In newly independent Ghana in June of 1962, an unexpected group of people gathered together in Accra to discuss a pressing issue: the abolition of nuclear weapons. As with many international meetings on the nuclear question, the participants included mostly well-known American pacifists and European experts on disarmament. But there were also delegates from Africa, Asia and South America with widely divergent backgrounds. Those participating in working commissions included, for example, Tomiko Kora (a Japanese Quaker pacifist), Abdalla Obeid (an Afro-Asianist from Sudan), Ebenezer Quaye (the mayor of Accra) and many other activists, intellectuals and politicians. The discussions among non-Western representatives made a mark on the conference. Propositions were made for a nuclear-free Africa and for turning military funding into development assistance for former colonies. Throughout the twentieth century, at international peace conferences across the globe, people like Kora, Obeid and Quaye shared their views on how to achieve world peace. But in conventional histories of peace internationalism, it has been the European and American peace activists who have been remembered.
To address this issue, the Peace Movements & Decolonisation Project that I am a part of aims to foreground a more global perspective on peace movements. Housed at the University of Leiden and funded by the European and Dutch Research Council, our project consists of a team of seven historians in different career stages. We each work on the connections between peace movements across the decolonising world and the international peace movement in the 20th century from different angles. Our personal projects focus on specific histories, such as anti-nuclear activism in Kazakhstan in the 1990s and Cold War-era Indonesian women’s peace internationalism. The heart of our project, however, is a collective endeavour: the creation of a dataset mapping the historical events in which links between peace and decolonisation were discussed, and the historical actors who participated in these events. This digital method of historical inquiry provides not only a collaborative way of studying global peace movements but also a means of communicating our findings to a broader public audience in interactive ways. So, how exactly are we using digital history methods to help us write new, global histories of peace internationalism?
Digital history offers promising avenues into exploring and highlighting the incredible diversity of participants in peace internationalism. The history of peace movements has long been dominated by narratives about European and American pacifists and organisations. We believe that it is time for a more nuanced perspective, one that recognises the activities and ideas of actors from the decolonising world within these movements. We have been inspired by digital history projects which have revealed the roles of non-Western, non-state actors across different networks of internationalism. Take for example the Afro-Asian Networks project, which created a visual mapping tool drawing on data from the international conferences of the Afro-Asian solidarity movement in the Cold War. More recently, the Pan-African data-project has published interactive data from their research into Pan-Africanist events between 1900 and 1960. Both projects offer insights into the diversity of people active in the Afro-Asian and Pan-African movements, while highlighting the amount of work which remains to be done on lesser-known activists, politicians and intellectuals. Building on these projects, we hope to address such absences in the history of international peace movements.
Our dataset is structured around what we call ‘centres of peace’: events where people engaged with questions of peace and decolonisation, between roughly 1920 and 1980. These ‘centres of peace’ comprise a wide range of events, from the conferences of international peace organisations and cross-border peace marches to cosmopolitan ashrams. We have specifically selected events which were either organised in the decolonising world or had the participation of people from the decolonising world. To make the dataset as representative of the international peace movement as possible, we aim to include data on all conferences organised by a selection of peace organisations. Our selection includes the wide ideological breadth of the peace movement, from the absolute pacifist War Resisters’ International, the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Council and the feminist Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, to the South-India based spiritual World Union.
The beginning of an entry in the dataset always starts with the finding of a source in an archive. The anti-nuclear Accra Assembly I mentioned in the opening of this essay is one example. I was carrying out research in the British Library when I came across a delegate list for the June 1962 conference. It briefly listed the participants’ names, nationalities and the organisations they represented as delegates. This source was merely a fragment. Yet, participant lists of this kind, which contain only sparse information about attendees, are among the most common sources that we use to build our dataset. It is the dataset itself which helps connect many fragments like this to create a bigger picture. I sent the source to my colleague Julian Grob, who transformed this list into data. Biographies of participants, with names, origins and related organisations were all filled into the dataset. There, the connections were laid bare, thanks to existing data entries from our collaborative work. Delegates to the Accra Assembly whom I had never heard of, turned out to be important peace actors. Take the mayor of Accra, Ebenezer Quaye. He was already in the database as he had travelled to Japan on at least two occasions to join anti-nuclear conferences. Abdalla Obeid travelled to Moscow a few years later to join a conference of the Soviet sponsored World Peace Council. And Tomi Kora? She was a leading pacifist and Quaker, already active in the international pacifist movement from the late 1940s.
Piecing archival fragments together is a strength of this digital method. But archives, and sources, that can speak to these international stories are scattered across the globe. It is therefore essential to collaborate: to share sources, knowledge and language skills. Our team’s varied regional specialisms and interests make it possible to bring a collection of sources together that would be impossible for one researcher alone. While I searched through archives in London, my colleagues collected materials in India, Indonesia and Tunisia, which we connected in the database. This collaborative, data-oriented approach leads to new insights about the history of global peace activism. When we bring these diverse archives together, some – in many cases virtually unknown – peace activists from the decolonising world start popping up across the globe at conferences, protests or marches. The data makes clear that they functioned as central nodes in international peace networks. The dataset makes peace actors from Africa, Asia and South America visible, and then, the real work begins: researching and writing the history of peace internationalism in the decolonising world.
In many ways, the dataset is a call to action. We want to encourage research into the people and events that made the international peace movement truly global. Our privileged position as a funded project based in a university in the Global North makes it possible for most of our researchers to travel without visa restrictions. This is not possible for many historians, and it is therefore essential that we not only collaborate but share our data, sources and knowledge with as wide an audience as possible. The entire dataset will be published online in open-access format, having considered the FAIR principles for sharing and storing data. Additionally, the dataset will be published on an interactive website. Here, users themselves can filter the data, create maps and look at the networks behind the international peace movement. This is made possible by the data environment Nodegoat, built specifically to accommodate historical data, which we use to create our dataset. This interactive environment makes it easy for users to explore the data based on their own interests. Interested in peace activists from Algeria in the 1960s? Once you filter data, you can see the Algerians who travelled to Tokyo for anti-nuclear conferences. Curious about women’s peace activism in Sri Lanka? In two clicks you have a list of women who attended conferences from Berlin to Beijing, whom we still know very little about.
Users can use the dataset as an encyclopaedia, a first step in tracing peace activists and movements from the decolonising world. But the data can also be used to track broader developments. Which international peace organisations were most engaged with the question of decolonisation? What role did women from the decolonising world play in networks of peace internationalism? A birds-eye view on the data that we are developing might speak to these questions and many more.
By connecting sources dispersed across diverse archives, our digital history project creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Anyone exploring the dataset will be struck by the remarkable diversity of actors, ideologies and backgrounds that made the international peace movement. The Accra Assembly is just one of many forums in which Gandhians, Afro-Asianists, pacifists and anti-imperialists debated the meaning and aims of peace internationalism. Such discussions took place among internationalists across unexpected ‘centres of peace’ throughout the 20th century – we invite readers to explore our dataset and discover the diverse networks, encounters and exchanges that shaped the global history of peace internationalism.