"Here I stand", said Martin Luther, "I can do no other"; My initial image of conscientious objection was rather framed by the Protestant tradition of the individual conscience taking a stand against authority, nailing theses to church doors and going to the stake rather than renouncing their faith. I understood it as a personal moral imperative rather than as a political strategy.
That, too, is how I think states have understood conscientious objection (CO). By the end of the…
The War Resisters' meeting may have had two parts - Council and seminar - but most of the themes discussed throughout the week were common to both: anti-militarism, conscientious objection, nonviolence, women in the anti-militarist movement, feminism, and the gay and lesbian movement.
The Council meeting of the War Resisters' International (WRI), which takes place in a different country each year, lasted for three days, followed by four days of seminars and workshops which took place…
In France, the strong ties that bind the national education system and the army are as old as compulsory schooling itself. Both institutions served in the building of the nation.
Schools served as one of the coloniser's main means of acculturation, enrolling pupils in 1914 to send out letters to the front or to organise fund-raising fairs which helped to maintain hatred and the warlike frenzy of the time. The Second World War saw the Marshal Petain1 children trained to sing…
When a student takes a gun to school and goes on a shooting rampage—as one 15-year-old is charged with doing in a community near me in California— the public immediately expresses its shock and confusion over how such a thing could ever occur.
Educators, politicians, and the mental health professionals who are called upon to deal with tragedies of this sort all struggle to come up with a plausible explanation. Usually, their attention focuses on narrow, individualistic conditions…
War and militarism are highly gendered phenomena—they are difficult if not impossible to understand without reference to gender.
In the first place, national leaders who want to shape our ideas so that we favour fighting a war often address us in gendered terms. They appeal to the nation's manhood to stiffen its spine, recall its heroic past and protect its women-and-children. They represent warriors as manly; draft resisters as wimps and sissies. The technologies of war fighting…
These thoughts prompted twenty of us to get together for a weekend workshop in Amsterdam at the end of January, an opportunity for in-depth discussion of women's current and future anti-militarist and anti-war strategies.
Some of the women at the Amsterdam workshop came from women-only groups. Some were active, as feminists, in groups with men. While some of us were more “specialised” in one kind of activism or another, women were commonly doing a bit of several kinds of things: non-…
Here's the short review – read this book! And just in case you need more persuasion, here are some reasons why.
Cynthia Enloe has probably been the most consistent analyst of gender and militarism over the past decade; the scope of her analysis is wide-ranging, yet her argument is focused and powerful; and unlike many other writers, she really does address gender, rather than merely documenting women's experience.
Though the subjects of each chapter – the mothers buying a can…
The relationship between military violence and economic exploitation is not new nor is it limited to modern capitalist economics. The dynamic was present in the former Communist societies and it was present before industrial capitalism developed.
Many have argued that globalisation began more than five hundred years ago when the Europeans first sent their armies to the New World. The conquest of the Americas (and subsequent subjugation of Africa and Asia) produced fantastic wealth…
We spent time attempting to pin down exactly what we would focus on, and in the end rejected creating an issue which focuses on globalisation however topical. Instead, while acknowledging the context provided by the ease with which capital, goods and services have been enabled to flow around the world, we decided that what we were really doing was creating an issue which would look at the economies of militarism.
To this end, PN 2442 has tried to focus on four distinct areas:
The…
