‘Private’ diplomacy and nuclear disarmament: Revisiting the Cold War activism of Women for a Meaningful Summit

This article uses some of Karen Knop’s insights throughout her career, including about the World War I-era women’s peace movement, to resurface and reread the anti-nuclear activism of the international women’s peace movement of the mid-to-late 1980s. It focuses specifically on the history and work of Women for a Meaningful Summit (WMS), an ad hoc group of women who came together to exert, through what some participants called ‘private’ diplomacy, a direct impact on the late Cold War summits between President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Reading the WMS archives through a Knopian lens, the article considers the group’s engagement with international law as part of an international civil society that intentionally crossed national boundaries and alliances, its deployment of a repertoire of strategies that combined relatively mainstream diplomatic approaches with grassroots activism, its faith in and sometimes creative use of international law, and its various articulations of the relation between peace and gender. Attending throughout to the erasure of Cold War anti-nuclear activism in contemporary feminist approaches to international law, the article concludes by demonstrating some of the ways in which international legal approaches to the war in Ukraine also rely on this active erasure.