Towards a Different Common Sense

Abstract

The groups, organizations and networks I have described in the preceding chapters, as I warned in the Introduction, can hardly be taken to ‘represent’ peace movements, especially if we use this term in its most inclusive sense. What we have seen here is simply a number of informative cases, lively components of a putative movement of movements, in widely dispersed places at different moments in time. We’ve stepped back into the past to see the peace movement in Britain changing as war itself changed over a century and a half. We’ve visited Japan and South Korea to see aspects of their anti-war, anti-militarist and peace activism today. Two international networks have featured. The first, War Resisters’ International, supporting conscientious objection world wide, appears in historical perspective, alongside a study of its associate, the Alternativa Anti-militarista – Movimiento de Objeccion de Conciencia, challenging the militarist policies of the Spanish state. The second, the International Action Network on Small Arms, is a more recent initiative, and we have seen both its transnational lobbying of the UN and, in Uganda, the grassroots anti-gun activism of typical member groups. We have also glimpsed a local alliance in a single British city, shocked into action in protest against an episode of aggression against Palestinians; and seen an early phase of what promises to be a sustained trans national campaign of protest against NATO.