On Saturday 7 March 50,000 people marched in London in protest at the war Israel and the United States are waging in Iran. It was a notable turnout by the standards of other Western capitals, but pitiful compared to past protests. On 15 February 2003 more than a million demonstrators filled London’s streets to try to forestall the invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands marched in New York and Washington, and nearly 15 million worldwide – the largest international mobilisation the world had ever seen. Twenty years earlier, on 12 June 1982, a million people had gathered in Central Park to demand nuclear disarmament and listen to protest songs from Joan Baez and Bruce Springsteen. Then, the antiwar camp included musicians, writers and filmmakers. That tradition has faded.

Today, wars are proliferating and the major powers are rearming, yet the streets remain strangely quiet. Even the nuclear threat seems to provoke little reaction. The New START treaty, which was the last remaining agreement limiting US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons, recently expired. Donald Trump has floated the idea of resuming nuclear testing and Emmanuel Macron has proposed increasing France’s arsenal. And yet there have been no demonstrations, no public debate.

Pacifist engagement – which is stigmatised by a media that is quick to conflate it with support for Hamas, the Iranian regime or the Kremlin, and sometimes repressed – sits uneasily with the zeitgeist. Such engagement demands stubborn optimism, a conviction, forged through struggles which sometimes succeed, that nothing is settled, that collective action can still alter the course of events. Opponents of the Vietnam war drew strength from the civil rights movement; in 2003 the alter-globalisation movement energised protests against the invasion of Iraq. Nothing comparable exists today.

Pacifism also requires patience: conflicts which could not be prevented must still be challenged every step of the way. But the results may only be perceptible over time – shifting public opinion, hastening military withdrawal, influencing elections. These slow, indirect, sometimes invisible gains only fitfully inspire in an age that values immediacy.

Commitment to peace demands political judgment, too: a willingness to work alongside people who have a different point of view. ‘Every antiwar movement in the United States in the 20th century has included small numbers of pacifists who have opposed all war, and, in many cases, larger numbers of socialists, who have opposed capitalism and/or imperialism. But every antiwar movement has been composed mostly of people whose concern was limited to stopping that war,’ wrote journalist Barbara Epstein (1).

Growing political sectarianism makes such coalitions harder to build, especially as activist groups have lost organisational skills. ‘People confuse mobilising with organising,’ according to the political scientist Eric Blanc (2). They know how to bring people out onto the streets, but often neglect what happens between demonstrations – the work of embedding themselves locally, persuading, canvassing, pressurising politicians and building alliances to broaden their base.

Four years of propaganda promoting rearmament and warning of an imminent Russian threat have numbed public opinion and disarmed pacifists. The huge surge in military spending at the expense of social programmes has encountered little that would count as fierce resistance, even from the left. Yet whether in Iran or Ukraine, bellicosity remains largely the preserve of elites: war profiteers and media commentators who never take risks themselves – except that of overexposure in the television studio.