Conscription is being talked about by Nato’s European members as they grow increasingly concerned about further Russian expansion. Ukraine has just expanded its version.
Israeli police scuffle with ultra-Orthodox Jews as they block a main road in Jerusalem during an October 2017 protest against Israeli army conscription.
AP Photo/Ariel Schalit, File
Israel’s decision to mobilize hundreds of thousands of reserve soldiers was not just an act of self-defense, a scholar writes, but a political move as well.
‘Be a man’: Russian marine conscripts at a departure ceremony at Trinity Cathedral in St Petersburg.
EPA-EFE/Anatoly Maltsev
A short history of the Ex-Services Human Rights Association of Australia: a group of brave returned servicemen and women who protested the Vietnam War.
Draftees are sworn into the U.S. Army in 1940.
AP Photo
Questions include whether women should be compelled to register, as men are, and whether the draft and draft registration should exist at all.
A large group of American male Reserve Officers Training Corps students gather to protest the U.S. draft in the late 1930s.
Anthony Potter Collection/Getty Images
An Iranian general’s killing sparked fears of war and a draft in the US. Those are old fears, says a scholar who contends it’s a myth that during the two world wars, men signed up in droves to fight.
Soldiers in Anzac Cove. The war had driven Australians apart in the demands it made upon the people.
State Library of Victoria
Labor Leader Arthur Calwell tried to leverage public opposition to conscription to gain support during the 1966 election, calling it a “sinister word” for Australians. The tactic failed.
An anti-conscription rally in Melbourne, 1916.
Heritage Council of Victoria
It’s time the Australians who voiced vociferous opposition to war in general and conscription in particular were commemorated as an important part of our history.
Prime Minister Billy Hughes worked hard to quash rebellion over conscription during the first world war.
Australian Prime Ministers
Rock music against military conscription during 1980s South Africa resonated with wider fault lines in Afrikaner society - this as the apartheid regime’s grip on power started to slip.