This article challenges the received wisdom that French public opinion was infused with pacifist sentiment during the 1930s, and that this sentiment in turn contributed to the French defeat of 1940. It will suggest that French public attitudes towards the prospect of war can be better defined as ‘war anxiety’ rather than the value-laden term ‘pacifist’. Taking as a test case the period between ...

Abstract Pacifism and anarchism have been until recently largely missing on the landscape of international relations (IR) theories, even though they help articulate valuable nuanced reflections core IR themes such as war peace, structure order, multiple effects political violence. In particular, an analysis grounded in territory shared by pacifism offers a focused vantage point from which origi...

The Israeli military's Conscience Committee evaluates and exempts pacifists from obligatory military service, based explicitly on concern for liberal tolerance. However, I found that liberal pacifist applicants’ principled objections to violence challenged the state, and as such, applicants who articulated their refusal in such terms are rejected by the military review board. By contrast, pacif...

The paper has three parts. The first is a discussion of the values as goals and means. This is a known Moorean distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values, with one other Moorean item – the doctrine of value wholes. According to this doctrine the value wholes are not simply a summation of their parts, which implies a possibility that two evils might be better than one (e. g. crime + p...

Thomas Curran has created an intriguing exploration of an overlooked group of antiwar Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century. Growing out of his dissertation at Notre Dame, this monograph examines the beliefs and activities of a group Curran describes as “perfectionist pacifists” during the Civil War and after, following it into the early twentieth century. The book is effective...