Contesting Patriotism: Culture, Power, and Strategy in the Peace Movement

Contesting patriotism: culture, power, and strategy in the peace movement by Lynn M. Woehrle; Patrick G. Coy; Gregory M. Maney. Article in Policy Sciences.
Table of contents

JSTOR: Access Check

How much fear has the regime created? How strong is a desire for revenge? What new information might be of interest to the public? What metaphors might resonate with the electorate right now? Is our message to our constituency of supporters or to the general citizenry? Do we focus on societal issues or frame the message personally? Can we create a coalition among disparate identity groups to oppose war? In short, how can we remove the wedges that keep us separated from each other and instead create bridges and bonds for peace?

While the ranges of responses are organized remarkably well, there is no hint of how the messaging may have actually worked—the deeper knowledge we need about the transformative effects. Was the United States really exposed to that oppositional transformative knowledge, or was it just sent out in press releases that editors of mainstream media ignored?

This leads the reader to hope for additional study in some practical directions, including:. This is a book for activists, particularly those constructing arguments and seeking to understand why certain arguments are more powerful under which conditions—timing, public sentiments and the zeitgeist, policy anticipation and effective amplification of the message, coalition-building strategies, and general message construction and deconstruction.

However, Contesting Patriotism will have more value for organizers with graduate degrees or at least a degree in peace studies—this is a first-rate academic text.

You are here

These peace sociologists are just the team to do it. Hastings pcwtom [at] gmail. Antimilitarist Swag Get 'em here! Skip to main content. Capturing Hearts and Minds: Emotions and Peace Appeals Chapter 7 Chapter 5: Unraveling Hegemony, Spinning New Threads. It is a page serving of some much needed analysis of the modern American peace movement, more specifically, how it has managed to play an important role in balancing the popular discourse about war and patriotism.


  • A Complete Stranger.
  • Culture, Power, and Strategy in the Peace Movement.
  • Contesting Patriotism: Culture, Power, and Strategy in the Peace Movement | War Resisters League.
  • Resisting War at Home & War Abroad since 1923.

It is a work of great significance in an area of research that, as the authors themselves point out, has been neglected for far too long. The authors here make a valuable contribution to the study of how peace and justice movements grapple with these important questions. In the process, they also show it is time for the universities to devote more resources to conflict resolution studies.

Movement Politics: From Protest to Power (full video)

That's why the peace movement has hungered of late for an informed, analytic framework to assess where we are and where we go next. Woehrle, Coy and Maney provide rich, deep, but fully accessible research that will sharpen our focus, increase our effectiveness, and provoke our community to "smart growth" through self-reflection. This is a very timely gift.

Citation Tools

It will give us direction with its GPS-like utility, and it offers encouragement in its C. Wright Mills-like sensibility for social change as a legitimate expression of patriotism. But the wars-and the worries-persist.

Book Review: Contesting Patriotism: Culture, Power, and Strategy in the Peace Movement

What should we do? Contesting Patriotism gives us a language to talk about our dilemmas. In it, Lynne Woehrle, Pat Coy, and Greg Maney describe the rhetoric used by peace organizations and then give us real solutions as we look to the future. Contesting Patriotism is an academic book, complete with an page bibliography, but it's written by professors who are themselves activists and is eminently readable.

Access Check

It's a must-read for anyone who wants to move from wailing about strategy to truly working for peace.. This carefully reasoned and richly researched book provides a set of tools to help reshape the discourse about who speaks for America in matters of war and peace. This timely book is vitally important for all who seek new ways to turn this country away from the catastrophic policies that, in the name of patriotism, have deeply harmed Americans' interests at home and abroad. Globalization and Race in the United States We wring our hands about the culture of violence that pervades our nation, and some of us expend enormous energy trying to change our country's rhetoric from one of war to one of peace.

It's a "must-read" for anyone who wants to move from wailing about strategy to truly working for peace.

Contesting Patriotism

Woehrle, Coy, and Maney provide rich, deep, but fully accessible research that will sharpen our focus, increase our effectiveness, and provoke our community to great coherence through self-reflection and cross-movement dialogue. The authors combed through a great deal of peace group arguments and isolated the strongest persuasive writing, contextualized it, and compared contexts.

The study is well-structured and progresses logically…. It is an ideal book for postgraduate students….