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This chapter provides a brief introduction to the central arguments of the book. It outlines the basic understandings of militarism, anti-militarism, direct action and prefiguration which run through subsequent chapters. It then reflects on the particular approach to activist ethnography which guides the study, and introduces some of the anti-militarist groups who will be discussed. The introduction closes with brief outlines of the chapters to follow.

This chapter outlines the understanding of direct action on which the rest of the book builds. It begins with two vignettes of notable anti-militarist direct actions, before setting out some formal definitions of direct action. It then outlines a brief history of anti-militarist direct action in the UK, showing how the tactic developed through the two world wars and the anti-nuclear movements of the 1950s and 80s. The second half of the chapter introduces four concepts through which we can read the politics of direct action. These concepts – (anti-)representation, prefiguration, (anti-)strategy and empowerment – and the debates that surround them, help to situate direct action not only as a particular practice or tactic, but as generative of particular kinds of subjects, movements, and approaches to social transformation.

This chapter looks at how feminist and queer anti-militarists have understood the relationship between militarism, gender and sexuality. Those relationships have been theorised in some detail by academics working at these intersections, and have occasionally taken centre-stage in British anti-militarist politics, most notably at the time of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the early 1980s. However, they are not often highlighted in contemporary British anti-militarism. The chapter considers the politics of this limited attention, before turning to a series of cases where anti-militarists have focused on the militarised politics of gender and sexuality. Across three vignettes, the chapter shows activists challenging central dynamics of militarism while also calling attention to the reproduction of militarised gender orders within anti-militarism.

This is the first of two chapters to reflect on how anti-militarists relate to the politics of security. This chapter begins by outlining the intimate relationships between militarism and security, before showing how Critical Security Studies has called for alternative/non-militarised practices of security. The second part of the chapter suggests that anti-militarist direct action could be read as an alternative, anti-hegemonic practice of security where, faced with indifferent or complicit states, activists seek to combat insecurity themselves. The third part of the chapter complicates this story, introducing three more vignettes to reflect on the ways that, even as they seek to ‘do’ security differently, activists remain entangled within hegemonic logics and practices.

This chapter builds on the critiques introduced in latter parts of the preceding chapter to argue that, beyond viewing activists as alternative agents of security, we might read them as resisting security. It begins by outlining why the particular political, conceptual and metaphysical promises of security render it an unlikely candidate for rehabilitation, before considering what it would mean to resist security. The second part of the chapter explores how anti-militarists resist security by evading state security practices, placing particular attention on how they contend with possible police and corporate infiltration. The third part draws on two vignettes to consider how anti-militarists resist security by subverting the binary logics of security/insecurity and mobilising a positive politics of anarchy. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the limits of such resistances, insofar as they are always vulnerable to recuperation within spectacular logics of (in)security.

This chapter considers how anti-militarists challenge militarised forms of contestation by prefiguring alternatives. The chapter opens by introducing again the concept of prefiguration, which holds that the means used to achieve political change will shape or become the ends that result. It then considers three distinct anti-militarist practices – peace camps, die-ins, and the use of humour – showing how each of these is guided by a desire to generate subjectivities and relationalities which do not reproduce militarism. In contrast, the last part of the chapter considers how anti-militarism is shaped not simply by opposition to militarism, but also by desire for it. Drawing on auto-ethnographic reflections, the discussion outlines how acknowledging the role of desire in social movements deepens the radical promise of prefiguration.

This chapter looks at the internal movement dynamics of British anti-militarism. It first focuses on the contested organising principle known as ‘diversity of tactics’, and on the role of nonviolence within the movement, suggesting that here we see attempts to develop movement practices which do not reproduce militarism. It demonstrates the difficult but politically valuable work of building movements which refuse to establish firm limits on tactics, and makes the argument that anti-militarism should not necessarily insist on nonviolence as an organising principle. The second half of the chapter interrogates the role of whiteness in British anti-militarism. It shows how solidarity politics, direct action tactics and the particular conceptions of militarism operating within the movement reproduce both white privilege and racialised exclusion, before considering various (and variously successful) attempts to unsettle this whiteness.

This chapter looks at how anti-militarists attempt to become ‘disobedient’ in the conduct of direct action, with a particular focus on how they constitute themselves as (il)legal subjects. It begins with some reflections on the intimate relationships between concepts of obedience and disobedience, with the rest of the chapter considering how those relationships are manifest in the movement. The first main section outlines how activists attempt to become disobedient, with a focus on the intentional and embodied labour involved in preparing for individual acts of disobedience. The next section reflects on how, despite these disobedient acts, anti-militarists also operate as obedient subjects. The argument here focuses on the politics of ‘accountability’, looking at how many (but not all) activists frame their disobedience through a higher duty of obedience, whether to the law, the state, or to God. It provides some critical reflection on the politics of accountability. The chapter then discusses how, even as they practice accountability, activists locate further opportunities for resistance, turning legal processes into fresh instantiations of disobedience. The conclusion argues that it is vitally important to make space for a politics of disobedience which is not automatically positioned in reference to a higher practice of obedience.

This chapter looks at how anti-arms trade activists develop critiques of the international arms trade. It argues that the overwhelming focus on the sale of arms to ‘repressive regimes’ risks reproducing liberal militarism and racialised discourses of the international, showing how apparently radical anti-militarism can become folded within and circumscribed by militarist discourse. The chapter begins by outlining existing critiques of the Arms Trade Treaty, before suggesting that such critiques might also be directed towards more radical actors like Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). It then sets out how abolitionist actors like CAAT mobilise the ‘repressive regimes discourse’ to critique the arms trade, using this discourse to ground campaigns including ongoing efforts to ‘Stop Arming Saudi’. The chapter shows how, notwithstanding the importance of such campaigns, such discourses can remain troublingly compatible with liberal militarism, and can feed into racialised discourses which are themselves constitutive of militarism. The chapter ends by considering the potential for a more explicit focus on liberal and racialised forms of militarism within the movement.

The conclusion returns to the politics of prefiguration and political coalition. There are certain dangers involved in practices of resistance which set themselves in opposition to coherent and stable enemies, and which seek to build hegemonic coalitions. Such practices often struggle to contend with how resistance is shaped and produced by those very power systems it seeks to oppose. The chapter outlines some of these challenges, before suggesting how an understanding of anti-militarism as a prefigurative ethics of resistance which seeks to reveal, limit, or disrupt violence, and which recognises that its task is never complete, may offer some pathways through.

The third chapter reflects on new youth activism within the wider context of what has been termed ‘the new social movements’. It addresses the broader transnational influence of movements abroad, and shows how new areas for political expression opened up around peace, anti-militarism, environmentalism/nuclear disarmament and sexuality. Late socialist Yugoslav society witnessed the proliferation of a youth arena of civil initiatives and activist citizenship, albeit fragmented and often discordant, which found shelter and support within parts of the existing youth institutional framework. Although the federal Youth League did not explicitly endorse all of the initiatives stemming from the new social movements, it did provide spaces for some of them and increased the visibility of their demands in the public space.

This essay explores the so-called ‘Bomb Plot of Zürich’, in which the Indian nationalists Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and Abdul Hafiz of the Indian Independence Committee collaborated with the German Foreign Office and a band of Swiss-based Italian anarchists led by Arcangelo Cavadini and Luigi Bertoni to smuggle German-manufactured bombs, weapons and poison into Switzerland and Italy in the summer of 1915. This was a prime example of the solidarities and overlaps between, in principle, conflicting ideologies of Indian nationalism, German imperialism and Italian anarchism. The essay draws primarily on proceedings from the Swiss Federal Court and aims to situate the event within both the histories of the Indian nationalist movement abroad as well as the Italian anarchist movement. It argues that, during the geo-political context of the First World War, the Indian nationalists forged strategic alliances with strange bedfellows to overthrow the British Empire.

This chapter examines the heated debates within the French anarchist movement after the outbreak of the First World War, leading up to the 1916 Manifesto of the Sixteen and the Russian Revolutions of 1917. It focuses on the movement’s shift from a near-unanimous anti-militarist stance to a more equivocal one, with significant voices being heard in support of interventionism. What were the arguments deployed by the supporters of the Union Sacrée, and how much did they owe to the influence of Peter Kropotkin? Crucially, could the revolutionary project of the anarchists co-exist with participation in the war effort, or did the war in fact expose the growing integration of the working classes into the nation, defusing their revolutionary potential? The chapter then examines how the anarchists’ varied attitudes to the national war effort largely determined their differing responses to the two Russian revolutions of 1917. It concludes that the failure of the movement to prevent the mobilisation of 1914 was a watershed for the French anarchist movement, provoking some profound soul-searching about the state of the movement and, specifically in relation to war, a much less ambitious attitude with regard to anti-militarist positions and tactics.