Post 9/11

Abstract

This book sets out to analyse the anti-war movement in Britain during the opening years of the 21st century. To address this subject adequately we need first to detail the circumstances in which anti-war activism developed over this period. That such activity is shaped by conditions beyond activists themselves is scarcely contentious, since it is obvious that it has waxed and waned depending on broad trends and issues. It would be hard, for instance, to comprehend the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)-led protests during the late 1950s and early 1960s without acknowledging the post-war rivalries of the Soviet Union and the United States, just as the re-emergence of anti-war protests in the early 1980s owes much to the Second Cold War of that time and to NATO’s decisions to relocate nuclear missiles across Europe. None of this is to suggest that the anti-war activists, who are our main concern, are merely respondents to external forces rather than pro-active agents of change. Without trivializing the strength of protesters’ convictions or organizational efforts, we nevertheless recognize that those beliefs and actions are conditioned partly by their historical situation. For this reason, we begin by setting out the wider contexts within which our subject is situated.