“As threats from nuclear weapons reappear in conflicts in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, it is timely to revisit the history of the antinuclear movement."

Martin Shaw will talk about his new book The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the first academic overview of the movement in Britain to appear this century. The book discusses the movement's political dilemmas, including the relationships between mainstream political campaigning and direct action (like the Greenham women's peace camp) which have been at its heart from its origins in the 1950s, as well as its links to other antiwar and social movements and changes in left-wing politics.

To discuss the book, Martin will be joined by LSE academics Luke Cooper, chair of Another Europe is Possible, and Mary Kaldor, who was central to the European Nuclear Disarmament (END) movement in the 1980s, which helped remove intermediate nuclear missiles from Europe - although during his first term, Donald Trump opened the way for their return when he withdrew the USA from the treaty that banned them.

Meet the speakers and chair

Martin Shaw is Research Professor at IBEI, Barcelona, and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. He has written widely on war, genocide and social movements and was involved in CND and END as well as some of the other movements with which antinuclear politics is linked in his new book. 

Luke Cooper is Associate Professorial Research Fellow with the Conflict and Civicness Research Group and Director of PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme. Dr Cooper is a historical sociologist and political scientist, whose work studies processes of change and transformation within and between societies. 

Mary Kaldor is Professor Emeritus of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict Research Programme at LSE. She has pioneered the concepts of new wars and global civil society. Her elaboration of the real-world implementation of human security has directly influenced European and national governments.

The British Library of Political and Economic Science (@LSELibrary) was founded in 1896, a year after the London School of Economics and Political Science. It has been based in the Lionel Robbins Building since 1978 and houses many world class collections, including the Women's Library and Hall-Carpenter Archives.