The connection between literature about war and humanitarianism is complex. The war novel tends towards a human rights ethos that demands accountability for war atrocities. These novels express antiwar views, whereas humanitarianism’s genealogy in the laws of war reflects an acceptance of war as inevitable. Humanitarian discourse deploys a narrative paradigm that sees human suffering in war through trauma. In fiction, it frequently foregrounds the role of doctors and nurses as witnesses to war’s suffering. The resulting attention to victims’ disempowerment effectively reinforces the global inequality of lives and is problematic. This chapter argues that postcolonial literature of war offers a counterwitnessing that exceeds the affective accounts of trauma narratives and foregrounds the breach in humanitarianism’s imperative to save lives. Postcolonial literature’s critical engagement with war centers on the achievement of radical equality and visibility of all lives.

This essay explores women’s antiwar activism in New York, California, and Kansas demonstrating the national breadth and regional diversity of pacifist and peace organizing. The essay identifies some of the individual women who raised their voices and pens against the war and includes some of the antiwar and pacifist organizations women created or joined including the Woman’s Peace Party, the People’s Council, and the Union Against Militarism. It argues that women of the First World War peace movement linked state-sanctioned violence in war with state-sanctioned violence against women, children, and the poor. Women thus contributed to the process by which the peace movement transitioned from defining peace as the absence of war to defining peace as the presence of social, economic, and political justice.