Can We Make a Difference?.

• Date: 01 April 2023
• Author: Stockwell, Norman
• Published date: 01 April 2023
• Author: Stockwell, Norman

"They were right," says David S. Meyer in the foreword to A Peaceful Superpower: Lessons from the World's Largest Antiwar Movement, the new book by longtime peace activist David Cortright. Meyer is talking about the millions of people, worldwide, who assembled to oppose the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq.

Meyer, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has authored or co-edited seven books on social movements, argues that the ultimately failed effort to stop the war had "some success, but left much undone." Cortright s book is the first comprehensive, book-length scholarly analysis of that effort, the work that led up to it, and the lessons that can be learned from it.

Cortright began his opposition to war as an active-duty soldier during the U.S. war in Vietnam. He went on to...