Security as Experiment: Fighting Terror and Transforming Imperialism after Napoleon | Hoover Institution

February 6, 2023
Hoover Institution | Stanford University

A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Beatrice de Graaf.

Beatrice de Graaf illuminates how, long before economic considerations set in motion the creation of the European Union, collective European security provided the first impulse for the integration of European norms and institutions. 

After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, Europe’s victorious powers sought to forestall the reemergence of war and revolutionary terror by establishing the Allied Council. The Council transformed interstate relations into the first, modern system of collective security in Europe. Drawing on the records of the Council and the correspondence of key figures such as Metternich, Castlereagh, Wellington, and Alexander I, Beatrice de Graaf tells the story of Europe's transition from concluding a war to consolidating a new order. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Beatrice de Graaf is a historian and a security researcher. She studies the emergence of and threats to European security arrangements from the 19th century until the present. Her book Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815, won the 2022 Arenberg Prize for European History. She is currently working on a translation of her latest book, Radical Redemption: What Terrorists Believe In, which combines testimony, history, psychology, politics and theology to understand how the search for radical personal redemption can lead to violence. Beatrice is a member of The Netherlands Academy of Sciences and of the Academia Europaea. She is the editor of Terrorism and Political Violence, as well as of the Journal of Modern European History. She is also a fellow at the Program on Extremism and the ISIS Files Project at George Washington University.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM
The Hoover History Working Group aims to conduct and disseminate historical research on issues of national and international concern, and provide concrete recommendations on the basis of research and discussion. The mission of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives is to collect, preserve, and make available the most important materials about global political, social, and economic change in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We serve as a platform for a vibrant community of scholars and a broad public interested in the meaning and role of history.