This dissertation traces the origins, formation, and development of the United States Institute of Peace. The project seeks to illuminate how an elite-led reform campaign to establish a national peace academy resulted in a federally funded “think and do tank,” arguably a crucial component of the national security state. More generally, the research aims to understand how initiatives intended to alter the behavior of the state are constrained and transformed through their journey in the field of power.
The study begins by examining the history of calls for the establishment of a federal peace office, calls which date to the founding period of the United States and are anchored in the writings of such notable figures as George Washington and Benjamin Rush. This project reveals that there were at least three contending views about the relationship of peace to the state. In overlooking these distinctions, peace reformers championed the legacy of George Washington as a peace advocate, while ignoring Washington’s own interactions with those committed to non-violence. Next, the study examines the origins of the National Peace Academy Campaign and its efforts to pass peace legislation at the federal level. It interprets this campaign as an attempt to offer alternatives, in the form of peace studies and conflict resolution, to the dominance of political Realism during the Cold War and Vietnam War. Finally, the study considers the passage of U.S. Institute of Peace Act and the organization that emerged from the law. Here the Institute is situated within the context of scholarship on think tanks and knowledge production. The study explores the organization’s transformation from a focus on peace education to policy analysis, and finally to its recent incarnation as a hybrid think tank and intervention agency.