Accepting the Women Waging Peace Award: A Case for Reviving Peace as Policy

Katrina vanden Heuvel received the Women Waging Peace Award and used the occasion to restate a practical argument: peace should be treated as the only responsible policy position given the current risks the world faces. She positions journalism not as neutral observation but as an active contribution to struggles against unjust occupations, illegal wars, genocide, and systemic inequality. How The Nation's history informs today's stance

• Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928): The Nation participated in post–World War I debates about making war illegal. The magazine opposed the Pact not because it went too far but because it didn't go far enough, arguing that outlawing war without enforcement lacked meaningful effect.
• Hiroshima (1945): After the first atomic bombing, editor Freda Kirchwey argued for radical structural responses — including world government — to manage technologies that could annihilate humanity. Kirchwey's line "If we are to survive our new powers we must understand their full meaning" appears as a direct warning about the altered scale of modern destruction.

• Anti-nuclear organizing (1980s): An intern's 500-word editorial in 1980 called for a bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons production by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Two years later, in June 1982, about a million people gathered in Central Park to demand an end to the nuclear arms race.

Why the argument is framed as practical Vanden Heuvel emphasizes that advocating for peace is not naïve. She highlights that new weapons technologies changed the calculus of war: even limited conflicts can escalate beyond the control of their initiators and threaten civilization. The Nation's historical record, she suggests, shows consistent attempts to adapt public policy and international law to those new realities.

The brief connects past lessons to present urgency without laying out a specific new policy blueprint. The practical takeaway is a reframing: peace and disarmament should be treated as realistic, respectable policy positions backed by historical evidence of escalating risk. That reframing calls for renewed public debate and organizing around international cooperation and constraints on instruments of mass destruction. Concrete threads for further reporting