What If Bertha von Suttner Lived in the 21st Century?
Bertha von Suttner was a Czech-Austrian pacifist, writer, and activist who changed the course of history and our understanding of peace. In 1905, she became the first woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a powerful recognition of her work and influence. Bertha passed away in 1914, just two months before the outbreak of World War I. But what if she was alive today? Imagining her presence in the 21st century invites us to consider how a staunch advocate for peace might confront the wars, occupations, and gendered injustices of our time. More than a historical exercise, this thought experiment compels us to ask: what strategies, coalitions, and moral arguments would Bertha deploy in an age where global violence is at once more technologically advanced and more publicly documented than ever before?
I argue that she would begin where she always began: by making visible the human cost of violence. In Kyiv and in Gaza she would listen first to the women who save families in bombed neighborhoods, to men conscripted against their will and to displaced elders whose livelihoods have been erased. Those testimonies would be the raw material for her interventions. Drawing on her experience of creating international networks, Bertha would convene cross-border women’s peace councils. She would press the UN, regional organizations, and individual states to make gender-inclusive ceasefire terms non-negotiable, arguing that agreements which ignore who bears the costs of war are short-lived.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I argue that Bertha would push for robust, independent mechanisms to record crimes, secure humanitarian corridors, and support civil society initiatives that keep social infrastructure functioning under bombardment. However, she would also back reconciliation processes, reparations programs, land and housing rights for returnees, and local truth-and-reconstruction commissions that include women and youth as central architects.
As far as the crisis in Gaza is concerned, I reckon she would relentlessly advocate for the rights of civilians and the need for immediate humanitarian relief, but she would go beyond emergency aid. Bertha would presumably argue for a twofold strategy: an immediate halt to policies that cause civilian harm along with a sustained international process to address the root causes of the Israel-Palestine conflict, ranging from governance failures, blockade economics, and the political exclusion of entire communities. She would work with medical teams, educators, and cultural workers to ensure that women who run clinics, schools, and informal markets are supported to lead recovery and reconstruction.
I postulate that Bertha would also confront one of the biggest gender tragedies of our time: the Taliban’s systemic repression of women and girls in Afghanistan, that has been widely described by experts, UN bodies, and human-rights groups as “gender apartheid.” She would support strategies her nineteenth-century self could have imagined but never executed in quite the same way. For instance, litigating on international human-rights grounds, pressing for targeted diplomatic pressure and sanctions on those who enable the repression, demanding meaningful humanitarian access that reaches women and girls, and supporting evacuation and resettlement for Afghan women leaders in danger. She would press for the international community to back institutions run by Afghan women, be it underground schools, women-led clinics or documentation projects, with funds, legal tools, and sanctuary options.
Furthermore, I have no second thoughts in assuming that Bertha would campaign to reframe national security from the language of domination and “honor” to the language of human dignity. Where the militaristic narratives of her childhood seemed invincible, today she would take on their digital equivalents: the manosphere and the organized networks of online hate. Recognizing how these movements radicalize young men, normalize violence, and generate targeted harassment of women, Bertha would encourage legal campaigns to hold platforms accountable for coordinated harassment and abuse, and large-scale counter-speech campaigns that elevate stories of cooperative leadership and community protection.
Social media would be one of her favorite battlefields. Bertha would recognize the unprecedented organizing power of digital tools. For instance, she would train women in conflict zones to document war crimes on their phones in ways that are admissible in courts, and she would train moderators, journalists, and civic groups to spot and counter disinformation aimed at inflaming ethnic or gendered tension.
Most of all, I am confident that Bertha would insist that peace is an active verb. She would teach what she practiced: after the verb “to love,” “to help” is the most beautiful verb. In contemporary times that “help” would mean building institutions that protect civilians, insisting on women’s full participation in peace processes and dismantling online ecosystems that promote misogyny and radicalization. Her message would be hopeful: the human capacity for cooperation outlasts the machinery of war, but only if we choose repair over retaliation and justice over the illusion of “victory.”
written by
Riyan Buragohain