  Pacifism includes a wide variety of ideas and commitments. Pacifism has typically been understood as a critical or negative argument against war (or violence), even though the author of the present entry has argued that pacifism could be understood as a comprehensive normative theory that postulates peace as the highest good (Fiala 2018). Pacifism in its broadest sense can be distinguished from application of pacifist critique to particular issues such as: domestic violence (Hall Fitzgibbon 2017), environmental issues (Woods 2017), the death penalty (Steffen 2017), nonhuman animals (Chapple 2017), and so on.  This article will not focus on those applications. Rather, it organizes the variety of pacifisms in several ways according to interrelated conceptual distinctions: absolute and contingent pacifism; maximal and minimal pacifism; universal vs. particular pacifism. These distinctions overlap, as we shall see here.   