Sources and References

This course does not rely on a single textbook; instead, it draws on course reserves selected from a wide scholarly literature on peace history. The present synthesis leans on the following standard works, which are recommended for deeper reading and for grounding a research essay.

• David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2008) — the most comprehensive one-volume survey.
• Charles Chatfield, The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism (Twayne, 1992).
• Peter Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton University Press, 1972) and Varieties of Pacifism.
• Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1991).
• Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Lawrence S. Wittner, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford University Press, 2009).
• April Carter, Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics since 1945 (Longman, 1992).
• Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress and related work on the nuclear freeze campaign of the 1980s.
• Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (3 vols., Porter Sargent, 1973).
• Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011).
• Christoph Bertram and other contributors to the strategic-studies literature on arms control.
• Johan Galtung, foundational essays on positive and negative peace in the Journal of Peace Research.

Chapter 1: Defining Peace and Peace Movements

1.1 What Counts as a Peace Movement?

A course on the history of peace movements must begin by acknowledging that “peace” is not a single idea. Historians such as David Cortright and April Carter distinguish between absolute pacifism, which rejects all war on moral or religious grounds, and a broader non-pacifist anti-war politics, which opposes particular wars, particular weapons, or militarism as a system without insisting that violence is always wrong. A peace movement, in this wider sense, is any organized collective effort to reduce the incidence, scale, or legitimacy of armed conflict and to build institutions and practices that replace violence with negotiation, law, or nonviolent resistance.

This definitional work matters because it shapes the cast of characters a historian considers. If one restricts “peace movement” to doctrinal pacifists, the story becomes almost entirely a religious one, centred on the historic peace churches. If one broadens it to include liberal internationalists, feminist anti-militarists, anti-colonial strategists, nuclear disarmers, and environmentalists, the history becomes global, plural, and politically varied.

1.2 Positive and Negative Peace

The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung is the course’s indispensable theorist here. Galtung distinguishes negative peace, understood as the mere absence of direct violence, from positive peace, which requires the absence of structural violence — the entrenched inequalities of class, race, gender, and empire that make some lives systematically shorter and narrower than others. On this reading, a society can be at “peace” in the negative sense while remaining deeply violent in its ordinary workings. The distinction reframes peace activism as not only opposition to war but also work for justice, human rights, and ecological sustainability.

1.3 Nonviolence as Ethic and as Strategy

A third foundational distinction runs through the entire course: nonviolence as a moral commitment and nonviolence as a political technique. For figures such as Leo Tolstoy or the early Mennonites, refusing violence was a religious duty owed to God regardless of consequences. For strategists such as Gene Sharp or Erica Chenoweth, nonviolent action is a practical method of political struggle whose efficacy can be measured against the alternatives. The two strands often overlap in practice — Gandhi held both simultaneously — but they justify their choices in quite different vocabularies.

Chapter 2: Religious and Early Roots

2.1 Early Christianity and the Refusal of the Sword

For roughly the first three centuries, many Christian communities read the Sermon on the Mount as incompatible with military service, and early Christian writers such as Tertullian and Origen articulated arguments against Christians bearing arms. After Constantine’s conversion and the rise of Christendom, just war theory largely displaced pacifist readings in the mainstream churches, but the memory of an earlier refusal would be invoked repeatedly by later dissenters.

2.2 Medieval Peace of God and Truce of God

In the tenth and eleventh centuries, bishops in southern France organized the Pax Dei (Peace of God) and Treuga Dei (Truce of God) movements, which attempted to protect non-combatants — clergy, peasants, pilgrims — from feudal warfare and to suspend fighting on particular days and in particular seasons. These were not pacifist in the modern sense, but they represent an early institutional attempt to place moral limits on violence and have been treated by historians such as Peter Brock as part of the long prehistory of peace activism.

2.3 Historic Peace Churches

The three communities traditionally grouped as historic peace churches — the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren — emerged from the radical wings of the Reformation and from seventeenth-century English dissent. They taught nonresistance as a community-wide discipline rather than as an individual heroism. Mennonite communities in particular would play a large role in later Canadian peace history, bringing a tradition of conscientious objection and alternative service across the Atlantic.

Chapter 3: Enlightenment Peace Thought and the First Peace Societies

3.1 Erasmus and Early Humanist Critique

The Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Querela Pacis (The Complaint of Peace, 1517) is often cited as the first great secular denunciation of war in European letters. Erasmus treated war as a failure of reason and Christian charity rather than as a natural condition of princes, and his rhetoric about the absurdity of Christians killing Christians would echo through later peace writing.

2.2 Kant’s Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay Zum ewigen Frieden (Perpetual Peace) offered a philosophical program that remains strikingly contemporary: republican constitutions at home, a federation of free states abroad, and a cosmopolitan law guaranteeing hospitality across borders. Kant argued that republics would be slower to make war because citizens bore its costs, that a voluntary league of peaceful states could expand outward, and that commerce and communication tended to make war ever more irrational. This liberal peace tradition would supply the theoretical backbone for nineteenth-century internationalism and, eventually, for the League of Nations and the United Nations.

3.3 The First Peace Societies, 1815–1828

The Napoleonic Wars produced the first durable peace societies. In 1815 the New York Peace Society and the Massachusetts Peace Society were founded in the United States; in 1816 the London Peace Society was organized in Britain. By the 1820s, smaller societies existed across the North Atlantic. Their members — many of them Quaker merchants, liberal clergy, and reform-minded professionals — circulated tracts, petitioned parliaments, and promoted international arbitration. Sandi Cooper’s term patriotic pacifism captures their characteristic posture: they loved their countries, but they believed that love obliged them to spare their countries the scourge of war.

Chapter 4: Nineteenth-Century Internationalism

4.1 Arbitration, Free Trade, and the Liberal Peace

Mid-nineteenth-century peace advocacy was tightly linked to free-trade liberalism. Figures such as Richard Cobden and John Bright in Britain argued that tariffs bred wars and that commerce bred peace; they pressed for international arbitration treaties as an alternative to the duel of armies. A series of international peace congresses — Brussels 1848, Paris 1849 (where Victor Hugo prophesied a United States of Europe), Frankfurt 1850, London 1851 — gave the movement a transnational presence if not yet political power.

4.2 The Hague Conferences

By the end of the century the long campaign for arbitration began to produce institutional results. The First Hague Peace Conference of 1899, convened at the suggestion of Tsar Nicholas II, and the Second Hague Conference of 1907 codified laws of war, established the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and marked the first time that peace advocacy had pried real concessions from the chancelleries of Europe. Historians such as Martin Ceadel treat these as a high-water mark of nineteenth-century “semi-detached” peace liberalism — idealist in aspiration, pragmatic in method.

4.3 Bertha von Suttner and the Nobel Peace Prize

The Austrian novelist Bertha von Suttner played an outsized role in transforming peace advocacy into public spectacle. Her 1889 novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!) became a European best-seller and made her a celebrity organizer of congresses and petitions. Her correspondence with Alfred Nobel is widely credited with persuading him to include a peace prize among the awards established in his 1895 will; she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905. The prize itself, studied as a barometer of what each generation understood by “peace,” is a recurring reference point in the course.

Chapter 5: Women, War, and Peace

5.1 The Women–Peace Link

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women organized some of the most enduring peace institutions. The argument that women had a special stake in peace took many forms — maternalist, suffragist, socialist, feminist — and did not go unchallenged, but it produced organizations that persisted where many male-led societies collapsed under wartime pressure.

5.2 Jane Addams, WILPF, and the 1915 Hague Congress

In April 1915, while the Western Front was already consuming a generation, more than a thousand women from belligerent and neutral countries met at The Hague to demand mediation. Out of this meeting grew the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), whose first president, Jane Addams of Chicago’s Hull House, would later receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. WILPF became a model for later transnational women’s peace organizing and remains active today.

5.3 Canadian Voices: Voice of Women

In Canada, the Voice of Women/La Voix des femmes, founded in 1960 in response to Cold War anxieties, became a central organization in Canadian peace history. It campaigned against nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, opposed the Vietnam War, and fostered Canadian–Soviet citizen diplomacy. Along with later groups such as Project Ploughshares and the Canadian Centre for Policy Development, it anchored a distinctly Canadian tradition of peace advocacy.

Chapter 6: World Wars, Conscientious Objection, and the Interwar Years

6.1 Conscription and the No-Conscription Fellowship

The First World War brought mass conscription and with it the first large-scale modern crisis of conscience over military service. In Britain, the No-Conscription Fellowship, founded in 1914, organized absolute resisters, many of whom went to prison rather than cooperate with the war machine. The American Fellowship of Reconciliation (1915) and later the War Resisters League (1923) extended this activism to the United States. In Canada, Mennonites, Doukhobors, and Quakers were recognized as conscientious objectors and assigned to alternative service, though the accommodations were imperfect and politically fraught.

6.2 The League of Nations, Kellogg–Briand, and the Oxford Pledge

The interwar years were a laboratory for the liberal internationalist program. The League of Nations, the Washington and London naval treaties, the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact (which nominally outlawed aggressive war), and the Geneva Disarmament Conference of the early 1930s all represented attempts to build Kant’s “league of free states” in practice. Popular peace activism crested in the 1933 Oxford Union “King and Country” debate and in the British Peace Ballot of 1934–35, which drew over eleven million responses in support of collective security.

6.3 The Crisis of Absolute Pacifism

The rise of fascism produced the deepest crisis in the history of organized pacifism. Absolute pacifism presumed that opponents could be shamed, persuaded, or outwaited; Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan appeared to offer no such purchase. Many interwar pacifists — including Reinhold Niebuhr, who broke with Christian pacifism to develop Christian realism — concluded that resistance to fascism required arms. Others, including some Mennonite communities and the historian Peter Brock himself, maintained witness pacifism even in the face of total war. The dilemma was sharpened by the wartime internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, which many peace activists opposed as a grave injustice even as they supported the war against the Axis.

Chapter 7: The Cold War and the Bomb

7.1 CND, SANE, and the First Ban-the-Bomb Movement

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 created an entirely new object of peace activism. By the late 1950s, hydrogen bombs and fallout from atmospheric testing had spawned a transatlantic anti-nuclear movement. In Britain, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in 1958, staged the annual Aldermaston marches and popularized the now-universal peace symbol. In the United States, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE, 1957) mobilized scientists, clergy, and celebrities. Lawrence Wittner’s multi-volume history argues that such pressure played a decisive role in producing the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty and, later, the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty.

7.2 Bertrand Russell, Pugwash, and the Nuclear Freeze

Philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Albert Einstein issued a 1955 manifesto that led to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a backchannel between Western and Soviet scientists. In the early 1980s, the deployment of new intermediate-range missiles in Europe triggered the nuclear freeze campaign in the United States, massive demonstrations against Euromissiles in West Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain, and the founding of European Nuclear Disarmament (END). Doug Rossinow’s scholarship describes the freeze as the largest grassroots foreign-policy movement in American history, one whose political pressure framed the INF Treaty of 1987.

7.3 Greenham Common

Among the most visible anti-nuclear actions was the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common in England, where a permanent encampment — eventually women-only — protested American cruise missiles from 1981 until 2000. Greenham is important in the course both as an episode in nuclear disarmament and as an example of feminist, consensus-based nonviolent direct action.

Chapter 8: Nonviolence, Anti-Colonialism, and Civil Rights

8.1 Gandhi and Satyagraha

No figure is more central to the modern history of peace movements than Mohandas K. Gandhi. His doctrine of satyagraha — literally “truth-force” or “soul-force” — was articulated in South Africa before 1914 and refined through the Indian independence struggle. Satyagraha fused personal discipline, fearlessness, willingness to suffer without retaliation, and mass campaigns such as the 1930 Salt March, which dramatized colonial injustice for a global audience. Gandhi’s insistence that means shape ends, and that nonviolent means were therefore demanded by a peaceful vision of independent India, anchored the ethical version of nonviolence for the twentieth century.

8.2 Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar

Gandhi’s Pashtun collaborator Abdul Ghaffar Khan organized the Khudai Khidmatgar (“Servants of God”) in the North-West Frontier of British India during the 1920s and 1930s. Composed mostly of Muslim Pashtuns from a society widely stereotyped as warlike, the movement fielded a nonviolent “army” of up to a hundred thousand members who endured massacres at Kissa Khwani and Takkar without retaliation. The Khudai Khidmatgar is a crucial case study because it shows that nonviolent discipline was not uniquely Hindu, English, or middle-class.

8.3 King, SCLC, and the American Civil Rights Movement

Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee translated Gandhian nonviolence into the American civil rights struggle. From the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56 through the Birmingham campaign of 1963 and the Selma–Montgomery march of 1965, the movement combined rigorous nonviolent training, disciplined confrontation with segregationist violence, and strategic manipulation of national media to produce federal civil rights legislation. The Freedom Rides of 1961, in which interracial groups deliberately violated segregation on interstate buses and endured mob violence, illustrated both the moral power and the physical cost of the method.

Chapter 9: Vietnam, Global 1968, and the Reinvention of Protest

The American war in Vietnam re-energized peace activism worldwide. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Vietnam Moratorium, draft-card burnings, and the 1967 March on the Pentagon brought millions into opposition to the war. In Canada, tens of thousands of American draft resisters found refuge, and Canadian peace groups such as the Voice of Women organized cross-border solidarity. Globally, 1968 saw linked student uprisings in Paris, Mexico City, Prague, and Tokyo that tied anti-war activism to demands for educational reform, civil rights, and decolonization. The Vietnam era is often treated as the moment at which peace activism definitively broadened beyond pacifism into a diffuse, left-leaning counterculture.

Chapter 10: After the Cold War — Landmines, Climate, and Civil Resistance

10.1 The Ottawa Treaty and Humanitarian Disarmament

The 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines is a Canadian-led milestone in humanitarian disarmament. Coordinated by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) under Jody Williams, who received the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, the treaty showed that transnational civil-society coalitions could move even great powers toward treaty commitments, and provided a template for later campaigns against cluster munitions and, more recently, nuclear weapons (TPNW, 2017).

10.2 Iraq 2003 and the Global Day of Protest

On 15 February 2003, between six and ten million people in roughly six hundred cities protested against the impending American-led invasion of Iraq — the largest coordinated day of protest in recorded history. The demonstrations did not stop the war, which is sometimes read as a failure, but they laid down political and moral markers that shaped later debates about the legitimacy of preventive war.

10.3 Climate, Black Lives Matter, and the Chenoweth Argument

In the twenty-first century the course broadens still further. Climate activism — from 350.org to Fridays for Future to Extinction Rebellion — is increasingly framed as a peace movement because climate change is a driver of conflict and because the same nonviolent methods are at issue. The Black Lives Matter movement and other contemporary racial-justice campaigns are often analyzed through the lens of strategic nonviolence. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s statistical study of 323 major resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 found that nonviolent campaigns succeeded roughly 53 per cent of the time against 26 per cent for violent campaigns, and that participation thresholds — famously, the “3.5 per cent rule” — were strong predictors of success. That empirical argument has reframed nonviolence, once marginalized as utopian, as the evidence-backed default strategy for popular political change.