Dr Benjamin Zala1
1Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Benjamin Zala is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. His work focuses on the politics of the great powers and the management of nuclear weapons and has appeared in over a dozen different peer-reviewed journals. He is author, co-author, or editor of three books: The Global Third Nuclear Age (Routledge, 2025), Power in International Society (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2025) and National Perspectives on a Multipolar Order (Manchester University Press, 2021). Ben has been a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Harvard University and has previously held positions at the ANU, University of Leicester, and Chatham House.
Abstract:
The concept of appeasement is regularly invoked in public discourse. Yet unlike almost any other concept, appeasement is almost always described as something to be avoided in all circumstances. Also, unlike any other concept in IR, it is extremely rare that it is used without reference to a single historical case study: the late 1930s British appeasement of Germany. This policy, epitomised by the Anglo-German Munich Agreement of September 1938, has been the sole historical analogy used for discussing appeasement for decades and this continues today. This is highly unusual – very few, if any, other IR concepts, or even specific foreign policy choices, are treated as having a single historical precedent. The dominance of the single, high-profile, case of the 1930s, has been facilitated by the lack scholarship on the concept in general (rather than in any one particular historical circumstance). This paper argues that the scholarly neglect of the concept not only holds back the field of IR in terms of having little to say about this foreign policy option outside of a single historical case study, but also impacts policy debates in a range of areas today. The paper outlines the kinds of definitional, historical, strategic, and ethical issues that would need to be addressed in order to create a generic, non-historically contingent, concept of appeasement in IR.