COPWOM · The Continuation of Politics with Other Means: War and Protest, 1914-2011

The Continuation of Politics with Other Means: War and Protest, 1914-2011

What is the problem/issue being addressed? The historiographies of war and of protest, apart from numerous specific studies, are only infrequently brought together, and there is virtually no comparative or integrative literature. Hitherto studies have often focused on Cold War peace movements, and especially non-violent strategies of protest. Almost exclusively in such instances, the reader is asked to maintain a bi-polar vision: peace/war; peaceful/violent. This research project is not so much concerned with peace and protest, but with war and protest, hence the main focus on protest generated by war and performed while the war in question was being waged. This perspective helps to contextualise and problematize the intuitive insight that “peace is good and war is bad”. Why is it important for society? COPWOM is an interdisciplinary and distinctively European research project into social movements during times of war in the period from the First World War to the Iraq War that left behind powerful legacies in the political culture of societies around the globe. At a critical time when European society is exercised by the implications of warfare, the emergence of new forms of protest politics and the relative absence of anti-war dissent, COPWOM is invested in challenging the premises often underpinning such thorny debates. Protest in relation to war has most commonly been considered in terms of peace movements, rather than integrated into a vision of the Europe-wide manifestations of war-time protest, the partial erosion of pacifist movements under conditions of war, and the use of state power to counter the challenge of war-time protest. Equally importantly, contestations of legitimacy – the essence of protest – remain an under-researched interface in societies’ experiences of and responses to war; and no systematic attempt has been made to place war studies and protest research − both among the most vibrant fields of contemporary history – into close conversation with each other. What are the overall objectives? COPWOM has been pursuing the following objectives: • to articulate the relationship between war and protest in the twentieth century and beyond, and to develop further the ongoing debate surrounding war as a channel of cultural, social, and political change. • to advance research into the comparative dimension of war-time protest by embedding this investigation in an analytical framework focused on the methods and questions of historical enquiry into social movements, and to give further specificity to the debate surrounding processes of politicisation and depoliticisation with a particular focus on the variety of motivations that drove war-time protest beyond just pacifism. • to examine the reciprocal impact of changing gender roles and war-time protest dynamics. • to illuminate the ways in which war-time protest manifested itself in a number of different wars, including both the major and well-known wars of the twentieth century and some of the "forgotten wars" that offer a specific constellation of power and protest (i.e. World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, the Kosovo War, and the Iraq War).

Data: CORDIS, © European Union