Peace movement

Seen from this perspective, they are often indistinguishable and constitute a loose, responsive, event-driven collaboration between groups motivated by humanism, environmentalism, veganism, anti-racism, feminism, decentralization, hospitality, ideology, theology, and faith.

Global protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in early 2003 are an example of a specific, short-term, loosely affiliated single-issue "movement" consisting of relatively-scattered ideological priorities ranging from pacifism to Islamism and Anti-Americanism.

One, rooted in the secular Age of Enlightenment, promoted peace as the rational antidote to the world's ills; the other was part of the evangelical religious revival which had played an important role in the campaign for the abolition of slavery.

A significant grassroots peace movement, animated by universalist ideals, emerged from the perception that Britain fought in a reactionary role and the increasingly visible impact of the war on the nation's welfare in the form of higher taxes and casualties.

The groups merged into the American Peace Society, which held weekly meetings and produced literature that was spread as far as Gibraltar and Malta describing the horrors of war and advocating pacifism on Christian grounds.

[13] In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the novelist Baroness Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) after 1889 became a leading figure in the peace movement with the publication of her pacifist novel, Die Waffen nieder!

[18] The concepts of nonviolence (ahimsa) and nonresistance have a long history in Indian religious and philosophical thought, and have had a number of revivals in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Jewish and Christian contexts.

The editorial called for an international organization to agree on the arbitration of disputes and guarantee the territorial integrity of its members by maintaining military forces sufficient to defeat those of any non-member.

The ensuing debate among prominent internationalists modified Holt's plan to align it more closely with proposals in Great Britain put forth by Viscount James Bryce, a former ambassador from the U.K. to the U.S.[24] These and other initiatives were pivotal to the attitude changes which gave rise to the League of Nations after the war.

A number of novels and poems about the futility of war and the slaughter of youth by old fools were published, including Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Beverley Nichols' Cry Havoc!

The idea of collective security was also popular; instead of outright pacifism, the public generally exhibited a determination to stand up to aggression with economic sanctions and multilateral negotiations.

Bertrand Russell said that the necessity of defeating Adolf Hitler and the Nazis was a unique circumstance in which war was not the worst possible evil, and called his position "relative pacifism".

During World War II, pacifist leaders such as Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy of the Catholic Worker Movement urged young Americans not to enlist in the military.

[47] In the United Kingdom, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) held an inaugural public meeting at Central Hall Westminster on 17 February 1958 which was attended by five thousand people.

Although this helped civil disobedience to spread, it produced policy confusion; as the 1960s progressed, a number of Committee of 100 groups protested against social issues not directly related to war and peace.

The 1961 Baby Tooth Survey, co-founded by Dr. Louise Reiss, indicated that above-ground nuclear testing posed significant public health risks in the form of radioactive fallout spread primarily via milk from cows which ate contaminated grass.

[73] In May 2010, 25,000 people (including members of peace organizations and 1945 atomic-bomb survivors) marched for about two kilometers from lower Manhattan to United Nations headquarters calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

According to Hania Fedorowicz, they played an important role in East Germany and other countries in resurrecting civil society, and helped instigate the successful 1989 peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe.

Peace Now supported Begin for a time and hailed him as a peacemaker, but turned against him when the Sinai withdrawal was accompanied by an accelerated campaign of land confiscation and settlement-building on the West Bank.

During the First Intifada, Peace Now held a number of rallies to protest the Israeli army and call for a negotiated withdrawal from the Palestinian territories; the group attacked Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin for his hard-line stance.

After Rabin became prime minister, signed the Oslo Agreement and shook Yasser Arafat's hand on the White House lawn, however, Peace Now mobilized strong public support for him.

The committee then decided to continue as a general peace movement opposing the occupation and advocating the creation of an independent Palestine side-by-side with Israel in its pre-1967 borders, with an undivided Jerusalem the capital of both states.

Its founders included a group of dissidents which included Major-General Mattityahu Peled, a member of the IDF General Staff during the 1967 Six-Day War; economist Ya'akov Arnon, who headed the Zionist Federation in the Netherlands before coming to Israel in 1948 and the former director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Finance and board chair of the Israeli Electricity Company; and Aryeh Eliav, Labour Party secretary-general until he broke with the Prime Minister Golda Meir over Palestinian issues.

[91] Notable peace activists include Sonya Davies, Kate Dewes, Elsie Locke, Maire Leadbeater, Bunny McDairmid, Laurie Salas, and Jools and Lynda Topp.

[93] Stories of the horrors recounted by soldiers and nurses returning from both world wars, along with the impact of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deeply ingrained the nation's commitment to peace.

[101] As recently as 2024, Foreign Minister Winston Peters emphasized the importance of seeking peaceful solutions, highlighting the lesson learned from the Second World War that dialogue is preferable to conflict.

The anti-nuclear movement sought to opt out of the Cold War, rejecting "Britain's Little Independent Nuclear Deterrent" (BLIND) on the grounds that it contradicted mutual assured destruction.

By early 2003, the peace and anti-war movements (grouped as the Stop the War Coalition) were powerful enough to cause several of Blair's cabinet to resign and hundreds of Labour MPs to vote against their government.

During the 1990s, peacemaker priorities included seeking a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian impasse, belated efforts at humanitarian assistance to war-torn regions such as Bosnia and Rwanda, and aid to post-war Iraq.

Protest methods included rallies and marches, impeachment petitions, the staging of a war-crimes tribunal in New York to investigate crimes and alleged abuses of power by the Bush administration, bringing Iraqi women to the U.S. to tell their side of the story, independent filmmaking, high-profile appearances by anti-war activists such as Scott Ritter, Janis Karpinski, and Dahr Jamail, resisting military recruiting on college campuses, withholding taxes, mass letter-writing to legislators and newspapers, blogging, music, and guerrilla theatre.