This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distributionĪnd reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). Muste, believed that 'essentially individualistic, moral Yet rather than diminishing James's critique, the war also gave its central message a renewed prescience: fuelled by a growing sense of urgency in their calling many pacifists, including America's most prominent A. The 'positive martial virtues' that he praised sat uncomfortably alongside the senselessness of the war that followed, one memorialised not by heroic statues of military fortitude but by the unadorned grave of the Unknown Soldier. Written at the very end of his life and prior to the outbreak of the First World War, in many respects James's essay is of its time. A genuine alternative to war therefore, a pacifism built for purpose, needed to not only critique processes of war and violence but to forge a moral equivalent to them, one that retained the admirable elements of army character, discipline and bravery that were so central to the military imagination. He argued that these feelings of admiration were too deeply entrenched to be easily abandoned without some kind of functional, psychological substitute. War was wholly inadequate: the horror drove the fascination the more bloody the battlefield, the more heroic the soldier. (James 1911, 108)įor James, a pacifist programme that relied on demonstrating the irrationality, horror or bloodiness of While intellectually we conceive of it as almost completely negative, only permissible as a last resort, he argued that the military commands a powerful cultural and emotional attraction, reflected in an unwillingness toĮnvisage a future in which army-life, with its many elements of charm, shall be forever impossible, and in which the destinies of peoples shall nevermore be decided quickly, thrillingly, and tragically by force. In his classic essay The moral equivalent of war, the renowned Harvard psychologist William James argued that we have a curiously paradoxical relationship with warfare. because we are academic, over-intellectualised and conventional in our attitudes, we think that making speeches about pacifism, even superficial and dull ones, or mailing leaflets discreetly, is necessarily virtuous (Muste, 1941).1 We shy away from anything that smacks of building an 'army' of nonviolence, smacks of uniformity and regimentation. OF THE INS I ITU'I K OF BRITISH GEOGRAPHERS School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD Email: manuscript received 14 July 2016 Key words Central Africa internationalism Northern Rhodesia pacifism peace World Peace Brigade Second, the histories of waging peace (peace armies, civil disobedience, etc.) allow us to critically interrogate the co-constitutive geographies of violence and nonviolence while retaining peace as a distinct category around which to promote political engagement. First, it encourages us to remain attentive to the big stories of peace and, specifically, the way in which the peace movement has been a historically important conduit for a range of internationalist ideas. I suggest this case study has two implications for peace research in geography. In Central Africa this meant the Brigade developed two, ultimately incompatible, conceptions of peace: an internationalist one that stressed world community, and a local one that adapted pacifism for nationalist movements. The paper suggests that geography poses a distinct conceptual problem for peace movements, which must simultaneously operate beyond conventional forms of territorial politics while remaining sufficiently flexible in the political arena for their strength and relevance. I argue that the Brigade offers geographers important insights into how ideas of peace have been circulated, adapted and even resisted. This paper retraces the World Peace Brigade and its collaboration with the Northern Rhodesian independence movement in 1962. Waging peace: militarising pacifism in Central Africa and the problem of geography, 1962ĭespite the discipline having undergone a 'peace turn' in recent years, the history of the peace movement itself remains curiously under explored by geographers.
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