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We rise, for our brothers, for our sisters.
We rise, for water, for life.
We rise, for one nation.
Protect our water,
Protect our land,
Protect our people.

[Mass chanting at Standing Rock Spirit Camp, led by a young Sioux woman]

The Dakota pipeline is being planned and constructed to pipe oil from the Dakotas to Illinois, in the USA. The Standing Rock Sioux and other First Nations of the…

For the past two years I’ve been living in a well-known squatted site of resistance. While people usually ask me about the legal situation, the threat of eviction isn’t one of the main challenges for me. One of the biggest challenges for me is the constant flow of new people coming with the assumption that it’s an ‘open site’ because it’s a squat.

‘At the end of the day yeah, it’s just a squat, so you can’t tell me what to do’, is a phrase that I hear irritatingly often. Not that…

Well there are various kinds of dirt, but I often think of something: when you’re planning to do some direct action, and when it’s going on, and then you’re arrested, you’re often very dirty because you can’t get washed.

There is another thing that’s occurred to me because that’s what you want! Twice I’ve been involved in digging a peace garden and that was good because you’re engaging with the dirt of the ground, the soil, and that makes you dirty. It’s a good kind of dirt.

…

Construction – not destruction – is the battle-cry in Affile.

Service Civil International has invaded Affile, 80km from Rome, but this is an invasion with a difference. Affile, which was once a battlefield, is now being assaulted with bricks and shovels, sledgehammers and barrows. Construction not destruction is the new battle-cry as young people from many nations set forth with heavy boots and light hearts.

The founder of SCI was Pierre Ceresole of Switzerland, who…

I’ve just been watching a TV programme (3 July) about trench photographs in the First World War, taken not by officers but by privates.

It showed the work of a 17-year-old German soldier and a 23-year-old English soldier; both volunteers and both initially thinking war – as Peter Pan said of death – ‘an awfully big adventure’.

The German boy’s early photos are posed poised and romantic – even excited: his comrades draped on their ugly big guns, relaxing with a pre-battle swim…

What should progressive activists (whether Leave or Remain) be doing, post-Brexit? In every area, there are different needs, for sure. However, it seems to me there is a national urge to listen to people who feel ‘left behind’ by the system, an urge rising up like a wave across the country, an opportunity which should be seized on by people committed to peace and justice.

In Hastings in England, there is an attempt to set up a ‘listening project’ – for progressive people to go to…

Events in June left many with a sense of despair at the prospects for global peace. The killing of 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on 12 June was followed abruptly by the stabbing and shooting of the Labour MP Jo Cox at her constituency surgery in Yorkshire on Thursday 16 June. This in the midst of a hate-filled EU referendum campaign in the UK and the seemingly inevitable rise of the war-mongering Donald Trump in the US.

It’s enough to make anyone want to bury their…

Many of you will know this song, 'Singing For Our Lives', by Holly Near. It has been sung in many contexts since she wrote it, but it began life as a cry for and from members of the global LGBT community in response to the killing of councillor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone in San Francisco in 1978.

There are songs that we inherit as radical activists, songs that are part of our history. I cut my teeth singing this song outside Faslane submarine base, and on all sorts of…

‘So, are you going to get married now?’ This seems to be the question everyone is asking me nowadays. Who would have thought that Britain voting to leave the EU would bring so much romance to my life?

On 24 June, I woke up in France, in Burgundy. I was on holiday, visiting…

As usual, we rang people up to talk anonymously about a topic. This time, something came up for one person that needed more space.

Can I caveat this right before I agree to do this? I feel I am poor on my feet. I don’t do social media partly because I can’t get my head round how people do that. I have a bit of anxiety around this.

The other context is, depending on your topic, really good for your piece or really bad.

I have just been through the most enraging experience…

My personal earliest memory of Europe is, when I first moved to the UK, one of the reasons was actually to campaign and work against the [US] cruise missiles being stationed in Europe.

There was EP Thompson’s book Protest and Survive and as a result I became active. I went to Berlin in the ’80s and joined demonstrations about the cruise missiles.

I went down to Greenham Common which was also about cruise missiles in the UK. Back in those days, I considered the…

Europe’s first International Nonviolent March for Demilitarisation took place in north-east France from August 4 to 10. People from 15 countries called for the conversion of military structures to civilian use, a nonviolent people’s defence rather than a suicidal military one, the abolition of military blocs, the liberation of objectors and total resisters to conscription, and civil rights for members of the forces.

The climax of the march was the afternoon of Sunday August 8, when –…

Though it goes by the formidable title of ‘An Appeal’, a pamphlet by the War Resisters’ International is in reality a valuable addition to the all too meagre information that is available concerning the heroic stand that is being made by pacifists in countries where the penalty for such views is exile, imprisonment, torture, or even death.

In French Guiana, France, Lithuania, Italy, Rumania, Germany, Yugoslavia, Poland, Switzerland and elsewhere it is the same story. ‘I may be…

As I write this, the case for and against leaving the EU has raised the nauseating stench of this non-debate to hysterical levels. So far, it’s been a combat between dread and fear. Far from shedding light or sharpening a vision of what Europe could/should be, the exchanges have barely risen above the level of insult and derision.

The leavers’ Little Englanders bind is deeply unappealing and barely conceals a dread of immigrants and foreigners in general and refugees in particular…

If you don’t live in Scotland, you might not know the phrase, ‘the carrying stream’. It has come to mean being part of the passing on of tradition, particularly through music and culture, and comes from the words of Hamish Henderson. Hamish was, among many other things, a great Scottish songwriter, collector and passer on of traditional songs. His final words, taken from the elegy he wrote for himself, is where this phrase ‘the carrying stream’ comes from;

‘Maker, ye maun sing…

‘So will you now be organising a cycle ride to Ende Gelände, the mass action in Germany in May?’

Filled with emotions and exhaustion, 125 of us had just reached Paris for the climate negotiations in December after a five-day ride from London, and all I wanted to do was crash in a corner, and not think of any new project that involved ‘logistics’ or ‘meetings’.

After catching a little sleep and recovering some energy, we rethought that suggestion. We saw the need to…

The death of Dan Berrigan, a week short of his 95th birthday, marks the passing of one of the 20th century’s most influential and inspiring Christian peacemakers. Certainly, he was the major source of inspiration – through his writings, innovative actions and wise presence – for my transition into radical activism.

Co-founder of both the Catholic Peace Fellowship and Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, in 1968,…

Joan was a new arrival in the CND office sometime in the 1980s. This warm-hearted woman with the sunny disposition had a desk opposite mine and I therefore saw a lot of her. Her job was to sell advertising for our CND magazine Sanity.

I marvelled at her technique. If, on the phone, a possible client hesitated, Joan knew exactly what to do. ‘I quite understand, Mr X or Ms Y, that you are too busy at the moment. It might be better if I called you…

Over his 91 years, George has been an extraordinary example of a human dedicated to making the world a better place.

He was until recently an active member and vice-chair of CND Cymru. Over many years, together with his late wife Jeanne, George was an absolutely reliable member of many other groups dedicated to change, including Cardiff Peace Shop, Cynefin y Werin, Ex-Services CND and Veterans for Peace, the Bridgend Bunker Campaign, the Snowball Campaign (…

It doesn’t feel like the right combination of words! Activism is not about running away, it’s about running towards.

I have often felt like running away, I suppose, like the nervousness before you’re about to enter a base or something.

- Woman, Leicester

I think what comes to me is ‘not taking responsibility’. Day to day, in my day-to-day living, with various aspects.

When you first said it, what came to mind was: Never!

- Woman,…