Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is an anglophone novel that aspires to heal the effects of conquest and colonization through a decolonial politics that accepts hybridity, recognizes the sensitive work involved in transitions, and embraces Indigenous knowledge. Even as Silko celebrates hybridization, transitions, and boundary-crossing, she recognizes that these processes have a dangerous side – specifically, the potentially world-destroying effects of the nuclear arms race. The novel shows that settler colonialism is one aspect of an unfolding pattern that denies limits and boundaries; with the invention of nuclear weapons, it threatens to destroy the world. Silko’s message echoes Vine Deloria, Jr.’s 1974 essay “Non-Violence in American Society,” commenting on the era’s social justice movements. Giving narrative form to Deloria’s message, in Ceremony the multiple strands of Silko’s political thought – the Native American Renaissance and decolonization, environmentalism, feminism, antiwar and anti-nuclear activism – are woven together in a story that is also a healing ceremony for readers. Ceremony aims to create a world where indigeneity emerges as the dominant force for a world at risk that is also a world in transition.

Elite Chinese scientists’ prominence within the World Federation of Scientific Workers during the 1950s opened many new opportunities for those scientists and the Chinese party-state alike. Examining the origins and evolution of the on-again off-again relationship between China and the early Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Chapter 2 discusses the decision-making processes and key episodes that shaped this relationship. From Chinese policymakers and officials’ internal debates over the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955 through to the end of Mao-era engagement with Pugwash at the fateful Moscow Conference in 1960, Chinese involvement in Pugwash during this period shows the shifting dynamic tension created by a system in which foreign policymakers expected scientists to act as state agents in their international activities. Much of the time, this saw senior Chinese Communist Party leaders or foreign relations officials able to actively shape the Chinese side of these international encounters; however, particularly in the case of those taking place in person and overseas, scientists were the ones who were carrying out the interactions, creating the potential for them to exercise some agency in how they were conducted and reported back.

This chapter chronicles Canada’s emergence as a middle power on the global stage and as a champion of peacekeeping in the Cold War environment. Canadians meanwhile embraced a range of human rights legislation, engaged in an unprecedented outpouring of cultural expression; adopted a series of welfare state measures culminating in Medicare (1968); legislated bilingualism (1969) to accommodate the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec; and implemented a policy of multiculturalism (1971) to integrate the influx of immigrants. The postwar liberal consensus began to fall apart with the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, which blunted economic growth. The Parti Québécois won the 1976 Quebec election, promising to hold a referendum on independence; Indigenous peoples vigorously challenged centuries of settler oppression; corporate agendas began to trump all other concerns; oil-rich Alberta mounted vigorous opposition to the 1980 National Energy Policy; and environmental degradation called into question the very survival of life on Earth. With the support of Quebec, Liberal governments remained in office federally for most of this period and Pierre Elliott Trudeau cemented his place in history in 1982 by “pratriating” the Constitution, which included a popular Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Quebec refused to sign the Constitution Act leading to a decade of fruitless constitutional negotiations.

In the 1980s, many disillusioned East Germans dropped out of the official social system and created a parallel civil society within the Protestant Church, striving towards disarmament, demilitarisation and environmentalism. While these activists sought to eschew politics, the SED’s repression of a social sphere outside of party-approved organisations demonstrated to many that political reform was imperative to achieving even purely moral goals such as peace. In 1986, a small group of activists created the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, sparking a rallying cry for disparate groups of disaffected East Germans, who invoked human rights not as the antithesis of socialism but as a core value forgotten and abused by the SED. Simultaneously, the SED’s ideological bulwark against such a movement began to crumble as it sought to create a socialist version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite initial enthusiasm from allies who saw it as a means to unify the socialist world against Western pressure, one country after another pulled out, scared off by various human rights guarantees contained within. Simultaneously, reformers began to see human rights as a rhetorical tool to liberalise sclerotic political institutions to save the socialist project as a whole.

David J. Brewer is famous for announcing in 1892 “this is a Christian nation” from the bench of the United States Supreme Court. He believed that Christianity justified an official separation of church and state while remaining the foundation of all human law. A liberal Congregationalist who was comfortable straying from literal readings of the Bible, Brewer spoke often in public on Christianity although his religious faith rarely surfaced in his judicial decisions. His many public speeches allow us to see how religion underlay his opposition to economics regulations as part of an influential conservative voting bloc on the Fuller Court at the turn of the century. Brewer’s stance against appeals in criminal trials relied upon his belief that flawed human justice and perfect divine justice played different roles. Brewer’s work in the peace movement was supported by a hope that it helped to hasten the Second Coming of Christ.