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Sharon Erickson Nepstad’s chapter hones our understanding of how religion can shape activists’ interpretations of repression. Through a comparative analysis of the Plowshares movements in the United States and Sweden, this chapter argues that long prison sentences did not harm the U.S. Plowshares movement in part because activists’ Catholic beliefs and identity led them to view repression in religious terms that deepened their commitment, motivation, and unity. The chapter contrasts the U.S. case to the experience of the secular Swedish Plowshares activists, who interpreted their repression in ways that made them susceptible to internal disputes, waning commitment, and co-optation.

This chapter analyzes the strategic choices of Swedish and British activists who imported the controversial tactics of the U.S. Plowshares movement. U.S. plowshares organizers were strongly influenced by Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who established “houses of hospitality” that offered shelter and food to the poor. Priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan, however, introduced an even more controversial form of resistance—draft board raids—wherein activists would forcibly remove conscription files, drenching them in blood or burning them with homemade napalm. International media coverage of U.S. Plowshares actions caught the interest of activists abroad, who began experimenting with this radical approach. Swedish and British activists faced numerous choice points that led them to implement strategic changes which resulted to different consequences: the British Plowshares movement prospered, while the Swedish Plowshares movement struggled and collapsed.

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 explores the pacifism of the early Christian church and how the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century led to the development of the just war doctrine. At the conclusion of World War II, the advent of the nuclear arms race rendered some aspects of the just war doctrine obsolete. Pope John XXIII addressed these concerns in his encyclical Pacem in Terris, released in 1963. Numerous Catholic peace groups thought that the Vatican did not take a strong enough stance on war, militarism, and nuclear weapons. The Catholic Worker movement called for a return to pacifism and introduced the techniques of nonviolent noncooperation with civil defense drills in the 1950s. The chapter covers other Catholic peace movements and organizations, including Pax Christi, the Catholic Left that opposed the Vietnam War through draft card burnings and draft board raids, and the Plowshares movement, whose members damaged nuclear weapons to obstruct the nuclear arms race. Eventually, the US Catholic Bishops released the pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace, which condemned nuclear weapons and called for disarmament.