Review: The World Says No to War

By Jin-Wook Shin

Stefaan Walgrave and Dieter Rucht (eds.). The World Says No to War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

On February 15, 2003, when the protest against the war on Iraq took place in London, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, New York, and many other cities of the world, I was writing the last pages of my doctoral dissertation in Berlin and had the opportunity of joining the historic event. I still remember how excited was by the astonishing size, diversity, and vitality of the people who gathered around the Brandenburger Tor at the city center.

It was like a serious political version of a great festival. Parents pushing a stroller, teenagers dancing together, university students holding antiwar drawings by Käthe Kollwitz, and aged couples who seemed to be familiar with all these scenes—so diverse a range of people were saying the same words: “No War!,” “Stop the War!”

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Learning from Shortcomings and Other Movements

By Eric Stoner

The 10-year anniversary for the movement that sprung up against the war in Iraq is on the horizon, and it presents an opportune time to reflect on its progress, and more importantly, the lessons that can be learned from its shortcomings.

While activists were busy organizing in the fall of 2002, the dramatic debut of the movement’s true size and global dimensions took place on February 15, 2003. On that historic date, millions took to the streets around the world in the largest antiwar protest in history. Two days later, Patrick Tyler wrote in The New York Times that there were now perhaps “two superpowers on the planet—the United States, and worldwide public opinion.”

From the Streets to the Ballot Box: Ending the War in Iraq

By David Cortright

The campaign against the war in Iraq was the largest, most intensive antiwar mobilization in history. On February 15, 2003 an estimated 10 million people demonstrated against the war in hundreds of cities across the globe, the largest single day of antiwar protest ever recorded. A month later another massive wave of global protest occurred, this time at the local level, as millions of people gathered in 6,000 candlelight vigils in more than one hundred countries in a last minute plea against war. People across the globe spoke out as never before in a unified voice against invading Iraq.

Reflections Ten Years Later

By William A. Gamson

It would be an exaggeration to claim that there has been a significant and visible mobilization against the war in Iraq for the past several years.  The misinformation used to justify the war and the failure of any workable formula for the governance of Iraq after the removal of Saddam Hussein rather quickly caused a broad segment of the public to adopt a quagmire frame.  With the election of a President who was critical of the war and who promised to end it in an orderly fashion, the opportunity to mobilize any significant constituency to take collective action to end this war was essentially closed.

Nevertheless, there are some lessons to be drawn from this experience.

Opposition without (Much) Action: Iraq the Later Years

By Lisa Leitz

The number and scale of national protests aimed at ending the Iraq War were significantly smaller beginning in 2007 than they had been in the earlier years and lead-up to the war (see Heaney & Rojas’s 2011).

While many in the peace movement remained active as the Iraq War continued for five more years, their political actions were much more fragmented and radicalized from 2007 onward. The diminishing size and scope of Iraq War protests contradict public opinion because it was not as though the war became popular among Americans in its later years. Instead while public opinion about the Iraq War became more negative, large political actions against the war decreased. In this essay, I examine how civilians’ distance from the Iraq War contributed to this contradiction.

The Policy, Political, and Social Effects of the Antiwar Movement after 9/11

By Michael T. Heaney

Almost 11 years have passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  Those events catalyzed a series of global military actions by the United States, which led to an international social movement opposing these actions, especially against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Given that the antiwar movement has existed largely in abeyance since 2009, enough time has passed to begin to reflect on the policy, political, and social effects of this movement.

Our baseline expectations for the policy effects of the antiwar movement ought to be low.  In general, antiwar movements tend to be less successful in achieving their goals than other social movements because they challenge the security interests of state actors and, thus, receive relatively little facilitation from the state. 

The Iraq War 10 Years Later: Are Formal Coalitions Needed for Mass Mobilization?

By  Catherine Corrigall-Brown

On February 15^th, 2003, millions of people from around the world took part in a series of coordinated protests against the impending war in Iraq. Although estimates of the number of participants ranged from six to thirty million, it was, without a doubt, the single largest protest event in human history to that date (BBC News 2003). Many scholars commented that the unprecedented level of successful global coordination against the war was made possible by the work of institutional leaders cooperating in large scale coalitions (Boekkooi, Klandermans, and van Stekelenburg 2011; Corrigall-Brown and Meyer 2010).  These types of coalitions seemed indispensable for this level of mobilization.  However, the recent success of the intentionally unorganized Occupy movement challenges us to reassess the necessity of formal coalitions between organizations and ask: in what contexts are formal coalitions needed for mass mobilization and how do formal organizational coalitions shape the nature of campaigns?