Diverging in Peace: (Inter)Religious Internationalism, Interwar Pacifism, and a World Conference that Never Happened

Abstract

Abstract:The end of the First World War heralded a new age of internationalist and pacifist action. After initial hopes for peace and international justice, however, soon followed disillusionment about a post-war order that left little room for the aspirations of colonized people and those nations not amongst the winners of the new geopolitical order. The present article analyses interwar pacifism as a polycentric discourse, moving beyond earlier Anglo-American and European-centered approaches. It introduces the World Conference for International Peace through Religion, an initiative by the American Church Peace Union, focusing on the (inter)actions of its American, German, Indian, and Japanese members. The World Conference set out to tackle world peace from a perspective outside of formal politics and international relations in hopes that religion might succeed where politicians and secular activists had failed. In the end, however, the organization never achieved its ambitious goals due to internal contradictions, differing visions of peace and international (or transnational) justice, and structural problems like the persisting connections of its f(o)unders to the American Protestant missionary milieu.