Antiwar Groups Research Articles

From Representation to Sabotage: The New Practices of Russian Antiwar Groups

AbstractSince February 24, 2022, new oppositional groups—Feminist Antiwar Resistance (FAR), Stop the Wagons, Combat Organization of Anarcho‐Communists (BOAK), the Russian Freedom Legion, and others—have emerged in Russia. Politically, they range from socialist and anarchist to nationalist or fascist, and in their visual media present a range of anonymous protest subjectivities, from the young feminist female artist to the Molotov cocktail‐throwing anarchist to the army defector. Differences notwithstanding, antiwar groups resemble one another in their use of anonymity and sabotage, departing from the culture of the prewar Russian opposition to Putin. The new antiwar groups seek to demonstrate the existence of a broad decentralized movement, but one that continues, rather than disrupts, historical narratives. This article pays special attention to narratives produced by “railway partisans” currently operating in Russia and Belarus, analyzing how they challenge, through tactic as well as rhetoric, their regimes’ uses of World War II history for state‐building myths. I find that antiwar activists claim that sabotage, vandalism, and other forms of material damage represent continuity—rather than break or rupture—with historic forms of grassroots resistance.

Women's Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era by Jessica M. Frazier

Reviewed by: Women's Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era by Jessica M. Frazier Frances P. Martin (bio) Women's Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era. By Jessica M. Frazier. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 236. $80.00 cloth; $29.95 paper; $19.99 ebook) As the title suggests, Jessica Frazier's book Women's Antiwar Diplomacy [End Page 139] during the Vietnam War Era examines the role of women in antiwar diplomacy and activism during the Vietnam War. The main crux of Frazier's argument asserts the relationship between the American and Vietnamese women was not U.S. cultural imperialism, but rather a genuine collaborative relationship where each side actively worked to forward their own goals and agenda. Spanning from 1965 to 1978 Frazier documents the collaborative anti-war efforts of Vietnamese and American women and how the nature of the relationships forged by these groups changed over the course of the war as the nature of the Vietnam War also changed. However, while the war provides the context for her primary argument, the women's anti-war activism frames a broader discussion of the role identity and imperialism played in activism during the 1960s and 1970s. Frazier breaks the war into six sections, allowing her to focus on particular issues during each phase. First, Frazier looks at mothers as experts in 1965 to 1967 by focusing on the burgeoning activism of women's antiwar groups in the United States and Vietnam. Motherhood appears as a continuous theme throughout Frazier's argument. She illustrates how both groups used motherhood and maternal duty as a way to justify fighting against the war or fighting in it. After explaining how alliances formed and connections strengthened through international activism and conferences from 1968 to 1970, Frazier uses chapter three to discuss 1970 and the development of "Third World" feminist networks. The chapter focuses on African American, Chicana, and Asian American women activists and how they drew inspiration from the Vietnamese women in their different fight against sexism, racism, and imperialism. In chapter four she examines the years 1969–1972 and focuses on the struggle among feminist movements worldwide to include war as a feminist issue. Using the International Women's Conference as the backdrop for the discussion of war as a feminist issue Frazier shows that the feminist movement and the antiwar movement were hardly a homogenous group with identical goals and agendas. The last two chapters span from 1970–1978 and focus on the more practical ways that women's [End Page 140] antiwar activism impacted the discussion of the Vietnam War concerning women's rights and the conditions of Prisoners of War, and expose the shifting context of alliances between the activists after the war. Overall, Frazier has a well-developed argument aided by a rich set of case studies. By focusing on the individual's experience, she provides a densely woven analysis that propels her argument forward. Frazier also has extensive bibliography-based sources. Her use of oral histories provided the Vietnamese perspective vital to her central thesis and the incorporation of these interviews strengthened the overall narrative. By giving us a glimpse of the Vietnamese women's view, Frazier solidifies her claim of collaborative and mutually beneficial relations between the American and Vietnamese women. Despite the excellent use of oral histories, Frazier's analysis was from a primarily American or western perspective, which at times sidelined the voices of the Vietnamese women involved in the narrative. However, this does not lessen Frazier's contribution to the historiography. This book challenges previous conventions about the level of women's involvement in the anti-war movement and the type of relationships forged on an international level between Vietnams and American women. Rather than creating yet another imperialistic encounter between the United States and Vietnam, Frazier shows that these women came together to fight the imperialism that American intervention in Vietnam represented. Finally, this book shows the underlying complexities and intersections of identity and activism present in the antiwar movement around the world. [End Page 141] Frances P. Martin FRANCES P. MARTIN is a PhD student at the University of Connecticut. She currently researches...

Positionality in Embodied War Imaginaries: American Snipers

This paper maps the positionality of two soldiers embodied experiences as snipers for the US military. One, Chris Kyle who is labeled as “the most lethal sniper in US military history,” wrote a book uncritically glorifying his experiences, which was later turned into the Oscar nominated film American Sniper. His attempt to help veterans heal from PTSD by taking them shooting was a possible trigger that reignited the traumas of war, which can be traced to his eventual death. The other, Garett Reppenhagen, who was the first active duty member of the antiwar group Iraq Veterans Against the War, and currently works to help others heal from the traumas of war by getting them engaged in wilderness programs and environmental activism. Both stories expose a range of traumas of war, both within wartime and in peacetime, and we see the ways in which their narratives of war have different reflections of what it means to heal during times of peace. This paper juxtaposes these two stories, their war imaginaries, and how one works to reinforce the military dispositif, while the other works to impede it in favor of human rights.

“Cultural Participation as the Essence of Life”

Milena Dragićević Šešić is former President of the University of Arts in Belgrade and the Head of UNESCO Chair in Interculturalism, Art Management and Mediation. She lectures at various European universities in the areas of cultural policy and cultural management, cultural studies and media studies. Milena has been President of the Board of the European Diploma in Cultural Project Management and, in recent years, President of the Cultural Policy Research Award at the European Cultural Foundation.Born in Croatia in 1954, Milena is a prominent researcher in the fields of cultural studies and cultural policies. She has devoted her attention to both academic and research work as well as to social activism in Europe, the Arab States, Central Asia and the Caucasus region, where she has been strongly involved in civil society and anti-war groups, particularly in the former Yugoslavia.Milena also serves as a consultant on strategy building and organization reform to cultural institutions and third-sector organizations and has published a vast diversity of essays and books, among them: “Culture: management, animation, marketing”, “Neofolk culture”, “Art and alternative”, “Horizons of reading”, “Art management in turbulent times” and “Intercultural mediation in the Balkans”.These are only some of the reasons why we decided to invite her to speak with us about cultural participation. Milena provides us with an alternative and complementary approach to the theme of this present issue – an approach that derives from Eastern Europe, Eastern theory and action research. In this interview, she shares with us a challenging way of understanding and practicing cultural participation in political contexts and societies that also matters to a Europe in construction – or, shall we say, to a never finished European project?Her contribution helps us reflect on the urgency of building more democratic, open minded and inclusive societies. Her experience instructs us on other possibilities of giving life to cultural participation, or to actively participate in cultural life. Possibilities that come from another Europe.

‘The unbreakable solidarity of women throughout the world with heroic Vietnam’: Freda Brown, women’s organisations and the anti-Vietnam War movement

One of the many Australians who campaigned against participation in the Vietnam War was Freda Brown (1919–2009). Among the anti-war groups she worked within, three employed a maternalist approach to many of their campaigns. Mobilising against the prevailing concept of a woman’s role to keep the home fires burning and support the troops, Brown travelled to North Vietnam at the height of the conflict. One remarkable outcome of her activism was the funding of the Hanoi Obstetrics and Gynaecology Hospital. This article explores Brown’s work in these organisations, and examines her work in transnational maternalism.

Fateful Misunderstandings about the Republic of Vietnam

For the five Vietnamese students who traveled the United States on a State Department tour in the fall of 1965, it must have been nerve-wracking, if not downright terrifying, to stand before a group of students at the University of California-Berkeley and plead the Republic of Vietnam’s case. At some stops on the trip, American antiwar student groups accused the Vietnamese delegates of being “stooges” of South Vietnam’s government. Other antiwar groups refused to meet with the delegation. A State Department evaluation of the tour concluded that while the students were more effective than Vietnamese or American government officials in conveying the political situation in South Vietnam to American students, the most receptive audiences consisted of those who already supported the U.S. alliance with South Vietnam. It was not as though most Americans were uninterested in the students’ perspectives; the State Department received more booking requests than the delegation could fill.1 Yet by speaking primarily to like-minded listeners, the Vietnamese students remained out of earshot of the skeptics and those who believed that Vietnamese who supported the Saigon government or opposed Hanoi and the National Liberation Front were puppets of the authorities or the Americans.

‘They need our help’: Non-governmental organizations and the subjectifying dynamics of the military as social cause

The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan spurred a range of popular activity – from anti-war protests to war boosterism to veterans’ advocacy – purporting to ‘support the troops’. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), from veterans’ welfare organizations to anti-war groups, are crucial to this transformation of ‘the troops’ into a social cause and matter of collective concern. As such, this article proposes an initial qualification of NGO representative practices as a form of media genre, characterized by striking similarity in presentation, structure and, particularly, explicitly normative tone. A poststructural discursive approach is utilized to examine the implications of this genre for the production of subjectivities and power relations inherent to ‘supporting the troops’ via a structured analysis of the public-produced texts of a selection of typologically identified NGOs in the US and the UK. The article goes on to highlight the ways in which NGO representations counterintuitively objectify those they seek to support, while simultaneously limiting the political possibilities of supporters. Overall, it is argued that within the context of the liberal state, the representations of support produced across the advocacy spectrum work to not only depoliticize conflict but to ‘apoliticize’ support for the troops as a matter of morality.

Alternative calendars and memory work in Serbia: Anti-war activism after Milošević

This article analyzes the continuation of anti-war groups and activists in Serbia who were in opposition to wars in the 1990s and, in the decade after October 2000, are still in struggle. Activism often analyzed as part of the “Dealing with the Past Projects” is here analyzed in the context of social memory studies contributing to the understanding of current memory work and memory activism in Serbia. Drawing on Eviatar Zerubavel’s analysis of calendars as sites of social organization of national memory, this text looks at the emergence of alternative calendars as formed and created by anti-war and human rights activists. By analyzing the emerging alternative civic calendar in Serbia, I discuss memory activism as related to the commemoration of the Siege of Sarajevo and the Omarska concentration camp. I then extend my analysis on what I see as the most apparent and significant day on the emerging civic alternative calendar: 10 July annual commemoration of the victims of Srebrenica taking place for the last two decades at the heart of Belgrade’s city center, Republic Square.

Between fragmenting and multiplying: Scale-shift processes in Serbian and Croatian antiwar activisms

This paper follows the almost contemporaneous emergence of the two primary antiwar initiatives in Belgrade and Zagreb to explore how they acted as hotbeds from which permanent human rights organizations appeared in the newly created nation-states. Drawing mostly upon in-depth interviews with antiwar activists from Serbia and Croatia, I argue that the dominant patterns of protest expansion were different in the two countries. While cooperation and tensions existed within both antiwar groups, the Antiwar Campaign of Croatia acted as a broker, leading toward the multiplication of civic initiatives; on the other hand, the Belgrade Center for Antiwar Action was characterized by ideological, professional, and personal divisions, which caused a rapid fragmentation of antiwar undertakings. This paper outlines the main reasons for such expansion patterns (scale-shift processes) and discusses them in the light of recent theoretical advances in political contention studies.

Protecting Rights as a Counterterrorism Tool: The Case of American Muslims

Developing effective strategies to counter violent extremism (CVE) has proven to be elusive. Despite the plethora of conferences, reports, and expenditures, governments continue to struggle to find the right formula to decrease politically motivated violence. Because the underlying causes of violent extremism are complex and country specific: no one size fits all solution. Each nation must consider its unique economic, political, and social circumstances when seeking to protect its citizens from violence perpetrated by extremists. But government officials should be careful that their CVE strategies do not exacerbate the underlying marginalization, discrimination, and disenfranchisement that create fertile grounds for terrorist recruitment.This paper argues that America’s domestic CVE practices create a paradox: law abiding citizens and residents who openly and legally express their oppositional views or orthodox religious practices are targeted by the state in the form of surveillance, infiltration, investigation, entrapment, and prosecution. Thus, targeted communities reasonably suspect that the campaign against homegrown terrorism is not so much about public safety as it is about irrational bigotry. Members of these communities become less willing to cooperate with law enforcement because they view CVE as merely political scapegoating at the expense of their liberty and livelihoods. When contextualized within America’s aggressive police tactics in the 1960s and 1970s against civil rights, Black Nationalist, and anti-war groups and coupled with the disproportionate focus on African Americans in the ongoing War on Drugs, such suspicions are not far-fetched. Accordingly, this paper makes three recommendations that address the paradox of punishing the innocent for openly expressing grievances shared by the guilty, or worse merely sharing the same immutable characteristics. First, an effective program to counter violent extremism must prioritize protecting the ability of individuals to exercise civil and human rights without fear of state retribution. Second, the American governments must balance the tight rope between engaging Muslim communities to protect them from hate crimes or bolster public safety and heightened attention to Muslims that signals to the public that Muslims warrant extra scrutiny from the state. Selective engagement risks a backlash where the majority resents what it perceives as favoritism towards Muslims or interprets engagement efforts as legitimizing suspicion of Muslims. Either response often leads to private acts of discrimination or violence in employment, schools, mosques, and public places. Third, CVE programs that empower communities as stakeholders in preserving public safety and protection of rights must be careful not to perpetuate existing disparities within Muslim communities along gender, age, class, and race. Insensitivity to internal tensions risks placing the government as an enabler of intra-community gender bias, intra-community ethnic conflicts, and class divisions.In the end, the legitimacy of CVE policies hangs in the balance. The extent to which governments are able to uphold individual rights while preserving public safety directly contributes to defeating the use of violence as a means of seeking justice.

Cognitive–Affective Styles Associated With Position on War

This study examined cognitive–affective styles associated with position on the Iraq war by analyzing responses posted on an online discussion forum using a computerized text-analysis program (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). Overall, the results were consistent with those obtained in narrative-coding studies. The pro-war group was associated with an external focus and a simplistic style of information processing. The anti-war group was associated with an internal focus and high levels of cognitive processing and negative emotion words. The “neither” group scored the highest on cognitive complexity and positive emotion words, and it was also the most balanced in terms of internal and external focus.

War and the Austrian School: Modern Austrian economists take on aggressive wars

The Austrian school of economics increasingly has become identified with antiwar groups. This is not due to religious or political views. Rather, the antiwar viewpoints of the Austrians come from the fundamental tenets of economics as expressed by the school's founders and refined for 140 years. This article applies post-world war II Austrian thought to the subject of war.

'It was like fighting a war with our own people': anti-war activism in Serbia during the 1990s

This article discusses anti-war and anti-nationalism activism that took place in Serbia and, particularly, in Belgrade during the 1990s. It analyzes anti-war activism as aiming to combat collectivestates of denial.Based on fieldwork research conducted in 2004-05, and particularly on an analysis of interviews conducted with anti-war activists in Belgrade, this text closely analyzes the nuanced voices and approaches to activism against war among Serbia's civil society in the 1990s. The article highlights the difference between anti-war and anti-regime activism, as well as the generation gap when considering the wars of the 1990s and their legacy. Finally, this text emphasizes the role of Women in Black as the leading anti-war group in Serbia, and examines their feminist street activism which introduced new practices of protest and political engagement in Belgrade's public sphere.

Grieving Dead Soldiers, Disavowing Loss: Cindy Sheehan and The Im/possibility of the American Antiwar Movement

The article investigates the conditions of emergence of Cindy Sheehan (mother of soldier killed in Iraq) as a spokesperson of the American antiwar movement and its so-called ‘spark.’ It interrogates the emotional pull of the current ‘support the troops’ rhetoric and the usurpation of this and other patriotic signs and symbols by various antiwar groups as both a constraint on the realm of legitimate dissent and an enabling condition of intelligible subject formation – with particular attention given to the figure of the grieving mom. This article argues that the sympathetic, albeit tenuous, identification with this figure emerged through a simultaneous psychic identification with and disavowal of loss – with implications for the possibility and impossibility of dissent in the aftermath of 9/11.

Whose Views Made the News? Media Coverage and the March to War in Iraq

Criticism of the news media's performance in the months before the 2003 Iraq War has been profuse. Scholars, commentators, and journalists themselves have argued that the media aided the Bush administration in its march to war by failing to air a wide-ranging debate that offered analysis and commentary from diverse perspectives. As a result, critics say, the public was denied the opportunity to weigh the claims of those arguing both for and against military action in Iraq. We report the results of a systematic analysis of every ABC, CBS, and NBC Iraq-related evening news story—1,434 in all—in the 8 months before the invasion (August 1, 2002, through March 19, 2003). We find that news coverage conformed in some ways to the conventional wisdom: Bush administration officials were the most frequently quoted sources, the voices of anti-war groups and opposition Democrats were barely audible, and the overall thrust of coverage favored a pro-war perspective. But while domestic dissent on the war was minimal, opposition from abroad—in particular, from Iraq and officials from countries such as France, who argued for a diplomatic solution to the standoff—was commonly reported on the networks. Our findings suggest that media researchers should further examine the inclusion of non-U.S. views on high-profile foreign policy debates, and they also raise important questions about how the news filters the communications of political actors and refracts—rather than merely reflects—the contours of debate.

The Radical Next Door: The Los Angeles Catholic Worker during the Cold War

While some anti-war activist groups faded during the latter part of the cold war, the Los Angeles Catholic Worker organization continued its commitment to world peace through nonviolent resistance. This article explores the organization's founding, programs, and the variety of motives that led individuals to participate in lacw's causes. By linking the struggle against war with the struggle against poverty, and by relying on self-sacrifice as a primary strategy, this peace group remained viable while providing essential services to the poor, expanding its ideological focus and effectiveness, and shaping America's consciousness and conscience.

Pacifist Brawn and Silk‐Stocking Militarism: Labor, Gender, and Antiwar Politics, 1914–1918

Historians have recently devoted significant attention to exploring the ways in which gendered imagery and assumptions were used to mobilize popular support for U.S. foreign and military policies during World War I. Preparedness and government propagandists routinely conflated manliness with military service and attempted to discredit male opponents of war by casting aspersions on their masculinity. The female Red Cross worker was upheld as the ideal model citizen for American women. But a diverse array of antiwar groups hotly contested the notions of gendered citizenship duties promoted by pro‐war activists. This article explores the responses of the Socialist Party, Industrial Workers of the World, and American Federation of Labor to the gendered propaganda of preparedness advocates and the Wilson administration between 1914 and 1918.

Thinking About Human Rights During the Iraq War: Toward a Cartography of the Cognition of Western “Thought Communities”

Any symposium in academic quarters these days on the war in Iraq is likely to contain primarily accounts that share a common narrative of negativity about the justifications for the war, the conduct of the war, the effect of the war on civil liberties in the United States, and bleak prognostications about how the war has made the world more unstable and dangerous. The most common thread of this narrative is that the war was ill conceived, illegitimate, and unjust and has led Iraq into a more precarious situation than it was in even under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein. From a Durkheimian point of view, antiwar narratives have become rituals of sorts, which identify and strengthen the solidarity of groups, primarily on the left of the political spectrum; it is in this sense that negative narratives of the war have served as very strong forms of symbolic capital for the personal and political agendas of Western spectators of the conflict in Iraq. The mass demonstrations that have occurred worldwide, the campus teach-ins, the academic symposia, and the antiwar blogosphere all constitute a constellation of cultural discourse with immense power to unify antiwar groups and foster political action. In this environment, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to sustain any type of argument that supports the war in any way shape or form, which focuses on positive outcomes of the war, or which considers the fate of the Iraqi people under their former master, Saddam Hussein, who aspired to counter US hegemony, destroy Israel, and control the Middle East, or their would be masters, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which aspires to defeat the United States and set up a Taliban-style fascist theocracy in Iraq. What Paul Berman (2003) has seen as the traditional value system of the liberal internationalist—antifascism, pro-democracy, solidarity with the oppressed, and the expansion of human rights—has become, ironically, a value system that is not at all at home within the cultural constructions of those from the left who have opposed the war. Among most people on the left, an argument for the war, especially one made in terms of human rights, is likely to produce, in its most benign forms, curiosity and puzzlement, and in its most hostile forms, anger, hostility, shunning, and banishment from the ideological collective. In the present-day left narratives

Code Pink, Raging Grannies, and the Missile Dick Chicks: Feminist Performance Activism in the Contemporary Anti-War Movement

This article examines feminist performance activism in the context of the contemporary anti-war movement. Using data gathered through ethnographic participant observation, formal and informal interviews, and content analysis from October 2002 through January 2005, this article describes and analyzes the use of performance activism by three women's anti-war groups as an activist repertoire used to challenge cultural assumptions about gender. This paper argues that these groups used a combination of norm-embracing and norm-challenging performance elements to integrate gender into the anti-war agenda and promote a feminist ideology among fellow protesters and suggests that different combinations were more or less effective.

Secrets Revealed, Revelations Concealed: A Secret City Confronts its Environmental Legacy of Weapons Production

Oak Ridge, Tennessee was born as a planned and secret community established during World War II to contribute to the development of the first atomic bomb. Sacrificing their own civil liberties toward the goals of democracy and freedom, residents lived behind guarded fences and learned not to discuss their work with family, neighbors or co-workers. Their clandestine work became public following the bombing of Hiroshima, but the environmental legacies of weapons production increased and remained secret throughout the Cold War. In this paper, I discuss the cultural and environmental legacy of Oak Ridge and then draw on ethnographic interviews with residents, former workers, and participation in public hearings to show how the culture of secrecy has shaped the community of today, while efforts to confront the environmental legacy of the city continues to both unite and divide the community. I conclude that the history of secrecy has limited organized efforts to confront the ongoing environmental problems facing the community, while individuals act independently to investigate past and potential exposures. Paradoxically, however, the history of secrecy contributed to the development of a proud community with a commitment to environmental stewardship, democratic principles, and concern for peace and stability that many outsiders have failed to recognize in condemning the community as a showcase of military toxic waste.