Johns, Emily

By 1918, Britain’s No-Conscription Fellowship was led by women, as the male leadership was in prison. Catherine Marshall was a key organiser of the NCF. Joan Beauchamp was the official publisher of the NCF’s newspaper, The Tribunal, and Lydia Smith her secret co-editor, using a woman with a pram as a…

In Marge Piercy’s wonderful visionary work, Woman on the Edge of Time (1985), a young visitor from a future North American utopia wants to see a car. Dawn says: ‘I studied about them. I saw them on holi. How the whole society was built around them, they paved over the earth for them to run on and sit on right in the middle of where they lived! Everyone had to have one. And they all set out in their private autocar to go someplace at the same time and got stuck in jams and breathed…

Here’s a book to counter climate change! I travelled through New Orleans every night from my bed, becoming intimate with neighbourhoods through maps of sounds and corpses and bananas; poetic and political maps such as ‘Snakes and Ladders: What rose up and what fell down during Hurricane Katrina’; I followed the fluidity of a delta city where the concrete and metaphor elide in ‘Of Levees and Prisons: failures of containment, surges of freedom’, with many ‘did you know?’ moments (Louisiana was…

All the fights that we cover in Peace News against fracking and roads and climate change have at their heart an anger and a love for our intimate home landscapes. We fight for the hills of Lancashire to the fields of Norfolk. Sebastião Salgado’s grand photographic project Genesis opens one’s eye and heart to a world beyond anything most of us will ever experience. Here are images that bring one to tears for the magnificence and frailty of the earth.

The Genesis project ‘is an attempt…

The social centre before it was occupied.
Photo © Enredadera Tetuán

On 3 February, the PN co-editors interviewed a key figure in the Centro Social Okupado la Enredadera (the Vine occupied social centre) in northern Madrid. The social centre is one small part of the huge, nonviolent, anti-austerity, non-hierarchical ‘15M’ movement which began in May 2011, and has shaken up Spanish politics and empowered millions of people.

Peace News What was the beginning of the social centre…

On 1 February, over 300 people squeezed into an auditorium in southern Madrid designed for half that number, to remember and celebrate the life of Howard Clark, a key figure in Peace News and War Resisters’ International (WRI) for several decades.

The evening event, organised by WRI, was attended by peace activists from across Europe, as well as many folk from Madrid, where Howard has lived with his partner Yolanda Juarros Barcenilla since 1996. (Yolanda organised a weekend programme…

It’s still unbelievable that he has gone. Howard Clark has been a key figure in Peace News for several decades – as a co-editor, collaborator, contributor, (re-)organiser, trustee, director, defender. His 1971 essay Making Nonviolent Revolution, which we re-published as a pamphlet two years ago – over his modest objections – with a new, very valuable afterword by Howard, remains one of the most important explanations published of the liberatory politics that PN aims to…

In his 2011 book To End All Wars – the only recent account of the first world war to foreground the anti-war movement – Adam Hochschild asks: "If we were allowed to magically roll back history to the start of the 20th century and undo one – and only one – event, is there any doubt…

This is one segment of the outstanding 24-foot-long drawing by Joe Sacco of the first day of the battle of the Somme from his concertina book The Great War: July 1, 1916 (an illustrated panorama with an essay by Adam Hochschild. Jonathan Cape, 2013, 56pp, £20). At first, the mass of figures shuffling through trenches appear to be Where’s Wallys, then peering closer you see that they are all…

After some deft public relations interventions in September and November, Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is not expected to make any serious moves before the March 2014 local elections.

In April, we speculated that Erdogan was spurred to initiate peace talks with the PKK by the mass nonviolent uprising of Turkish Kurds last autumn, sparked by a Kurdish prisoners’ hunger strike that began last September (see PN 2556, and 2552-2553). It may need another…

Effective nonviolence at the Reclaim the Power camp in Balcombe, West Sussex, part of a summer of action against fracking exploration by Caudrilla. PHOTO: Reclaim the Power

Nonviolence study groups underpinned much of the success of the US civil rights movement in the 1960s (see editorial, p12). Campaign Nonviolence, a new year-long project initiated by California-based peace group, Pace e Bene,  aims to promote the formation of such study and action groups. Campaign Nonviolence has been…

We remember the lunch counter sit-ins that electrified the civil rights movement in the US in 1960. We remember the dignity and persistence of the hundreds of young African-American who asserted their right to be served as equals, day after day, despite repeated beatings and arrests.

The direct action of these Black students achieved desegregation of many businesses within weeks, and dramatically escalated the confrontation with institutional white racism. Many of the students…

On 14 September, instead of launching air strikes on Damascus, US president Barack Obama was forced to agree to a Russian plan for disarming Syria’s chemical weapons under the supervision of a UN agency, the organisation for the prohibition of chemical weapons (OPCW). The resolution of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis by diplomacy was a triumph for what the New York Times in…

We are of the generation who came of age in the 1980s, terrified that the world might end at any moment through nuclear holocaust. In the decades since then, the people of the world have grown less frightened of a nuclear war.

The risk is still there, as the number of nuclear weapon states increases, and conflicts continue around nuclear tinderboxes, but the fear has declined.

Recent studies suggest that even a ‘small’ nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each…