Dissertation Project

The women's peace movement in Western Europe. Networks, circulations and conceptualisations of peace during the Euromissile crisis (1977–1987) (Working title)

In the early 1980s, an unprecedented wave of peace protests swept across Western Europe in response to NATO's 1979 “double-track decision” to enter into negotiations with the USSR and, if these failed, to deploy new intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of major European cities to protest against this “arms race”. Many women took part in these mass demonstrations, including a large number of women who had previously had little or no political involvement. They demonstrated alongside men, but also chose to organise among themselves. New women's pacifist groups (Femmes pour la Paix, Frauen für den Frieden, Vrouwen voor Vrede, etc.) emerged in most European countries.

Despite its importance, the gendered component of the transnational pacifist mobilisations of this period has still been relatively little studied. The aim of this project is to fill this gap and shed new light on this key episode in the twentieth-century pacifist struggle, by reconstructing the history of the transnational women's peace movement. I will consider the ways in which links were forged between pacifist activists on a European scale, the construction of a collective discourse articulating feminist, pacifist and ecologist concerns, and the social and political impact of the movement. The aim is to determine the extent to which gender and the transnational dimension of these protests contributed to the unprecedented resonance of the pacifist movement, the renewal of concepts of peace and peacebuilding, the emergence of a “European consciousness” and the politicisation of women during the final phase of the Cold War.

To this end, this research will first examine the correspondence of activists and a variety of other textual sources produced by the movement in order to trace the phenomena of networking and the circulation of ideas and practices. Party archives, especially those of the Greens, will be used to study the process of institutionalisation of the movement in the 1980s. Finally, these sources will be supplemented by oral interviews, which will allow me to reconstruct the activist and political careers of the activists.

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Silke Mende / Prof. Dr. Antoine Acker (Uni Genf)