The Versailles Settlement, at the time of its creation a vital part of the Paris Peace Conference, suffers today from a poor reputation: despite its lofty aim to settle the world’s affairs at a stroke, it is widely considered to have paved the way for a second major global conflict within a generation. Woodrow Wilson’s controversial principle of self-determination amplified political complexities in the Balkans, and the war and its settlement bear significant responsibility for boundaries and related conflicts in today’s Middle East. After almost a century, the settlement still casts a long shadow. This revised and updated edition of The Consequences of the Peace sets the ramifications of the Paris Peace treaties—for good or ill—within a long-term context. Alan Sharp presents new materials in order to argue that the responsibility for Europe’s continuing interwar instability cannot be wholly attributed to the peacemakers of 1919–23. Marking the centenary of World War I and the approaching centenary of the Peace Conference itself, this book is a clear and concise guide to the global legacy of the Versailles Settlement.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace - John Maynard Keynes - The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) is a book written and published by the British economist John Maynard Keynes. After the First World War, Keynes attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as a delegate of the British Treasury. In his book, he argued for a much more generous peace, not out of a desire for justice or fairness – these are aspects of the peace that Keynes does not deal with – but for the sake of the economic well-being of all of Europe, including the Allied Powers, which the Treaty of Versailles and its associated treaties would prevent. The book was a best-seller throughout the world and was critical in establishing a general opinion that the treaties were a "Carthaginian peace" designed to crush the defeated Central Powers, especially Germany. It helped to consolidate American public opinion against the treaties and against joining the League of Nations. The perception by much of the British public that Germany had been treated unfairly was, in turn, a crucial factor in later public support for the appeasement of Hitler. The success of the book established Keynes' reputation as a leading economist, especially on the left. When Keynes was a key player in establishing the Bretton Woods system in 1944, he remembered the lessons from Versailles as well as the Great Depression. The Marshall Plan, which was promulgated to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, was similar to the system proposed by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

In a turbulent world, Keynes's warnings of a century ago are no less relevant - and some even more so.

Published just months after the Versailles Treaty was signed, The Economic Consequences of the Peace is a devastating critique of allied leaders and the reparations imposed on Germany and Austria in the aftermath of WWI. These essays assess the importance of Keynes’s book, both historically and in its relevance for the challenges we face today.

This open access book discusses the impact of protracted peace processes on identities in conflict. It is concerned with how lingering peace processes affect, in the long-term, patterns of othering in protracted conflicts, and how this relates with enduring violence. Taking Israel and Palestine as a case study, the book traces different representations of success and failure of the protracted peace process, as well as its associated policies, narratives, norms and practices, to analyze its impact on identity and its contribution to the maintenance and/or transformation of the cultural component of violence. On the one hand, drawing from an interdisciplinary approach comprising International Relations (IR), History and Social Psychology, this book proposes an analytical framework for assessing the specificities of the construction of identities in protracted conflicts. It identifies dehumanization and practices of reconciliation in ongoing conflicts – what is called peace-less reconciliation – as the main elements influencing processes of othering and violence in this kind of conflicts. On the other hand, the book offers an empirical historical analysis on how the protracted peace process has impacted identity building and representations made of the ‘other’ in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the end of the 19th century to the present day.