ABSTRACT
The big swell in new peace movements at the end of the 1970s and in the beginning of the 1980s was a political event which has exerted a significant amount of impact on our way of thinking about peace and security issues. Some peace organizations and initiatives, such as the Green party in West-Germany, No to Nuclear Weapons in Denmark and Norway and Freeze campaign, were newly born. A few studies on the class backgrounds of peace activists are available for our discussion of the peace movements of the 1960’s. Frank Parkins’ study of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Great Britain showed that the members of the movement were mainly drawn from highly educated people of the middle class. Concerning the new social movements, Claus Offe argues that the actors do not rely for their self-identification on either the established political categories nor on the partially corresponding socioeconomic categories.
