World Peace Foundation

• 1. Introduction

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  The World Peace Foundation was born in 1910 out of a conviction that the same scale of resources poured into preparing for war could, at least in modest measure, be directed toward making peace. A wealthy publisher named Edwin Ginn put his money behind that idea. He called his creation the International School of Peace and placed Edwin D. Mead at its helm. What turned a small educational initiative into the oldest secular peace foundation in the United States? And how did a nineteenth-century philosopher's essay on democracy become the intellectual compass for a philanthropic institution that would outlive its founder, change its name, move between universities, and still be operating more than a century later?

• 2. Edwin Ginn's Wager

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  Edwin Ginn made his fortune in publishing, and he spent a portion of it on a premise borrowed from Immanuel Kant. Kant's essay, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, argued that democratic governance was the surest road to lasting peace among nations. Ginn felt that massive financial investments in war should be matched by, at least, modest investments in that same idea. He financed the school himself, and when its name changed from International School of Peace to World Peace Foundation, his endowment ensured the institution could survive beyond his own lifetime. Ginn died in 1914, just four years after founding the institution, but his money kept it alive through the upheavals that followed.

• 3. A Mission in Their Own Words

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  Philip S. Khoury, the chair of the WPF's board in 2012, reached back to the foundation's original statement of purpose to describe what it set out to do. The objectives, as he quoted them, were to educate "the people of all nations to a full knowledge of the waste and destructiveness of war and of preparation for war, its evil effects on present social conditions and on the wellbeing of future generations, and to promote international justice and the brotherhood of man, and generally by every practical means to promote peace and goodwill among all mankind." Khoury stated plainly that there was no intention to change that aim. More than a hundred years after Ginn wrote those words, the foundation still cites them as its governing purpose.

• 4. Institutional Homes

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  Robert I. Rotberg served as director of the WPF from 1993 to 2010, a tenure of nearly two decades that anchored the foundation at the Harvard Kennedy School for the first decade of the twenty-first century. That affiliation came to an end in 2011, when Alex de Waal became director and the foundation relocated to The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. The Fletcher School connection gave the WPF a new institutional base and a fresh relationship with one of the country's dedicated graduate programs in international affairs. By 2017, the foundation operated with six employees and a budget of just over 1.75 million dollars, a deliberately lean structure for an institution pursuing global questions.

• 5. The Journal That Shaped a Field

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  In 1947, the WPF launched a quarterly publication called International Organization. That journal went on to become the leading publication in the field of international relations. The WPF also produced a second quarterly, Documents of International Organizations: A Selected Bibliography, which catalogued source material for researchers working in the same field. Between them, the two publications gave the foundation a scholarly footprint that extended well beyond its small staff and modest endowment, shaping how scholars and policymakers understood the architecture of international cooperation.