292 ANALYZING DATA
out of academia; students in both graduate and undergraduate classes; my children’s all-too-apt
questioning of authority; and my own continued reading and questioning. More than anything,
the road has taught me to reexamine certainties constantly, my own and others’, political and
academic, with all the epiphanies and angst that that entails.❖❖❖This reinterpretation [of interwar peace movements and the creation of the United
Nations] demonstrates that a critical analysis of the interwar period and the role of peace
movements in it not only disturbs entrenched categories and ways of theorizing, but also
tells us something useful about the role of social forces in international life.
—Cecilia Lynch (1999, 215)What does this reinterpretation, or construction of an alternative narrative, tell the reader about
the role of peace movements?Their primary significance lies in their ability to contest, to loosen the boundaries of
conventional notions of interest by exposing their contradictions (as in the Coolidge
Conference and Kellogg-Briand Pact debates), and to use discursive compromises to
open the way toward further contestation.
—Cecilia Lynch (1999, 214)More specifically, regarding the construction of the United Nations:Peace movements helped to foster and to legitimize norms underpinning global interna-
tional organization. But what is important about global international organization is not
so much whether or not it represents a decline in state sovereignty or whether it fulfills
state goals. What is important is that it has represented an important site of social struggle
over the normative meaning and legitimacy of state practice and an alternative to the state
for social groups to enable new practices to take form. The state and international
organization are both permeable as well as powerful entities, and both have functions that
are constantly reevaluated, reinterpreted, and recreated, in large part because of the
claims and demands advanced by social movements.
—Cecilia Lynch (1999, 215)And finally, what do these findings mean for disturbing “entrenched categories and ways of theo-
rizing” (from the first epigraph)?Laying bare the normative positions of interwar movements forces us to look
at the reasons why peace groups acted as they did; that is, it forces us to
compare the logic of their behavior against that of the “lessons” taught
by the dominant narratives and to ask anew whether the former
should of necessity be seen as naive and the latter as prudent.
—Cecilia Lynch (1999, 215)My study of interwar peace movements, the construction of the United Nations, and the construc-
tion of international relations (IR) theory comprised nonlinear and multicausal notions of how