Nonviolence Meets Direct Action: A Transnational Encounter of the Interwar Years

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the concept of “direct action” emerged as a major presence in radical politics. In the years following World War I, opponents of war and militarism reshaped that concept. They insisted upon its nonviolent character, they specified how direct action might be used to oppose war, they distinguished direct action from Bolshevism and social democracy, they imagined direct action as a key contributor to a future nonviolent revolution, and they drew upon contemporary struggles from the Ruhr, to Samoa, to India to justify their political claims. The radicals who shared these debates were linked by an energetic transnational network, spanning the War Resisters’ International and the International Antimilitarist Bureau. This article recovers this network, traces the key intellectual contributions, and argues for their significance. It aims to contribute to the intellectual histories of direct action and of nonviolence and to draw attention to previously submerged debates of the radical interwar left.