British prime minister Tony Blair recently remarked, in relation to the population of the United Kingdom, that 'we are a peaceful people'. Indeed, peace usually seems like an unarguable good: no-one would stand up in public and argue against it, but yet the economies and political systems of the UK and much of Europe rely upon a state of continual preparedness for war, and upon a set of militarist practices that make war thinkable as well as practicable. Over the past two decades, the women's peace movement has developed an analytic take on these practices that can best be described as 'feminist anti- militarism': a challenge to the brother ideologies of patriarchy, nationalism and militarism that, among other things, make a particular range of masculinities available to and desirable by growing boys, and position girls and women as the supporters of unambiguously masculine men. Feminist anti-militarism concerns itself both with the systems (economic and political) that make war possible, and with the cultural practices that obscure the fact that war is about anything other than political dominance for economic control. Like the idea of peace, 'inclusive education', as a concept and as a set of policies and practices, has become similarly unarguable. But in its journey from a marginal to a central educational discourse, much of the radical thinking originally underpinning the idea of an inclusive schooling system designed to challenge multiple inequalities has become lost, in favour of a technicist 'what works' version. This version elides, or makes invisible, the complex intersections between dis/ability, gender/sexuality, ethnicity, social class, religion and nationality, as they are experienced by young people in schools. The original emphasis on continually questioning the processes and practices that disadvantage specific individuals and groups of young people has been replaced by the punitive surveillance of new managerialism and the standards agenda, rendering the complex and uncertain world of young people's identity work in its social and political context largely invisible. Whilst on the one hand, 'inclusive education' is increasingly taken for granted - like peace - as an unarguable good, the schooling systems of the UK and much of Europe continue to grade and sort children and young people according to their academic achievements or 'performance', and to reward them accordingly. One group at the sharp end of these practices are children and young people considered to have 'special educational needs', for many of whom hegemonic versions of success as measured by examination results are inaccessible. Such children and young people are increasingly 'included', but in institutions whose primary job it is to produce governable subjects with the requisite skills and dispositions to attain quantifiable markers of 'success' beyond their reach. This stark reality, and its day-to-day negotiation (nuanced through multiple indices of difference) are obscured in most, if not all, public policy discourse, which presents inclusive education as a decontextualised, unarguable good. What happens when we seek to re-politicise the thinking behind 'inclusive education' by foregrounding multiple and intersecting indices of difference in relation to a wider framework of institutionalised violence, militarism and war in the name of 'freedom'? This paper uses thinking and practice derived from feminist anti-militarism to understand the school experiences of children and young people considered to have 'special educational needs', and the policies and practices through which these are produced. It brings a feminist militarist analysis to bear on data from three ethnographic studies in English mainstream schools, in order to open up new questions and research agendas around the politics of inclusive education.