Annotated list of popular movement literature

Peace movements

Thomas Head & Richard Landes (ed): The peace of God -- Social violence and religious response in France around the year 1000, Cornell University Press 1992

About the first documented peace movement, when the whole community united in defense against local warlords. Most are detailed accounts of various mobilizations, as they can be sensed from old writings. However, R.I. Moore puts the perspective together in a final chapter where he describes how the clergy created a compromise that lasted for several hundred years by inventing the “chivalry ideal” -- they simply let the warlords themselves defend society against violence, often in return for quite juicy patronage money.

Albert Vermeesch: Essai sur les origines et la signification de la commune dans le nord de la France, Heule 1966

About how this peace movement could look like in the cities in the cases where church potentates were themselves local warlords. It was this movement that gave rise to the concept of commune, which came to stand for an egalitarian treaty to protect the peace as opposed to the usual ecclesiastical hierarchical variants.

Martin Ceadel: The origins of war prevention, Clarendon Press 1996

Some about the origins of the peace movements in radical Christian circles such as e.g. Quakers and Anabaptists and their encounter with the resistance to the war between England and the American colonists in the 1770s. Shows, among other things, how over-ideologising and middle-class anxiety sabotaged effective resistance to the Napoleonic Wars by Christians refusing to cooperate with radical democratic groups.

Peter Brock: Pacifism in Europe to 1914, Princeton University Press 1972

Much like the above but more (European) versatile; thus there is also a section on Mennonites in Poland and Duchobortsy in Russia (and their middle-class offshoots the Tolstoyans), as well as a chapter on early Christianity and another on the Valdenses. The weakness is that the focus is on theories, not on practice. In any case, you realize that the core of the vast majority was opposition to conscription, and perhaps that is enough.

W. H. van der Linden: The international peace movement 1815-1874, Tilleul 1987

A chaotic description, without any attempt at analysis, of all the movements of the liberal “philanthropic” bourgeoisie in 1000 pages. Peace is indeed one of the goals they strove for, but if it occasionally came into conflict with the violent spread of “civilization”, it was usually the latter that won... One can also learn that the distance was still not abysmal to more popular movements, for example in France during the revolutionary years of 1848 and 1871, and that both the First International and later labor movement organizations occasionally moved in the same circles, which can explain some oddities.

David Cortright: Peace - a history of movements and ideas, Cambridge University Press 2008

More about ideas than movements, which has the effect that strong movements with simple ideas, e.g. the all-embracing movement that brought the First World War to an end is treated sparingly. Also hampered by the fact that Professor Cortright does not care much about sources other than American. The strength is that you find out how different mobilizations after about 1820 have thought. The strength is also that you sometimes find out about unintended results of mobilisations, such as e.g. how the international law and arbitration movement inadvertently laid the foundation for today's oppressive WTO laws.

Peter Brock: Twentieth century pacifism, Van Nostrand Reinhold 1970

Covers the period between the first wave of peace movements (1900-1914) and the second (from 1958 onwards). Can be read as a depressing story of failure, but also as a story of how a fairly small group -- Christian Socialists in America’s Fellowship of Reconciliation -- got past conscription refusal as a fairly sterile strategy to also campaigning for something, in their case equality between blacks and whites. As you know, they were the ones who started sit-in campaigns for desegregation already in the 40s and thus introduced Gandhian methods in the developed countries and became an example for basically all innovation that has happened within the popular movements there after 1945. For better or for worse.

Jill Liddington: The long road to Greenham, Virago 1989

A book about the contribution of feminist women to the peace movements, especially in England but with perspectives. While the efforts became almost as ineffective as the peace movements in general before 1914, Liddington shows how it was possible to put power behind the words if you broke with the pacifist over-ideologicalization and appealed to the interests, which was done in 1916-17, and how the over-ideologicalization regained the upper hand after the end of the war and, among other things, the English WILPF had to meet the fascists’ attack in Spain with “non-intervention”... Feminists’ contribution to the peace movement of the 80s is treated more sketchily, perhaps because of too little time for reflection.

April Carter: Peace movements, Longman 1992

A practical handbook on peace movements in preferably the Northern countries. In principle, there is a chapter on most things from the Second World War onwards (with an introduction starting with the Quakers), perhaps not so profound but a good overview.

Lawrence S. Wittner: One world or none, Stanford University Press 1993, and Resisting the bomb, Stanford University Press 1997

The book about the nuclear resistance 1945-53 and 1954-70 respectively. Covers the entire world, although the focus due to the nature of the movement is in the Northern countries, and everything is included. If there is any criticism, it is that Wittner spends so much time describing the trees that partly the forest tends to disappear, partly the books become unreasonably thick (altogether 1300 pages). Here, it is the actions of the movement that dominate, large and small, and internal conflicts are given as much space as the struggle itself.

Richard Taylor: Against the bomb -- The British peace movement 1958-1965, Clarendon Press 1988

The nuclear resistance with a focus on Britain although some international outlook is made. The emphasis is on describing the constituent parts of the movement and describing how they related to each other -- the Labour-loyal and somewhat anxious mass organization Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the much smaller and more radical activist organization, the Gandhi-inspired Direct Action Committee and the slightly later, broader but even more disobedience campaign-focused Committee of 100. Taylor does not miss the “forest” -- the movement hardly succeeded in achieving its goal as Taylor insinuates, but they brought an important and ambiguous legacy to future Western European movements: the emphasis on individual morality and the overriding of the economic motives required to achieve a sustained mass base.

Charles DeBenedetti: An American ordeal -- The antiwar movement of the Vietnam era, Syracuse University Press 1990

All about the very broad and very divided war resistance in the USA. DeBenedetti actually focuses on precisely the divisions and shows how the totally different perspectives and the mutual dislike between its various parts -- liberal politicians, classical peace movement and the “counterculture” youth movement -- paralyzed the ability to act and delayed the end of the war for many years. It is clear that the author does not like the “counterculture” people, and it is equally clear that the reason is that he most immediately identifies with the classical peace movement and feels great frustration at how the “counterculture” discredits its demands in the eyes of the public. And surely it is conceivable how ineffective a movement can become, despite enormous energy, when its habitus and ideology become too different from those that should really be its base?

Thomas Rochon: Mobilizing for peace -- The antinuclear movements in Western Europe. Adamantine Press 1988

A sociological description of the 1980s anti-nuclear weapons movement. The thesis is that the notion of a “new type of movement” is considerably exaggerated and that the peace movement is as classic an old popular movement as any. You get a broad overview of typical peace movement behavior and typical peace movement activists, but unfortunately little of how the movement actually developed from when it began in about 1980 until it petered out in 1987-88 and why it did what it did. But a book of this nature dealing with the period 1945-70 would still be the perfect complement to Wittner's.

Reuven Kaminer: The politics of protest -- The Israeli peace movement and the Palestinian intifada, Sussex Academic Press 1996

On the Israeli peace movement, with an emphasis on the late eighties. Clarifies conflicts and interplay between the “Zionist” peace movement with its unreasonable attempt to maintain mastery status while making peace and the more anti-imperialist peace movement with its desire for justice for the Palestinians. But above all, the Israeli movement’s dependence on having a reasonable Palestinian strategy to deal with is shown: the Israeli movement grows with the 1986-90 intifada and its emphasis on civil resistance and mass struggle, and is crushed when Palestinian political expressions are limited to corrupt Bantustan politics and elitist attacks.

Paul van Tongeren et al (ed): Searching for peace in Africa, European Center for Conflict Prevention 1999, Serarching for peace in Europe and Eurasia, 2000, and Searching for peace in South Asia, 2001

A review of conflicts in the world and thus also about the actors who strive to reduce them. Shows that local peace movements in the South are extremely scarce -- once it has gone as far as slaughter, civil society has little to oppose. It has proven to happen, e.g. in Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and a few other places which are reported in these books. In that case, the movements usually have a large social breadth and represent significant social forces, otherwise they achieve nothing. But most of the time, wars end (if they do) because the parties exhaust themselves or because the state system -- the neighbors or the UN -- forces them to.

Susanne Jonas: Centaurs and doves, Westview Press 2000

About how a revolt within the commercial upper class against a perpetually costly state of war created space to gradually push back the genocidal military in Guatemala. More focus on elite relations than on popular movement.