1st Edition

Pacifism Histories, Social Contexts, Activism

Edited By Nicholas Birns, John Kinsella Copyright 2026
146 Pages
by Routledge

146 Pages
by Routledge

This book offers a profound and necessary re-evaluation of pacifism, positioning it not merely as a negative stance against war, but as a comprehensive philosophical orientation toward living and ethical engagement. Moving beyond conventional political and historical limitations, the collection interrogates the radical intellectual and practical potential of non-violence in the twenty-first... Read more

Introduction

John Kinsella

1. Reintroducing Jonathan Dymond (1796-1818): A Quaker Pacifist Powerhouse

Petros Spanou

2. Pacifist Historiography: Anabaptist Historiography Between Normativity and Description and Beyond Neutralization and Polarization

Maxwell Kennel

3. Bethinking Ourselves: Tolstoy, Pacifism, and Critiques of Eurocentrism

Nicholas Birns

4. Anarcho-Pacifism: The General Strike and its Aftermath in Arnold Roller’s The Social General Strike

Brendan Brown

5. Making Time for Peace: Virginia Woolf, Pat Barker, and “Peace Time”

Krista Kauffmann

6. Portrait Of a Pacifist as a Young Man

Robert S. White

7. Feminist Voices of Dissent: Counternarratives of Pacifism from The Arab Spring

Erin Ammann Holliday-Karre

8. San’Si’In-Ship? Towards A Meditational Ethics of Custodianship

Dan Disney

Biography

Nicholas Birns is a literary scholar specializing in postcolonial and Australian literature. He authored Theory After Theory (2010), Contemporary Australian Literature (2015), and The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space (2019). Co-editor of The Cambridge Conpanion to the Australian Novel (2023) and Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature (2016), he has published widely on writers ranging from Roberto Bolaño to Agatha Christie. He teaches at NYU.

John Kinsella, world-renowned Australian poet, novelist, critic, and ecological activist, holds a fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. His recent works include three collected poetry volumes: The Ascension of Sheep (2022), Harsh Hakea (2023), and Spirals (2024); the critical work Legibility: An Anti-Fascist Poetics (2022);  the verse novel Cellnight (2023); the novel The Mahler Erasures (2024);The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems (2025) and a collection of new poetry, Aporia (2025). He has written over 70 books and is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Australia.