PN

We talked about class with Catholic peace activist Chris Cole during the DSEI week of action. He had been arrested a few days earlier (in his first lock-on) while blockading the set-up of the arms fair with other Christian peace activists. Chris has been involved in nonviolent direct action for almost 30 years. We met him at…

US author and Quaker activist George Lakey is touring the UK mainly to talk about his new book Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians got it right and how we can too (about how mass nonviolent struggle won radical changes). George is also the author of Toward a Living Revolution: A five-stage framework for creating radical social change

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Aberystwyth residents stand together on 18 June, one of 120,000 events around the UK to remember murdered MP Jo Cox and to show that ‘we have more in common than divides us’, a view expressed in many tongues. Photo: Marian Delyth

Do you want to strengthen your workshop facilitation skills? Do you want to help social change groups and mission-driven NGOs deal more skilfully with social class and classism in their own organisations, in their members’ lives and in the wider society?

If so, Exploring Class may be for you.

On 7 July, the United Nations passed a treaty forbidding the development, testing, production, possession, transfer, use and threatened use of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

Costa Rican diplomat Elayne Whyte Gómez, president of the abolition conference, said: ‘We all feel very emotional today. We feel that we are…

You never actually own a lock-on....

Local families, councillors and anti-nuclear power activists joined the first days of the ‘Rolling Resistance’ month of anti-fracking action in Lancashire organised by local groups and national climate activist network Reclaim the Power.

As PN went to press, we were half-way through the month of action, which aimed to disrupt work every single day in July at the Preston New Road site near Preston, owned by oil and gas company Cuadrilla.…

We’ve had to postpone a major workshop to June 2018! We’re also organising a digital tools dayschool, ‘Weaving Our Own Web’, in January!

This July and August, Peace News was meant to have been hosting noted author and trainer Betsy Leondar-Wright from the US group, Class Action. We have been big fans of Betsy’s work on class and classism (while recognising that there are differences between class in the US and in the UK). We interviewed Betsy over three issues in 2015–…

On 24 March, Airwars, a transparency NGO monitoring civilian casualties from international airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Libya, sent out an email warning that the escalation of US strikes was threatening to overwhelm its capacity to monitor and assess the civilian impact.

Airwars wrote: ‘Following an unprecedented number of alleged Coalition civilian casualty events and casualties in recent weeks, Airwars has taken the difficult decision to suspend detailed assessing of alleged…

On 12 February, dozens of constituents gathered in Tackleway, outside the official Hastings residence of home secretary and Hastings MP, Amber Rudd, to demand that she continue with a scheme to bring unaccompanied child refugees to Britain. Photo: Milan Rai

In Scotland, peace activists connected to Faslane Peace Camp have blockaded the Faslane Trident submarine base, held an open day as part of the camp’s 35th birthday celebrations. Oh, and halted a nuclear warhead convoy.

The 2 February blockade was carried out by five peace campers who ‘locked-on’ to each other by chaining…

Nonviolent Palestinian activists are facing a new wave of repression, demonstrating again that the Israeli authorities fear effective nonviolent action.

Israeli officials themselves know ‘we don’t do Gandhi very well’, as the then director of policy and political-military affairs at the Israel ministry of defence, major general (reserves) Amos Gilad, said in February 2010. Gilad, who retired in February after 14 years in that critical post, was talking to US officials about the…

Two sets of drone resisters in New York state, USA, walked free from court, after a ‘not guilty’ verdict on 2 March, and the dismissal of separate charges on 10 March.

In the first case, Daniel Burns, Brian Hynes, Ed Kinane and James Ricks were found ‘not guilty’ by a jury in Dewitt town court. They had been charged with obstruction of government administration,…

This year, Peace News is changing. We’re going to be more focused in the paper and on the web; we have new folk coming onto the board of Peace News Ltd; we want to be doing more events around Britain; and we want to move forward with Zylum, our super-easy-to-use set of online tools for grassroots campaigners.

PN will have some core themes for the paper for the year, including nonviolent revolution; class and classism; and the British-supported war in…

As PN went to press, the Civil March for Aleppo had been walking for 28 days through the European winter in protest against the bombing of civilians in Syria. Having left Berlin, Germany, on 26 December, dozens of marchers had reached Ledec nad Sazavou in the centre of the Czech Republic. The intention is to walk for over three months, for over 2,000 miles, into Syria.

The organisers’ founding statement says: ‘We are going to Aleppo. From…

Being a Muslim

We have the EDL [right-wing English Defence League] coming to a nearby town this weekend and I’m really torn about going to the counter-demonstration because we came very unstuck campaigning against the BNP [right-wing British National Party] in the elections. My young son and I managed to ‘intimidate’ the BNP candidate into not attending the hustings at the local town hall, which was great, and very thrilling.

Then we went home to our little council…