Floris de Ruiter MA
PhD candidate
E-mail: f.p.de.ruiter@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Area(s) of interest: Asian History, Environmental History, Global History, Political History
Cohort/Start PhD: 2024-2025
Natural Peace: An Intellectual History of Evolutionism and Ecology in India’s Ashrams
Overarching project: Peace Movements
Leiden University
Supervisors: Carolien Stolte and Marieke Bloembergen.
Duration of appointment: 01 September 2024 – 31 August 2028
My project focuses on how ashramites shaped a global intellectual history of (non-)violence in the early 20th-century. In defiance of empire, ashramites expanded the debate on the rightful ‘home’ of violence by going beyond anti-statism. Through the themes of evolutionism and ecology, I want to uncover how thinkers in ashrams used anti-statist debates on self-rule, and their promises of peace, to revisit the question of violence in relation to (one’s) ‘nature’, shaping global peace movements.