Pushing Against the Tide: Peace Movement Organisations’ Framing of Defence Spending in Europe from 2014-2025

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 and growing concerns about hybrid warfare activities in Europe, European leaders have started to propose clear raises of their national defence budgets. Meanwhile, security and defence are also high on Europeans’ minds – in the November 2025 Eurobarometer, security and defence topped the list of issues the public think that the EU should prioritise. This puts peace movement organisations in a difficult position. The dominant narrative that Europe is under threat and must stand on its own becomes increasingly unquestionable, making opposition to increased defence spending vulnerable to dismissal as naïve idealism. Yet little is known about how peace movements navigate this constrained discursive environment. This paper examines the frames that peace movement organisations (PMOs) use in their opposition against calls for increased defence spending in Europe. Taking an exploratory approach, we start from the premise that discursive opportunity structures have become increasingly constrained on defence spending: defence has become particularly politically and publicly salient and calls to increase defence spending normalised. In this study, we therefore ask: how do peace movement organisations oppose or embrace dominant discourses in their framing of defence spending? Through an analysis of PMOs in Belgium, Italy and Germany across one decade (2014-2025), we trace how their framing has evolved over time and how political context affects their engagement with dominant discourses of national security. The results are relevant to understand how the peace movement and other movement organisations adapt to deal with shifting discursive and framing opportunities.