Reconciling Peace: International Coalitions for Peace in the Era of Decolonization (RECONPAX) is framed around a single research question: how did peace movements – broadly conceived – navigate decolonization? More specifically, how did international peace organizations, such as the War Resisters’ International or the World Peace Council navigate the inclusion of groups with different understandings of peace and peace work that might not be immediately legible to them? What happens when Quaker peace workers meet Gandhians, or Japanese Buddhists? Or, perhaps even more fundamentally: what happens when peace activists try talking across Cold War lines? In short, RECONPAX seeks to explain how different views of peace interacted, collided, and changed within international coalitions for peace. Crucially, the RECONPAX team wants to know where the friction in such international interactions comes from. Such frictions were considerable and often related to the location of decolonization in peace work. Peace advocates from different backgrounds, especially absolutist pacifists, answered the following question in different ways: is the pursuit of independence a prerequisite for world peace, or did the pursuit of world peace supersede the struggle for independence? Similarly, friction occurred around the question of what “decolonization” meant in terms of the necessary political, economic and social conditions for a “positive peace” to exist. Peace is more than the absence of violence, after all.
As a team, RECONPAX looks at the international connections of local peace movements in different regions across Afro-Asia. Much of the existing historiography has failed to acknowledge that peace advocacy has multiple origins and is historically and regionally contingent. This raises a number of methodological issues and challenges, such as the fact that the peace movements we study include many individuals and groups that are not normally considered internationalist actors. Simply put, what if they are sitting in ashram rather than in the halls of the League of Nations? Additionally, there is a key intellectual history challenge here: much of the history of peace internationalism is reasoned from a very specific understanding of what pacifism is, which is one that is very much reasoned from the “traditional” internationalism of the early twentieth century. But traditional typologies of pacifism on a scale of “absolute” to “relative” are insufficient and often end up reifying ideas of single-origin, “authentic” pacifist thought. It makes other understandings of peace work, driven by other agendas, and especially in the decolonizing world, into “deviations” or “misunderstandings” of that gold standard. RECONPAX, by contrasts, seeks to approach different forms of peace thinking on their own terms. This, we contend, will result in a more globally representative history of peace advocacy.
