The Case for Pacifism and Conscientious Objection: A Reply to Professor G. C. Field. By Rev.E. L. Allen, Francis E. Pollard, and G. A. Sutherland. (London: Central Board for Conscientious Objectors. 1946. No price given.)

Philosophy ◽  
1947 ◽  
Vol 22 (83) ◽  
pp. 277-279
Author(s):  
Helen Wodehouse
Keyword(s):  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
Central Board

Conscientious Objection (European and American approaches)

Law and World ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-144
Keyword(s):  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
State Regulation ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
State Regulations ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual

The Article concerns the legal issues, connected with the situation, when a person (or group of people) disobey requirements of the Law or other State regulations on the basis of religious or nonreligious belief. The Author analyses almost all related issues – whether imposing certain obligation on individuals, to which the individual has a conscientious objection based on his/her religious beliefs, always represents interference with his/her religion rights, and if it does, then what is subject of the interference – forum integrum or forum externum; whether neutral regulation, which does not refer to religion issues at all, could ever be regarded as interference into someone’s religious rights; whether opinion or belief, on which the individual’s objection and the corresponding conduct is based, must necesserily represent the clear “manifest” of the same religion or belief in order to gain legal protection; what is regarded as “manifest” of the religion or other belief in general and whether a close and direct link must exist between personal conduct and requirements of the religious or nonreligious belief; what are the criteria of the “legitimacy” of the belief; to what extent the following factors should be taken into consideration : whether the personal conduct of the individual represents the official requirements of corresponding religion or belief, what is the burden which was imposed on the believer’s religious or moral feelings by the State regulation, also, proportionality and degree of sincerity of the individual who thinks that his disobidience to the Law is required by his/her religious of philosofical belief. The effects (direct or non direct) of the nonfulfilment of the law requirement (legal responsibility, lost of the job, certain discomfort, etc..) are relevant factors as well. By the Author, all these circumstances and factors are essencial while estimating, whether it arises, actually, a real necessity and relevant obligation before a state for making some exemptions from the law to the benefi t of the conscientious objectors, in cases, if to predict such an objection was possible at all. So, the issues are discussed in the prism of the negative and positive obligations of a State. Corresponding precedents of the US Supreme Court and European Human Rights Court have been presented and analysed comparatively by the Author in the Article. The Article contains an important resume, in which the main points, principal issues and conclusion remarks are delivered. The Author shows, that due analysis of the legal aspects typical to “Conscientious objection” is very important for deep understanding religious rights, not absolute ones, and facilitates finding a correct answer on the question – how far do their boundaries go?

Teachers as Conscientious Objectors

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doris A. Santoro
Keyword(s):  
Education Reform ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Global Education ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
Teacher Resistance ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
Research On Teaching ◽  
Moral Dimensions ◽  
Support Students

Teachers often characterize their interest in and commitment to the profession as moral: a desire to support students, serve their communities, or uphold civic ideals embedded in the promise of public education. These initial and sustaining moral impulses are well documented in research on teaching and teacher education. However, moral commitments can also be a source of teachers’ dissatisfaction and resistance, especially in the age of the market-based Global Education Reform Movement. This article explores the phenomenon of conscientious objection in teaching as an enactment of professional ethics. Conscientious objection describes teachers’ actions when they take a stand against job expectations that contradict or compromise their professional ethics. Teachers who refuse to enact policies and practices may be represented by popular media, school leaders, policymakers, and educational researchers as merely recalcitrant or insubordinate. This perspective misses the moral dimensions of resistance. Teachers may refuse to engage in practices or follow mandates from the standpoint of professional conscience. This article also highlights varieties of conscientious objection that are drawn from global examples of teacher resistance. Finally, the article explores the role of teachers unions as potential catalysts for collective forms of conscientious objection.

Part 1 Freedom of Religion or Belief, 1.3.11 Conscientious Objection

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bielefeldt Heiner, Prof ◽  
Ghanea Nazila, Dr ◽  
Wiener Michael, Dr
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
National Anthem ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
Lethal Force ◽  
Compulsory Military Service ◽  
Normative Basis ◽  
Military Expenditures ◽  
Alternative Service

This chapter addresses issues concerning conscientious objection, notably the refusal by individuals to perform compulsory military service based on their genuinely held religious or other beliefs that forbid the use of lethal force. Throughout the past five decades, various international and regional human rights mechanisms have significantly changed their interpretation with regard to the existence and normative basis of a right to conscientious objection to military service. This chapter also discusses the question of who can claim conscientious objection; procedural issues; the problem of repeated trials and punishment of conscientious objectors; the nature and length of alternative service; refugee status claims based on persecution arising from conscientious objection; and conscientious objection in disputed territories. In addition, there are several issues of interpretation related to ‘selective’ objection against participating in certain wars and ‘total’ objection even against alternative civilian service. In addition to conscientious objection to military service, also other issues may give rise to objections, for example against the obligation to pay taxes for military expenditures; against carrying out abortions; against a duty to join a hunting association; against singing the national anthem or saluting the flag; and conscientious objection in the employment sphere.

Necropolitics, Martyrdom and Muslim Conscientious Objection

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-159
Author(s):  
Pınar Kemerli
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
Islamic Political Thought

The war between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement has been the site of multiple forms of necropolitical violence, including killing and torture, indiscriminate exposure of the Kurdish population to state violence, and recently, the desecration of the Kurdish dead and prevention of customary burial practices. Military conscription and martyrdom discourses have been complicit in not only justifying this necropolitical violence, but also inspiring enthusiasm to participate in it as a form of national and religious duty. In this chapter, I examine the role played by militaristic invocations of Islamic warfare and martyrdom in the Turkish conscript army in the legitimisation of necropolitical violence from the perspective of those who refuse this necropoliticisation: a group of Muslim Conscientious Objectors (COs) who refuse the draft and peacefully accept the consequences of their criminalised refusal. Disputing the state’s necropoliticisation of theological concepts, Muslim COs marshal dissenting interpretations of Islamic martyrdom through their own readings of the religious texts and other resources derived from Islamic political thought and history. In the hands of Muslim COs, Islamic martyrdom becomes a form of life-affirmation to be achieved through refusing necropolitical violence, thereby suggesting conscientious objection to be a possible venue to resist necropolitics.

RELIGIOUS MILITARISM AND ISLAMIST CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION IN TURKEY

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pınar Kemerli
Keyword(s):  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
National School ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis ◽  
Military Conscript

AbstractThis article focuses on Islamist conscientious objectors (COs) in Turkey who have resisted both mandatory conscription and the Turkish state's use of Islamic discourses of jihad and martyrdom to legitimize it. Examining military conscript training and the post-1980 coup national school curriculum, the article first outlines the Turkish state's production of a particular interpretation of Islam and its dissemination of it through nationalist and militarist discourses and practices. The article then pursues an ethnographic analysis of Islamist COs’ resistance to conscription through nonviolent civil disobedience based on antiauthoritarian and antinationalist interpretations of Islam. Weaving together their own interpretations of jihad and martyrdom with transnational theories and ideologies, Islamist COs present a powerful critique of Turkish militarism and its religious claims. A focus on Islamist COs potently highlights the diversity of Islamic groups and sensibilities in contemporary Turkey, and the difficulties faced by nationalist projects to discipline religious imaginaries and put them to the service of the modern state.

Morally Puzzled Individuals in a Morally Puzzled Community: Resisting Israeli Soldiers during War in Lebanon and the Intifada

1994 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 423-434
Author(s):  
R. Linn
Keyword(s):  
Contextual Factors ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
Moral Thinking ◽  
Moral Ground ◽  
Factors Associated ◽  
Moral Atmosphere ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Israeli Soldiers

The particularity of the phenomenon of selective conscientious objection to given war objectives or conduct in the war requires an inquiry beyond individual moral character. This paper follows Walzer's 1970 suggestion that objection on moral ground is not solely the product of an individual's moral thinking but rather a function of the character of the community as well as the relations between them. The paper focuses on the experience of 48 selective conscientious objectors throughout the first four years of the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories. Their experience is compared with that of the selective refusers during the war in Lebanon. Special attention is given to the moral atmosphere in which these actions have been taken and the contextual factors associated with their decision to refuse.

Resistance at the Limits: Feminist Activism and Conscientious Objection in Israel

2012 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Natanel
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
The Relationship

This article investigates the relationship between feminism and conscientious objection in Israel, evaluating the efficacy of feminist resistance in the organised refusal movement. While recent feminist scholarship on peace, anti-occupation and anti-militarism activism in Israel largely highlights women's collective action, it does so at the risk of eliding the relations of power within these groups. Expanding the scope of consideration, I look to the experiences of individual feminist conscientious objectors who make visible significant tensions through their accounts of military refusal and participation in the organised conscientious objection movement. Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article problematises feminist activism in the organised Israeli refusal movement through three primary issues: political voice; privilege; and the realisation of gender agendas. Using Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of power as it has been critiqued and qualified by feminist scholars, I consider the ways in which resistance may be both multiple and a diagnostic of power, allowing activists and academics not only to envision new avenues for social change, but also to recognise their constraints. Critically, feminist theories of intersectionality enrich and complicate this Foucauldian approach to power, providing further modes of critique and strategy in the context of feminist activism in Israel. Ultimately, I argue not only for engagement with the limits of power, but also attention to their function, as in theory and praxis these boundaries critically inform our theorising on gender and resistance.

Conscientious Objectors with Psychiatric States

1943 ◽  
Vol 89 (374) ◽  
pp. 52-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Stalker
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Disorder ◽  
Psychiatric Patients ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
Professional Interest

Conscientious objection is a problem involving both personalities and society. It has important military, political, ethical, religious and sometimes psychiatric aspects. It is only where conscientious objection arises in a person who shows signs of psychiatric disorder that the psychiatrist has to take an active professional interest. He has sometimes to treat patients struggling with the problem of conscientious objection and sometimes has to report on them to the Recruiting Medical Boards. Thus this aspect of conscientious objection becomes a part of war psychiatry. My own interest in the problem was aroused by seeing a number of psychiatric patients who were objectors.

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