Gandhi in the West

It is important to be aware of what Sean Scalmer, the author of this book, does not do. The book’s wide-ranging title promises more than is actually delivered. This is really a study of the reception of Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience among British pacifists and some sections within the African-American civil rights movement from the 1940s to the early 1960s. If ‘the West’ is a useful category of analysis at all, this rather small sample does not qualify as such. Non-violent resistance also mattered greatly for Italian and German pacifists and activists during this period, but they are not covered here. The author also passes by the role of the War Resisters’ International as a clearing ground for ideas about activism, and thus neglects some of the more recent writings on the transnational histories of the subject. Moreover, he does not aim to explain why some protest movements adopted non-violent forms of resistance while other activists regarded such forms as too timid, reformist and therefore ultimately ineffective. Scalmer does not, in other words, provide us with a history that situates non-violent forms of protest more broadly within politics and political culture

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