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How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace
How nations move from war to peace
Is the world destined to suffer endless cycles of conflict and war? Can rival nations become partners and establish a lasting and stable peace? How Enemies Become Friends provides a bold and innovative account of how nations escape geopolitical competition and replace hostility with friendship. Through compelling analysis and rich historical examples that span the globe and range from the thirteenth century through the present, foreign policy expert Charles Kupchan explores how adversaries can transform enmity into amity―and he exposes prevalent myths about the causes of peace.
Kupchan contends that diplomatic engagement with rivals, far from being appeasement, is critical to rapprochement between adversaries. Diplomacy, not economic interdependence, is the currency of peace; concessions and strategic accommodation promote the mutual trust needed to build an international society. The nature of regimes matters much less than commonly thought: countries, including the United States, should deal with other states based on their foreign policy behavior rather than on whether they are democracies. Kupchan demonstrates that similar social orders and similar ethnicities, races, or religions help nations achieve stable peace. He considers many historical successes and failures, including the onset of friendship between the United States and Great Britain in the early twentieth century, the Concert of Europe, which preserved peace after 1815 but collapsed following revolutions in 1848, and the remarkably close partnership of the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s, which descended into open rivalry by the 1960s.
In a world where conflict among nations seems inescapable, How Enemies Become Friends offers critical insights for building lasting peace.
Is the world destined to suffer endless cycles of conflict and war? Can rival nations become partners and establish a lasting and stable peace? How Enemies Become Friends provides a bold and innovative account of how nations escape geopolitical competition and replace hostility with friendship. Through compelling analysis and rich historical examples that span the globe and range from the thirteenth century through the present, foreign policy expert Charles Kupchan explores how adversaries can transform enmity into amity―and he exposes prevalent myths about the causes of peace.
Kupchan contends that diplomatic engagement with rivals, far from being appeasement, is critical to rapprochement between adversaries. Diplomacy, not economic interdependence, is the currency of peace; concessions and strategic accommodation promote the mutual trust needed to build an international society. The nature of regimes matters much less than commonly thought: countries, including the United States, should deal with other states based on their foreign policy behavior rather than on whether they are democracies. Kupchan demonstrates that similar social orders and similar ethnicities, races, or religions help nations achieve stable peace. He considers many historical successes and failures, including the onset of friendship between the United States and Great Britain in the early twentieth century, the Concert of Europe, which preserved peace after 1815 but collapsed following revolutions in 1848, and the remarkably close partnership of the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s, which descended into open rivalry by the 1960s.
In a world where conflict among nations seems inescapable, How Enemies Become Friends offers critical insights for building lasting peace.
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 25, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 30, 2019
A very informative but difficult book. Mr. Kupchan is obviously a very well-read and smart man by the way he tries to synthesize history for us and show what are "sufficient" vs "necessary" conditions for a stable/cold peace to break out and eventually evolve into a friendship (if at all). One of the strengths of the book is he uses a diverse set of examples to illustrate his point. Overall, a good history book for aspiring diplomats.
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August 11, 2026**A book that tries to achieve a lot while being built on a theoretically eclectic base.**
Charles Kupchan is an extremely well-established practitioner and writer of international relations. He's currently working in "the belly of the beast" of US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations but was previously affiliated with the Obama and Clinton administrations. Considering the author and topic (and the fact that, as Kupchan himself points out, peace studies are underrepresented), I was quite excited to read this book.
I'm therefore a bit surprised that "How Enemies Become Friends" felt more like Kupchan saying he's going to synthesize a variety of international relations literature rather than effectively showing that such a thing is possible, per se. Perhaps this is only my own skepticism speaking when I hear someone wants to take from all of the main traditions in a field at once (realism, liberalism, constructivism) in addition to integrating other rich sources like Deutsch's security communities. Yet, on the other hand, there isn't really any engagement with these traditions by Kupchan beyond a handful of seminal scholars. In terms of the realist thought, for instance, Kupchan only really takes from Stephen Walt, which with his "balance of threat" is, in many ways, already a constructivist deviation from general structural realism. This makes Kupchan's work lean more toward the realm of meaning-making, which is already covered by constructivism, even while the book purports to be about power. This is especially visible in the section on *why* friendship processes are started. Of course this isn't really the "meat" of Kupchan's innovation--I see his contribution really being applying the three-step unilateral rapprochement, mutual restraint, and institutionalization model to a vareity of cases--but even so, the eclecticism of the IR theories section seems indicative of the general philosophy Kupchan took in writing this book.
This brings me to another point: I'm not quite sure who this book is for. It reads as something between scholarly (some understanding of theory prior to reading is important), advisory (policy implications), and something meant for a broader public audience (references to pop culture like "The Hunt for Red October," although this less academic feeling may stem from the plain language American Poli-sci tends to prefer). This isn't to say that this limbo state is a bad thing--I think some fantastic works reside within this space--rather, it makes recommending this book in particular much more difficult. The concepts aren't novel for the former, and for the latter groups, it's a bit too dense with historical examples and theory.
In sum, I personally find Kupchan's desire to understand peace as an admirable goal considering the relative scarcity of peace studies scholarship compared to war studies but for the general goodreads reader this is perhaps not the first work worth exploring.
Charles Kupchan is an extremely well-established practitioner and writer of international relations. He's currently working in "the belly of the beast" of US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations but was previously affiliated with the Obama and Clinton administrations. Considering the author and topic (and the fact that, as Kupchan himself points out, peace studies are underrepresented), I was quite excited to read this book.
I'm therefore a bit surprised that "How Enemies Become Friends" felt more like Kupchan saying he's going to synthesize a variety of international relations literature rather than effectively showing that such a thing is possible, per se. Perhaps this is only my own skepticism speaking when I hear someone wants to take from all of the main traditions in a field at once (realism, liberalism, constructivism) in addition to integrating other rich sources like Deutsch's security communities. Yet, on the other hand, there isn't really any engagement with these traditions by Kupchan beyond a handful of seminal scholars. In terms of the realist thought, for instance, Kupchan only really takes from Stephen Walt, which with his "balance of threat" is, in many ways, already a constructivist deviation from general structural realism. This makes Kupchan's work lean more toward the realm of meaning-making, which is already covered by constructivism, even while the book purports to be about power. This is especially visible in the section on *why* friendship processes are started. Of course this isn't really the "meat" of Kupchan's innovation--I see his contribution really being applying the three-step unilateral rapprochement, mutual restraint, and institutionalization model to a vareity of cases--but even so, the eclecticism of the IR theories section seems indicative of the general philosophy Kupchan took in writing this book.
This brings me to another point: I'm not quite sure who this book is for. It reads as something between scholarly (some understanding of theory prior to reading is important), advisory (policy implications), and something meant for a broader public audience (references to pop culture like "The Hunt for Red October," although this less academic feeling may stem from the plain language American Poli-sci tends to prefer). This isn't to say that this limbo state is a bad thing--I think some fantastic works reside within this space--rather, it makes recommending this book in particular much more difficult. The concepts aren't novel for the former, and for the latter groups, it's a bit too dense with historical examples and theory.
In sum, I personally find Kupchan's desire to understand peace as an admirable goal considering the relative scarcity of peace studies scholarship compared to war studies but for the general goodreads reader this is perhaps not the first work worth exploring.
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February 16, 2010Through compelling analysis and rich historical examples that span the globe and range from the thirteenth century through the present, foreign policy expert Charles Kupchan explores how adversaries can transform enmity into amity—and he exposes prevalent myths about the causes of peace.
April 9, 2011
An amazing study of the sources of stable peace. Kupchan not only finds the key components, but persuasively refutes widely-held misconceptions. A must-read for anyone interested in international relations.
February 1, 2016
I wasnt too crazy about the theory of this book, which is won it such great praise. I was much more enthralled with the diverse case studies that Kupchan discusses, including Norway/Sweeden, the Iroquois, and so many others. For these reasons alone, the book is worth picking up.
January 13, 2013
Good read, but too long.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews