Following on from Peace News 2439 on noviolence and social empowerment (NVSE), Andreas Speck and Julia Kraft report on the War Resisters' International NVSE conference, which took place earlier this year in Puri, India.
In recent months, Genoa, Gothenburg and Quebec have seen mass protest against globalisation—timed to coincide with the formal meetings of the G8, EU and the Americas trade talks. We reprint a discussion article written after the Quebec protests by US-based activist and author Starhawk, which presents ideas for moving the eternal violence/nonviolence debate forward into new territory.
Carlo Giuliani was a young man killed by another young man: a conscript policeman who was travelling in a vehicle which was being attacked by protesters during the G8 protests in Genoa. In so many ways his death was inevitable – not the death of him personally, but of one or more protesters taking part in mass and chaotic action against the dominant political and economic institutions, set against the repressive and violent response of the forces of “law and order”.
Children are the future, right? So why have we constructed a world which requires children to: live short, difficult lives and to die in poverty; to be recruited into our militaries and to engage in conflict; to be raped, tortured and mutilated?
