Anarcho-Pacifism
Anarcho-pacifism is a political philosophy that combines elements of anarchism and pacifism. It advocates for a society without a centralized government and opposes all forms of violence, including war and coercion. Anarcho-pacifists believe in nonviolent resistance and direct action as the means to achieve social and political change.
4 Key excerpts on "Anarcho-Pacifism"
eBook - ePubJust or Unjust War?
International Law and Unilateral Use of Armed Force by States at the Turn of the 20th Century
- Mohammad Taghi Karoubi(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Therefore, some feel that they have a peculiar ‘vocation’ for pacifism but think of political relations as inevitably bound up with violence and therefore largely ‘unredeemable’. Conversely, political pacifists, whether the foundation for their beliefs is religion or utilitarian, tend to think not only in personal terms but also in terms of non-violence for group relations. Therefore, political pacifism is concerned about such issues as principles of group conciliation, non-violent coercion, the nature of a pacifism society, and pacifist methods for resisting military invasion. From the late 19th century, pacifism was more derived from political creeds such as socialism or anarchism. Here, those issues will be discussed very briefly. One of the non-religious groups that pay special attention to pacifism is the Anarchists. In its broad meaning, anarchism includes a wide range of liberationists and communitarians. Therefore, in this way, it may be said that absolute pacifism’s closest political counterpart may be found in the principle of anarchism. Williams, in this regard, pointed out that: Absolute pacifism rests on the view that no state should ever use violence against another state, even in self-defence or in defence of others; alternatively and even more radically, no person should ever use violence or any other person. It follows from either of these positions that no state should ever use violence on any person then there is no state, because a state necessarily has a monopoly of violence which it can legitimately deploy against persons. From this it follows that a pacifist is an anarchist. 169 During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some pacifist groups, such as American pacifist groups 170 and the New England Non-resistance Society under the influence of William Liod Garrison, accepted this view, 171 but from a few decades ago, many pacifists were reluctant to accept such arguments, because their domestic political views were highly orthodox...
eBook - ePub- Brian Orend(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...3 Pacifism: Ethics, Cosmopolitanism, and Non-violence Pacifism is a form of idealism. If realism recommends group selfishness, lack of trust, and national egoism, then idealism – as the opposing “big-picture” perspective on foreign policy – recommends a kind of other-regarding altruism, stressing an ethical imperative not merely to forward the relative standing of one’s “in-group” but, rather, to use one’s resources to do what one can to make the world a better place. To this extent, pacifism is both individual and cosmopolitan, in contrast to realism’s tribal nationalism. Individual, in viewing all human beings with ethical concern; and cosmopolitan, in denying that national borders have deep moral significance. What matters morally is that we do the right thing, and we respect everyone’s lives and rights. And it’s difficult to square that principle with violent armed conflict, whether for reasons of smart strategy (realism) or of justice (just war theory). In contrast to the gritty realist ethos of “national security in an insecure world,” pacifism offers a vision of “human security in a better world,” where human security refers to the well-being of individual people and their feeling not merely physically safe from things like crime, terrorism, and foreign invasion but more broadly empowered and enabled to live their lives in a satisfying way. 1 A pacifist, for instance, would consider as sheer waste the enormous military expenditures by – and vast martial organizations within and across – nation-states, and experience a sad sense of lost possibility and an angry conviction regarding this wastage in comparison to what such resources could do in terms of food, housing, education, technology, health care, and research and development for the future. 2 3.1 Defining Pacifism There’s pluralism within pacifism, as with the other traditions. Two big distinctions stand out. The first is between pacifism as non-violence versus pacifism as (mere) opposition to war...
eBook - ePub- Nigel Dower(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...In other words, pacifism includes a commitment to pacificism, as discussed in the next chapter. Since there are, as we indicated, a variety of ways pacificism may be interpreted, pacifism along with the philosophy of nonviolence will provide fairly distinct analyses of how best to promote peace. Usually then, as I noted earlier, a pacifist is not merely a person who refuses to fight. A pacifist is someone who sees his or her refusal as part of a wider commitment: the ethical value of ‘peace’ is such as to draw out a commitment both to live by it and to promote it. That commitment to the wrongness of fighting will lead to: (a) trying to reduce the incidence of people doing what is wrong, by arguing the case with others and creating the conditions which make fighting less likely; (b) avoiding being culpably the beneficiary of or causally contributing to others’ violence, by selective forms of withdrawal and/or alternative forms of compensatory positive engagement, 6 such as working for peace and/or being willing to oppose with risks by nonviolent means what others oppose by violence, as Hawk stresses. Put another way, a pacifist will generally have additionally any or all of the following commitments: (a) promoting peace; (b) promoting justice and opposing injustice nonviolently; (c) engaging with others over the ethical issues, including specific issues such as nuclear weapons, child soldiers or landmines (note the issue of degrees or types of wrongness mentioned earlier). In other words, a pacifist usually has a strong cosmopolitan commitment to promoting peace and other values anywhere in the world. Pacifism, however, does not strictly entail such a cosmopolitan approach or any of (a) to (c), for the reasons given in §3.1...
eBook - ePub- Gregory Claeys(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
...Ronald J. Sider Ronald J. Sider Pacifism Pacifism 611 612 Pacifism The word pacifism normally means opposition to all war, indeed all intentional killing of human beings. Although opposition to war is ancient, the word “pacifism” was coined in 1901 (Cortright 2008, 8). There are many varieties of pacifism: religious and secular as well as passive and activist. American Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder distinguished 18 varieties of religious pacifism in Nevertheless (1971). Others, such as American political scientist Gene Sharp, promote nonviolent alternatives on purely secular, pragmatic grounds. Because, for so many, the word “pacifist” has acquired passive connotations of acquiescence to injustice, many contemporary pacifists prefer to speak of activist nonviolence or nonviolent direct action. Within all major world religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity—a pacifist tradition has emerged. Almost always, however, the pacifist community has been a minority voice within its own religious tradition. The history of Christianity illustrates this pattern. For the first 300 years, Christian writings were largely pacifist. There are a number of references to war and killing in extant Christian writings from these early centuries, and almost unanimously they say that Christians must never kill another person. Repeatedly they base this belief on Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies. There is evidence, however, that by the third century, there were increasing numbers of Christians in the Roman army, although the historical evidence is too incomplete for historians to know the numbers with any precision. In the early fourth century, the Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity, and by the end of that century, the great North African theologian, Augustine, bishop of Hippo, had begun to articulate what came to be called the just war doctrine...
