Peace Activists Research Articles

“Make All the Laws You Want”: The Catholic Left against Legal Liberalism, circa 1968

AbstractHow has American Catholicism interacted with American legal culture? Legal scholars have often examined this question in the context of contraception and abortion debates. This article focuses instead on the so-called Catholic left that emerged in protest against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, and thereby seeks to bring the rich history of Catholic radicalism and peace activism into closer conversation with legal history. Drawing on both primary sources and a rich body of secondary literature in religious and social history that legal scholarship has not fully incorporated, the author examines ideas about law within the writings of Catholic left figures, including writer-monk Thomas Merton, sociologist-priest Paul Hanly Furfey, and activist-priest Berrigan brothers. Building on work by religious historians who have interpreted the Catholic radical tradition as a distinctive response to the limitations of political liberalism, this author emphasizes that the Catholic left also expressed a profound alienation from legal liberalism, with its veneration of lawyers and its faith in courts as sites of social progress. Revisiting the Catholic left through the lens of legal history raises questions for future research about the possible connections between leftist antiliberalism and the more familiar Catholic tradition of conservative illiberalism.

On Peace Activists and Skilled Survivors

Abstract This article examines multiple entanglements of Afghan exiles’ biographies in West Germany with Cold War- and contemporary history. The life stories of six men who have been residing in Germany since the 1970s but were physically and cognitively highly mobile in their engagement for change in Afghanistan highlight the role of human agency in transnational history-making. The analysis shows that during the time of intense engagement connecting West Germany and Afghanistan, their lives became truly transnational, and the vernacular cosmopolitanism they practised has shaped transnational history from below. While all six life stories mirror transgressive biographies in connection with wartime events and differ from the global cosmopolitanism of elites, these life courses are neither standardised nor linear. The findings point to three types of transgressive biographies—skilled survivors, quietists and masters of crossover—that have preserved the transnational dimension that had been so significant earlier in the exiles’ lives to varying degrees and differed regarding related perceptions of failure, loss and regret.

Stretching the elastic: UK peace activists’ understandings of social change

While much research has been conducted on the antecedents and outcomes of activism, relatively lesser attention has been paid within social and political psychological research to the understandings of people themselves about their involvement in activism or the ways in which they conceptualise social change. Informed by social representations theory, we conducted interviews with UK peace activists, to examine how they made sense of social change dynamics in the context of their activism, and how the beliefs, opinions, and perceptions of other people (meta-representations) were implicated in these understandings. Three themes were developed using reflexive thematic analysis: (1) imagining and enacting an alternative; (2) impression management; and (3) refining the argument. Participants consistently oriented towards meta-representations of militarism in their activism, which was were consequential both for the ways in which activists communicated with and presented themselves to the public. This reflexive orientation was described as a barrier to social change but also a potential source of strength. Findings are discussed in relation to previous theoretical and empirical work.

From Peace Talks to Pandemics: The Continuum of Feminist Peace Activism

Abstract Feminist scholarship has convincingly shown that violence is more accurately conceptualized as a continuum rather than a war/peace binary. While recent scholarship has elucidated women's peace activism during armed conflict, peace negotiations, and post-peace agreement transitions, we know little about the work of self-identified women peace activists beyond those highly visible moments. We examine the activities of a Burundian women's peace organization in exile, Mouvement Inamahoro, during COVID-19. Our data are derived from thirty-six semi-structured interviews with individual members of the organization and reviewing hundreds of primary-source documents. We find that from Inamahoro’s standpoint, the intersection of COVID-19 and exile constituted security threats, relevant to its mandate to build peace. Accordingly, it responded with humanitarian assistance, advocacy, and awareness-raising among its own members as well as with Burundians both inside and outside the country. Inamahoro also continued its regular activities to promote longer-term peace and security in Burundi through media programming, training women and girls for political leadership, and liaising with Burundian civil society and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Based on the continuum of violence concept and building inductively from the Inamahoro case, we propose a multidimensional continuum of activism that occurs before, during, and following conflict (dimension 1, time); is conducted in multiple arenas (dimension 2, space); deals with issues of insecurity at multiple levels (dimension 3, scale); and is concerned with threats that are structural, direct, and cultural/symbolic (dimension 4, type). In so doing, we offer a preliminary framework with which to examine the everyday activities of women peace activists, which constitute often overlooked interventions in global politics.

Review of We Are the Voice of the Grass: Interfaith Peace Activism in Northern Uganda

Review of We Are the Voice of the Grass: Interfaith Peace Activism in Northern Uganda

Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire by Emily Baughan

<i>Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire</i> by Emily Baughan

Eqbal Ahmad’s Internationalist Vision

On January 12, 1971, two FBI agents burst through the doors of the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago to arrest Eqbal Ahmad. A preeminent South Asian activist and analyst of international politics, Ahmad had been charged with participating in a conspiracy to kidnap National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and bomb steam tunnels underneath government buildings in Washington, D.C. A vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, Ahmad had found company among the antiwar Catholic Left and grown close to the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel, both priests who had attracted the attention of federal authorities for their peace activism. By 1971, the Berrigans were serving prison sentences for breaking into a draft board office and burning hundreds of draft records. In a letter Philip received while incarcerated, a fellow Catholic activist recounted a recent conversation with Ahmad and others about a potential plan to make a citizen’s arrest of Kissinger. With the letter as evidence, the Justice Department filed charges against a group of antiwar activists that had long been on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s radar.

The Forgiveness Project: a conversation about peace activism and the transformative power of story

The Forgiveness Project: a conversation about peace activism and the transformative power of story

Alfred Hermann Fried: Peace Activist and Nobel Prize LaureatePetraSchönemann‐Behrens. Translated by EdwardLarkin and ThomasAhrens. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2022.

Peace & ChangeEarly View BOOK REVIEW Alfred Hermann Fried: Peace Activist and Nobel Prize Laureate Petra Schönemann-Behrens. Translated by Edward Larkin and Thomas Ahrens. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2022. Deborah Buffton, Corresponding Author Deborah Buffton [email protected] University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, EmeritusSearch for more papers by this author Deborah Buffton, Corresponding Author Deborah Buffton [email protected] University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, EmeritusSearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/pech.12597Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Daoist feminist leadership for international peace: the case of Jeannette Rankin

ABSTRACT Introducing the concept of Daoist–feminist hybridity to international relations (IR) scholars, this article makes a novel contribution to current debates over global feminism concerning the relevance and attractiveness of feminism in non-Western societies, the need to build transnational feminist solidarities, and the urgent need to decolonize feminism. Drawing upon the Daoist philosophy of Laozi’s Daodejing, which expresses an early and Indigenous form of non-Western feminism, the article constructs a model of Daoist feminist pacifist leadership as illustrated through the case of Jeannette Rankin (1880–1973), an influential women’s suffrage advocate and global peace activist who was the first elected congresswoman in the United States (US) and the only congressional representative to vote against US involvement in both World Wars I and II. As the article demonstrates, Rankin’s unwavering commitment to pacifism not only reflects core values of Daoist philosophy intermeshed with her twentieth-century feminism, but also illustrates the value of empathic engagement between Daoist thought and modern feminism, as making such connections can help to build alliances and partnerships among international feminist peace leaders today in the US, China, and elsewhere.

Queer Hostages for Hanoi

Abstract This memoir of peace activism in the United States in the early 1970s, as the Vietnam war was drawing to a close, focuses on the difficulties of sustaining an effective anti-war campaign. It describes several key protests: sit-ins outside the Senate chamber in Washington, after one of which the writer was briefly jailed; the attempt to secure the Nobel Peace Prize for all those Americans who refused to fight in Vietnam; and in particular a keenly debated and eventually unsuccessful initiative, led by sexual dissidents, to enlist prominent Americans to travel to Hanoi to deter American bombing of the North Vietnamese capital. Based on his own experiences and recollections, Martin Duberman discusses the overlap between the peace movement, the emerging gay and feminist movements, and the sporadic attempts to ally with the Black liberation movement. He speculates, as well, about the overall effectiveness of the anti-war movement in helping to bring the disastrous conflict in Vietnam – which claimed more than two-million lives – to a close.

A Pilgrim People: No Peace Theology without Peace Ecclesiology

Deep questions of identity are always at play in war and peacemaking, sometimes hidden yet always decisive. Thus, for Christians, peace activism needs peace theology and, indeed, peace theology needs peace ecclesiology. Efforts to transcend classic debates between just war theory and Christian pacifism by developing a just peace ethic will falter if they fail to address more basic questions of how Christians are to sustain a primary loyalty to Jesus Christ in relationship to other identities of family, tribe, nation, and global citizen. Attention to the biblical trajectory of Abrahamic community, the patristic embrace of life in exile, and Vatican II calls for the Church to be the “sacrament of human unity” by recognizing itself as a “pilgrim people” suggests that the Catholic Church can truly be a “peace church” only if it embraces life in diaspora.

Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891–1956 by Piotr H. Kosicki

Reviewed by: Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891–1956 by Piotr H. Kosicki Mikołaj Kunicki Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891–1956. By Piotr H. Kosicki. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2018. Pp. xxviii, 424. $40.00. ISBN: 9780300225518). Writing a transnational historical monograph about Polish and French intellectuals, lay activists, and ecclesiastical figures alike, who formed the twentieth-century “Catholic avant-garde,” the personalist current, is not an easy task. First, the collective biography of these figures is likely to appeal to highly specialised audiences; [End Page 213] secondly, the current climate around the Roman Catholic Church, with its internal conflicts, sexual-abuse cases, and the Vatican’s inconsistent approach toward international and social affairs may diminish some readers’ appetite for the story of Catholic revolutionaries who sought a just society, engaged in dialogue with Marxism and its Stalinist branch, and paved the way for the groundbreaking Vatican Council II. Fortunately, Piotr Kosicki’s book is a tour de force, expertly researched, elegantly written, and likely to be compared with and favorably contrasted against such titles as Zeev Sternhell’s Neither Right nor Left (1983/1987) and Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect (1992). Kosicki begins his story in the 1890s with Catholics’ reactions to Marxism, capitalism, and nationalism and concludes it in the mid-1950s, when Polish and French personalists and Catholic socialists faced the end of Stalinism, liberating themselves from the ideological corsets (if not straitjackets) of anti-Germanism, Soviet-sponsored and one-sided, anti-Americanist peace activism. The liberating effect of the thaw coincided with the death of Pius XII and the subsequent convocation of the Second Vatican Council. The book’s French characters illustrate the vicissitudes of Catholic thinkers and activists, including Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, or worker-priest Jean Boulier, and impact they made in France and beyond. Their Polish counterparts constitute an equally diverse company of groups and individuals who adopted the personalist core, tried to implement and modify it in prewar, wartime, and postwar communist-dominated Poland, often paying for their actions with their lives, imprisonment, or moral compromises. The book focuses mostly on the Polish part of the story, giving the fascinating portrayals of fascists and nationalists turned into pro-communist “progressive” Catholics (Bolesław Piasecki and his entourage of Dziś i Jutro millieu). We also meet their young adept, Catholic radical Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first Polish democratic prime minister after the collapse of communism, and a young cleric and priest named Karol Wojtyła, better known as John Paul II. Lastly, Kosicki pays close attention to the Cracow-based disciples of Mounier from the Tygodnik Powszechny weekly that were turned down by their spiritual master, vowed to abstain from the communist-dominated political life preserving their integrity and defending independent culture, and later joined forces with Mazowiecki and gay catehumen Jerzy Zawieyski to form the Znak circle of more independent Catholic activists in the post-Stalinist era. For Kosicki, the link between the Polish personalist groups and the Solidarity movement, which served as an icebreaker of communism in the 1980s is obvious. However, the autor is at his best while discussing less-known and researched phenomena such as the peculiar nature of French intellectuals’ involvement in the Soviet-sponsored Peace Movement; the role of anti-Germanism shared by both the French and the Poles in cementing their collaboration with Moscow; and the opposition of Esprit editors to European integration in the 1950s. Kosicki’s work does not contain any flaws or errors. If anything, I view it a bit apologetic toward John Paul II, one of the protagonists of this book, much revered in the past, and currently under posthumous re-examination. Another issue concerns the real [End Page 214] impact of intellectual Catholicism on Polish religiosity, which under the tutelage of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, also a frequently evoked figure, moved away from open Catholicism. Lastly, I would advise the author to pay more attention to the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign and the effect it had on the collapse of the Znak group. Still, Piotr Kosicki authored an excellent work, which will top the readingg lists of students of Polish and European history...

When the Guns Fall Silent: Richard Cobden’s Principles of Liberal Internationalism and Russian Reconciliation

Renowned for his espousal of early liberal internationalist principles, free trade, and the pursuit of peaceful reconciliation, the British industrialist Richard Cobden (1804-1865) first put forward ideas related to freer trade between Britain and France, as well as nonmilitary interventionism in European wars that were promulgated by Russia, leading to the onset of the Crimean War in 1853, and eventually, after Cobden’s death to the onset of World War I in Europe. Cobden’s principles significantly contributed to peaceful interactions among state actors in the late 19th century, despite the Crimean war. His radical notions can be usefully contextualized, and may relate to future peaceful reconciliation, in this century, between Russia and the West, possibly after “the guns go silent” in Ukraine. Similarly to the 1840s, idealistic principles, as opposed to militaristic and jingoistic attitudes among the Europeans and British in the 1840s, may be inculcated, based in part on Cobden’s idealism, including encouraging more peaceful connections among adversaries through freer trade. The political prescriptions of Cobden, before and after the Crimean War in 1853, can guide reflective perspectives among peace researchers, historians, and peace activists today, assisting processes that could move hitherto warring states toward more peaceful interactions and eventual reconciliation.

Peacebuilding in Politically Challenging Environments: How Do Local Peacebuilders Navigate Muddy Waters in the South Caucasus?

Abstract With the global proliferation of the liberal peace agenda, there has been an increase in attention to the participation of non-governmental organizations (NGO s) in the development and support of national peace agendas. However, with the rise of authoritarian states around the world, and the closing of civic spaces, NGO s have become constrained and limited in their actions. We often see autocratic and repressive regimes not welcoming the implementation of any initiatives that fall outside the scope of their official negotiation platforms, and therefore, limiting the participation of their citizens in unofficial peacebuilding initiatives. Through the application of the authoritarian conflict management framework, this article discusses the challenges of carrying out peacebuilding work in such non-permissive environments in the context of the South Caucasus and points out ways that local peacebuilding organizations and peace activists work around these restrictions to negotiate the reconciliation space that they are attempting to create.

“Here is ‘true Christianity’”: Peace movements contesting hegemonic nationalism of the Lutheran Church in Finland 1919–1932

AbstractThis article analyses how Finnish hegemonic nationalism was contested by peace movements in Finland from 1919 to 1932. First and foremost, Finnish peace movements contested hegemonic Lutheran‐patriotic discourses, which they perceived to have been maintained especially by the Lutheran Church of Finland. Thus, hegemonic Lutheran‐patriotic discourses were contested by peace movements through three church‐related discursive contexts: (1) biblical‐doctrinal interpretations, (2) Christian revivalism and (3) churches' peace ecumenism. Results of this article imply that contesting happened especially through religious discourses, which considered a nationalist state church idolatrous. Peace activists depicted themselves as true Christians and patriots, arguing that peace ecumenical cooperation with them and other churches enabled state churches to renounce hegemonic nationalism. Based on these results, I suggest that when hegemonic nationalism is intertwined strongly with Christianity and the state church, nationalism is challenged through questioning its alleged Christian basis.

International Women’s Movements, Peace Activism, and the World of Politics: The Rosika Schwimmer Archive in New York

Abstract Rosika Schwimmer (1877, Budapest–1948, New York) was one of the best-known women’s rights leaders and peace activists in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and worldwide. Unfortunately, she has been mostly forgotten or treated superficially in Hungarian and international scholarship until recently. In this article, I give a short description of the Rosika Schwimmer Papers in the New York Public Library, where I have been researching since 2017, and of the history of this archive, with a short biographical sketch of the life and career of Schwimmer.

“Actual Political Affiliations Are of Secondary Importance”: Communism and Women's Entangled Loyalties in the Australian Anti‐Nuclear Movement, 1945–65

The 1950s in Australia began with the newly elected Menzies Government's campaign to ban the Communist Party of Australia, feeding into and sustaining growing anti‐communist rhetoric in the post‐war nation. Fears of communist infiltration coloured the actions of the Australian peace movement, with public commentators and political figures condemning the movement as a communist fifth column intent on destroying Australian society. Peace activists had to manage such perceptions of their work while navigating their own beliefs on politics and ideology. Using the women of the anti‐nuclear movement of the 1950s and 1960s as a case study, this paper demonstrates that while the movement would often be publicly characterised — both in contemporary sources and more recent literature — as divided along ideological lines, individual alliances were far more complex and entangled. Though Cold War divisions appeared to be upheld in public nuclear disarmament sentiment, private sentiments were far more nuanced. These women had to decide what was more important to them: the cause or the image. Ultimately, for many, communism was a pressing issue, but nuclear disarmament was more pressing still.

The Navigation System, The Planetary Gardener, and the Prism:

Thirty-three years ago, futurist Sohail Inayatullah and MIT Senior Lecturer Otto Scharmer participated in a seminar focused on macrohistory at the University of Hawaii at Manoa held by peace activist and futurist Johan Galtung. In the years that followed, each developed a body of work that provides an integrated theory and method that supports individuals, groups and organizations to sense, vision and co-create the future. Dr. Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) draws on and integrates empiricist, interpretive, critical, and action learning modes of knowing at inner and outer levels to cultivate transformative spaces for the creation of alternative futures. Dr. Scharmer’s Theory U provides a framework and process for building essential leadership capacities needed to address the root causes of today’s social, environmental, and spiritual challenges by shifting individual and collective consciousness from ego-system to eco-system awareness. Recently the two came together in dialogue, joined by the Presencing Institute’s Emma D. Paine, Editorial Coordinator and recent graduate from the London School of Economics, to explore the role of futuring in societal transformation. In the context of our current polycrisis, and drawing from a wealth of personal and professional experience, the three engage in a multi-generational conversation about bringing the future into being.

W.E.B. Du Bois Against U.S. Capitalist Racism: Durable Peace and the Fulfillment of People(s)-Centered Human Rights

This article argues that W.E.B. Du Bois’s struggle for a durable peace was inextricably linked to his rejection of the United States’ racialized economic order that emplaced Blacks at the bottom of society within its borders and, given its imperial ambitions, threatened perpetual war abroad, with particularly dire consequences for colonized peoples. The first section re-interprets Du Bois’s writings and speeches about “caste” as, more accurately, explicating a system of “U.S. capitalist racism” in the United States that was inexorably tied to imperialism and war. Such clarity opens up an understanding of Du Bois’s conception of peace not as the absence of conflict, but rather as a necessary condition for the eradication of political, economic, and social inequality and injustice on a world scale. The next section argues that Du Bois’s analysis and critique of U.S. capitalist racism undergirded his advocacy of “People(s)-Centered Human Rights” (PCHR). Coined by Black Alliance for Peace National Organizer Ajamu Baraka, PCHR emanate from and address the everyday realities, needs, and challenges of racialized and colonized people. For Du Bois, PCHR could only be achieved through a durable peace, and durable peace could only be maintained through the extension of PCHR to all persons irrespective of race, class, or nation. The final section explicates how this anticapitalist, antiracist, anti-imperial, and anticolonial conception of durable peace drew the ire of the U.S. government and made Du Bois, the Peace Information Center, and his fellow peace activists targets of Black Scare and Red Scare repression.