Organization And Mobilization In Modern American Peace Campaigns

Organizing for Peace skillfully compares and analyzes the three major campaigns of the peace movement in the United States since World War I - the Emergency Peace Campaign (1936-1937), the Atomic Test Ban Campaign (1957-1963), and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (1979-1986). Kleidman shows how the campaigns organizational dynamics shaped their rise, course, fall, and impact both on public policy and on the peace movement itself. But as Kleidman points out, the three groups failed despite widespread mobilization and intense activism. Combining careful historical research with insights from contemporary social movement theory, this book sheds new light on the campaigns and the peace movement, as well as on key aspects of social movement organizations, cycles, and trends. Particularly valuable for policy and analysis is Kleidman's framework of organizational tensions. Social scientists and historians, particularly students and scholars of social movements and peace movements, will value the policy implications and analytical rigor of this book.

In November 1969 tens of thousands of demonstrators converged on Washington, D.C., to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. For four days they marched, sang, and made speeches calling for an end to the war; then they dispersed. Who were these people and what brought them together? Who was in charge and what did they hope to accomplish? What real effect did the event have on public opinion or foreign policy? In The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism, Charles Chatfield explores such questions as they relate to the peace movement from the early nineteenth century up to the present. Combining a broad historical scope with a sociological perspective, the study examines the movement as a social process--an interaction of organizations, strategies, and goals. Chatfield analyzes public attitudes toward peace, war, and foreign policy, and the shifting constituencies of the various peace coalitions as the movement responded to specific challenges of the international situation. Detailed portrayals of events, goals, strategies, and leaders help bring the story of the peace movement vividly to life.

Context matters, as students of social movements increasingly agree, and yet very little attention has been paid to the role geography plays in activism. Geography and Social Movements corrects this oversight, bringing a geographical perspective to the study of social movements. Byron A. Miller directly addresses the implications of space, place, and scale in social movement mobilization, and then demonstrates their significance in a detailed comparative analysis of peace movements in three municipalities around Boston. In focusing on the Boston area -- an old northeastern region, heavily industrialized with many companies working on military contracts, and also a center of education -- Miller is able to explore how campaigns aimed at curbing nuclear arms operate within the cultural, political, social, and economic confines of particular places and spaces. He shows how the decisions and actions of local peace movement organizations played a central role in the movement's successes and failures, and how local organizations had to respond to the differing class, race, and gender characteristics of different locales. Miller's empirical analysis clearly demonstrates that geographic strategies for social movement organizations have direct consequences for the successes and failures of specific campaigns.

Twelve contributions apply recent theory on movements to the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s. Subject areas include the development of the freeze movement, its social and political impact, and the question of whether the movement simply disintegrated or was transformed into other forms of activism. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR