The Peace Movements Project

How did peace movements navigate colonialism and decolonization? Our five-year global history project studies how local peace movements across the decolonizing world have connected to international peace organizations from the early 1900s onwards. Each of our subprojects focuses on a specific region, which we bring together in a shared analytical framework and data visualization of the international connections of the peace advocates we study.

We are based at the Institute for History of Leiden University, and we are funded by the European Research Council and the Dutch Research Council. Our team members work on peace movements in West-Africa, North Africa, South Asia, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, and we research the international connections these movements built. Such connections took many forms, ranging from institutionalized forms of cooperation, to protests, marches, and intentional communities. They centered on shared methods, goals, or on specific issues such as conscientious objection or nuclear disarmament.

We are always eager to hear from researchers whose interests align with ours! We will host an international conference on peace movements and decolonization in Leiden in the academic year of 2026/2027, so do tell us about your work! You can also find us on Bluesky @peacemovtsproject@bsky.social.

Follow our progress

We are building a dataset of peace activism and the decolonizing world (under construction – more soon!

On 26 May 2026, we organized a workshop in Rome entitled Trame di Pace: Italian Peace Advocacy and the Decolonizing World. A special issue is in the works!

We participated in the “New Methods for New Histories” conference of the amazing Rethinking Internationalism AHRC project. The collaboration resulted in a series of pieces for History Workshop in the Spring of 2026:

Henrike’s piece entitled Collaborative Digital Histories of Global Peace Movements on the connections our dataset is uncovering

Kamila’s piece on Soviet Internationalism and Kazakh Grassroots Activism

Carolien’s Marching for Peace in the Footsteps of the Saint on the links between grassroots activism, international conferencing, and internationalist thought

In November 2025, we participated in the biannual conference of the Peace History Society in Mt. Berry, GA, before heading to the Peace Collection in Swarthmore for a second collaborative research week (for the first collaborative research week at the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, see our Events page).