to oppose the dire nuclear threat, they engaged and responded to core concerns of safety, peace, democratic participation, mobilisation for disarmament and vitality of citizen engagement. The Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) acts as a reminder of the existential threat that nuclear weapons still pose to humanity and the value in harnessing the power of the people.