Questioning the warist orthodoxy: pacifist critical reflections on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Pacifists are used to finding their arguments being dismissed as naive or even dangerous, especially once war has erupted. Yet this is precisely when pacifist arguments are arguably at their sharpest, and when questioning the ‘warist’ orthodoxy is most urgent. This article demonstrates the point by articulating three sets of pacifist critical reflections on the reactions to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. First, enough evidence has mounted about the relative effectiveness of nonviolent (compared to violent) methods of civil resistance to ask the question: how might a coordinated national campaign of Ukrainian nonviolent resistance have compared to the way the war has unfolded to date? Second, the defaulting to a military response that nonetheless prevailed rests on two ingrained assumptions that pacifists query: on the efficacy of violence as an instrument, and on the place of violence in ‘human nature’. Third, war also transforms agents of violence politically, economically and culturally, thus further entrenching centralization, militarism, ‘warism’ and their concomitant dangers. It is too late to apply such pacifist reflections to the conduct of the war in Ukraine up to the present, but it is not too late to do so in the context of any ongoing tensions in the region, or indeed in the context of defence planning the world over.