Features

In the past 17 years, the staff did these things to make PN a great paper and a great media and peace project:

Eve’s resignation letter above refers to an email which was sent to PNT on 31 July by a dissident PNT director. This email was forwarded to the editor by another PNT director. Because we are publishing this statement without the author’s knowledge or consent, to protect them from retaliation, we are withholding their name.

I’m glad you’ve brought this up, Glyn, as it gives me the chance to ask you…

Michelle Cobbin’s current work ‘draws upon memories of growing up in Lakenheath, Suffolk, during the Cold War, beside a large US military airbase which housed nuclear weapons and from which fighter jets flew over our heads most days.’ She adds: ‘With the imminent return of US nuclear weapons to this airbase, and the continuation of deafening planes on their daily exercises, I felt compelled to make work about this from the perspective of both the naive and innocent child resident that I was…

Veggies Catering Campaign started in October 1984, when two Nottingham animal rights activists decided to present the manager of a local McDonalds with a huge veggieburger ‘to represent an ethical alternative to the products of death and destruction sold there’ (see Pat’s history of Veggies in PN 2514, published for the 25th anniversary in 2009). Since then, the group has gone from strength to strength, including catering for Peace News Summer Camp from 2009 onwards. Since Pat’s…

New details have emerged in the last few months about the intensive talks, just weeks after the full Russian invasion of Ukraine, that came very close to ending the war in April 2022 with an ambitious peace agreement negotiated in Istanbul, Turkey.

Both the New York Times (15 June) and Foreign Affairs (on 16 April) have carried out major investigations, with access to the draft agreements shared between the two sides and interviews with figures on both sides and in…

Felicity:

Here is the latest news from the Villages Group, who continue, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, to visit their friends in the South Mount Hebron hills [near the southern border of the West Bank]. This report concerns a tiny village, Umm al-Khair, where once I sat with children in a tent and sang with them. Already, they knew constant violence from their neighbours in the settlement, and they were already deeply traumatised.

Since 7…

Kate Hudson

Britain has a new government. The Tories are gone, after 14 years of misrule, of austerity, erosion of the welfare state, and vast amounts of public money sunk into nightmare nuclear weapons. But what comes next?

A Labour government that has committed to a ‘triple lock on Trident’, increasing military spending to 2.5 percent of GDP, and everlasting support for NATO.

Clearly there is much work to be done, but there is a new atmosphere, a more positive atmosphere…

On 19 June, Tell MAMA (‘Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks’) launched a Manifesto Against Hate ahead of the UK general elections on 4 July. They urged political candidates to address the increase in hate crimes across the country and to promote social cohesion.

Founded in 2012 with government support, Tell MAMA is a national service supporting victims of anti-Muslim hate through casework, counselling, advocacy, legal and signposting support.

Tell MAMA models itself on the…

A growing body of research points to the proliferation of Islamophobia across Europe in recent years. In the UK, record numbers of Islamophobic hate crimes were recorded in 2017, and across the continent there have been similar findings on the growth of explicit Islamophobia.

In a new, pan-European research project, my colleagues and I set about to devise a toolkit that can be used to counter Islamophobia. It summarises a range of the best methods and tools we saw being used to…

The best way to make sure your smartphone is secure at a protest is to leave it at home. But many people find it difficult to leave their phone at home – so what can you do to make your phone more secure when going on a protest?

To prevent the phone being seized during arrest and data on it being found:

‘In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist: in such a world a non-revolutionary pacifism is a contradiction in terms, a monstrosity.’ The words of US radical pacifist AJ Muste, who lived an astounding life of commitment, in 1928.

This powerful statement about pacifism and nonviolence comes from Muste’s classic September 1928 essay, ‘Pacifism and class war’. A radical Christian pacifist, Muste warned against the assumption that ‘violence is…

Peace News is in a period of change. We’re dreaming big ambitious dreams as to how PN can make a bigger contribution to the peace movement and to other nonviolent grassroots movements for social change. That might still be as a radical media project; it might conceivably be something even better.

If you have a wild idea, a sensible idea, a cheap-to-put-into-practice idea, or a would-need-a-billionaire-to-fund-it idea, please do add your thoughts to the mix – for…

In mid 2023, Cymdeithas y Cymod (CyC, the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Cymru) and CND Cymru (CND C, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Cymru), worked in partnership with other leading peace organisations to create Heddwch ar Waith (HarW), Peace Action Wales, a campaign network. The project received funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust last summer.

HarW was established as a forum for the peace movement in Cymru, enabling groups to collaborate with…

MM: ‘Alain, in your book Démilitariser la France (Demilitarising France), you indicate that France is the fifth most militarised country in the world. Can you outline some particularly significant elements of this militarisation?

AR: ‘France has the particularity of having a long tradition of militarist symbols. To begin with, there is our national anthem: La Marseillaise, which is a war song. Then there is the 14 July military parade in Paris. There is also…

‘Bellicosity’ is perhaps an old-fashioned word, and comes from the Latin word for war or warlike, ‘bellum’, and perhaps ‘warlike’ is more prosaic English. But, whatever word you prefer, the European Union (EU) is gearing up for a fight with Russia, and unspecified others, along with supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.

The mind boggles.

The EU, along with its NATO allies, the US and UK, and Russia are all nuclear-armed. It is crazy to continue to push forward…

Someone pointed out that the last British general election held in July was in 1945, which sent us scrambling for the archives. On 15 June 1945, the PN editorial responded to the calling of the election by noticing that there were two strands within British pacifism: those ‘who seek to work in the political sphere’ of party politics and those who ‘believe that their proper activity as pacifists lies outside the political sphere altogether’. (PN 470)

You can either…

The day before the UK general election was called, the government advisor on political violence and disruption published a 294-page report on Protecting our Democracy from Coercion.

The main theme of the report by lord Walney (John Woodcock) was the need for the government, the courts, the crown prosecution service and the police to crack down harder on ‘extreme protest movements’ such as Palestine Action, Just Stop Oil (JSO) and the organisers of the recent Gaza ‘Ceasefire…

Over 15 Gaza solidarity camps (or ‘encampments’) have sprung up around the UK, following the example of those at more than 140 universities in the US which have often been met with police violence and mass arrests. Here in the UK, after occupations of two Bristol university buildings were forced to end in late March and early April (because of the threat of legal action), students began an encampment on 1 May. The focus, as elsewhere, is on getting institutions to break ties with companies…

The sudden appearance of a ‘National Security Act 2023’ warning sign outside the Bristol offices of Israeli-owned arms manufacturer Elbit was a reminder to campaigners that as well as expanding public order laws, the government has also introduced sweeping changes to espionage laws that cover places where protests regularly take place.

Although this legislation was presented as necessary to counter hostile threats from foreign intelligence services, Netpol warned in 2022 that new…