Fighting for Peace: Veterans and Military Families in the Anti-Iraq War Movement

Description

"Fighting for Peace" brings to light an important yet neglected aspect of opposition to the Iraq War--the role of veterans and their families. Drawing on extensive participant observation and interviews, Lisa Leitz demonstrates how the harrowing war experiences of veterans and their families motivated a significant number of them to engage in peace activism. Married to a Navy pilot herself, Leitz documents how military peace activists created a movement that allowed them to merge two seemingly contradictory sides of their lives: an intimate relation to the military and antiwar activism. Members of the movement strategically deployed their combined military-peace activist identities to attract media attention, assert their authority about the military and war, and challenge dominant pro-war sentiment. By emphasizing the human costs of war, activists hoped to mobilize American citizens and leaders who were detached from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bring the wars to an end, and build up programs to take care of returning veterans and their families. The stories in "Fighting for Peace" ultimately reveal that America's all-volunteer force is contributing to a civilian-military divide that leaves civilians with little connection to the sacrifices of the military. Increasingly, Leitz shows, veterans and their families are being left to not only fight America's wars but also to fight against them.

Lisa Leitz is assistant professor of sociology and director of Project Pericles at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. She is married to a U.S. naval aviator who flew missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and she was a speaker on the Iraq War and military issues for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign.

"Lisa Leitz has effectively built on classic articles and books in social movement studies to tell a new story: that of the particular experiences of veterans and their families who choose to break the bonds of military silence. Fighting for Peace offers a data-rich study of how identity development and deployment is critical to movement growth. Leitz also deepens our understanding of emotion work and why it is essential to the construction of a collective identity among movement participants." -Lynne M. Woehrle, Mount Mary University "Fighting for Peace is a remarkable chronicle of veterans and military families, the military peace community, which was actively trying to stop the US war on Iraq. Leitz, as both a military spouse and a social scientist, observed with a trained eye how military peace groups organized and interacted among themselves, as well as with other anti-war groups. Leitz's analysis of these groups' efforts brings back great memories of tens of thousands of citizens working together to attempt to end the wars." -Col. Ann Wright, co-author of DISSENT: Voices of Conscience "Leitz has put together a credible book detailing a movement that works on behalf of the needs of war veterans in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has shifted its own emphasis to speaking out against future wars." -Publishers Weekly