Features

It has been intriguing in recent weeks to follow the various, and largely more coherent, debates and discussions that have emerged in the wake of the Climate Camp, and also as the discussions about Transition that the Trapese Collective’s “Rocky Road” document stimulated have rumbled on. A recent piece from Peace News by Kelvin Mason entitled “When Climate Camp Comes Home”, drew on his reflections as an activist who attended previous Climate Camps and also as someone with an involvement in…

A body of work by Liz Jones, based on musings on creative nonviolent interventions at military places, in particular AWE Aldermaston.
This exhibition was held in Rope Store Gallery, Quay Arts, Ventnor, Isle of Wight August 12th - October 6th 2008. Here are her words describing the work around creative nonviolence.

Outside the gallery, as if standing guard at the entrance, and seen from across the river stood an 8 foot high painting of a police evidence gatherer happily…

“If we are to roll back the tide of privatisation and war, rebuilding the grass roots of our movement is essential.”

Bob Crow – General Secretary, National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT)

The National Shop Stewards Network was established in 2007, the first such initiative in the 21st century. Its origins lay in a conference called in October 2006 by the RMT union which was attended by 300 trade union officials and activists and addressed by the…

The trade union movement in Britain, as elsewhere, has gone through periods where the rank and file has felt the need to organise itself in order to revive, reform or replace the existing structures. Perhaps the best-known attempt at initiating radical change within the unions was the so-called “Syndicalist Revolt” of the first decade of the 20th century.

Responding to a perceived timid reformism of the leadership and the bureaucratisation of the trade union movement, this revolt was…

On 27 October, Britain’s nuclear bomb factory at Aldermaston was blockaded by hundreds of peace activists in the largest nonviolent direct action at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) for a decade. Over 30 activists from Trident Ploughshares and CND were arrested by police.

Roads around Aldermaston began to be blocked before dawn as activists from Scotland, Switzerland, Norway and elsewhere converged on the site where Britain’s nuclear weapons are constructed and maintained.…

Greg Muttitt’s presentation about the politics of Iraqi oil at the Peace Festival produced both righteous anger and inspiration.

The Iraqi people are embroiled in an intense struggle against the privatisation of oil reserves and production. The fight put up by trade unionists and the Iraqi people to maintain ownership of their oil has so far been a surprising success and a cause for hope.

A law banning trade unions, which dates back to the days of Saddam Hussein, has never…

Once again this year Aberystwyth Town Council will lay a white poppy wreath at the war memorial. The ceremony takes place on Saturday 8 November at 11am. In taking this action Aberystwyth Town Council is unique in Britain. But the decision to maintain the tradition was not made easily. It took the casting vote of the Mayor, Sue Jones-Davies.

The white poppy not only commemorates all those who suffer in wars; it also sends out the message that “there are better ways to resolve…

In Battle this week there was the annual commemoration of England’s great and bloody encounter of 1066. It is peculiarly festive as hundreds re-enact the slaughter and subsequent regime change.

However I have come to see Unveiled at the Independent Photographers Gallery in Battle. I am looking at a soft view of a Kabul cityscape under snow. There are some bicycles and four people. I looked very hard to count these few people. Where are the rest of a capital city’s population? Dead?…

Chinese-American activist-artist Paul Chan embodies another aphorism from Robert Capa (see left): “Like the people you shoot and let them know it.” His three-part contribution to the London Barbican Art Gallery’s exhibition On the Subject of War includes films made of his “enemies”, in which it is clear he has indeed expressed affection and concern for those he is meant to fear.

Chan travelled to Iraq with US peace group Voices in the Wilderness in 2002, moved about independently and…

As I made my way around the upper floor of London’s Barbican Art Gallery, I gradually realised that I’d come with a preconception, an assumption which had turned out to be wildly wrong. I’d presumed naïvely that an art exhibition entitled “This Is War!” would be basically an anti-war exhibition.

The Robert Capa-Gerda Taro photography exhibition (focussed on the Spanish Civil War) on the top floor is actually a pro-war exhibition, though no less fascinating for all that. It…

The Unity Centre is tiny – the opposite of a Tardis – a corner shop space crammed with people, computers, filing systems, sofas, chocolates and a whole lot more. It is unique because of how it is organised, what it does and how it came into being. Unity Centre volunteers Jane and Phill helped me to understand more.

The Centre’s origins can be traced back to the 2005 anti-G8 mobilisation in Scotland, where one of the focuses was the Dungavel detention centre and the No Borders campaign…

Simone Bruno I would like to talk about the current crisis. How is it that so many people could see it coming, but the people in charge of governments and economies didn’t, or didn’t prepare?

Noam Chomsky Since financial liberalisation was instituted about thirty-five years ago, there has been a trend of increasing regularity of crises and deeper crises, and the reasons are intrinsic and understood.

So, for example, if you and I make a transaction, say you sell me a…

It is hard not to get carried away by the hysteria of Obamania.

Those wishing to keep a level head should certainly keep away from the mainstream media. Jonathan Freedland, writing about Barack Obama’s July speech in Berlin for the UK’s most progressive national newspaper the Guardian, breathlessly reported that the Democratic US presidential nominee “almost floated into view, walking to the podium on a raised, blue-carpeted runway as if he were somehow, magically, walking on…

During the Indian struggle for independence, Mohandas Gandhi gained many followers, including a Muslim Pashtun (or Pathan) from what is now Pakistan, named Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who organised a powerful nonviolent movement. – Eds

Gandhi had been talking about the nonviolence of the strong, that it was for the brave, the courageous. The idea developed into the notion of an army of Pathans, renowned for their ferocity but without weapons. They would be disciplined, wear uniform…

As suggested in last month’s PN, the US-UK war in Afghanistan is spreading to Pakistan, as US troops and drones mount attacks on border areas – against the express wishes of the Pakistani government. While Washington is banking on the acquiescence of the government, polls show Pakistani public opinion is outraged and the semi-autonomous Pakistani military appears set on confrontation.

As we mark the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October, Professor Paul…

This summer, I was one of nine walkers to complete a gruelling 84-day, 1000+ mile International Walk towards a Nuclear-Free Future from London to Geneva, through France.

The other eight walkers were: co-organisers Kerrie-Ann Garlick and Marcus Atkinson, and June, from Australia; Jill Saunderson from Fife; Steve Gwynne from Birmingham; Lena Bladh from Sweden; and Albert Monti and Aristide from France.

The walk was jointly organized by the Australian-American group “…

On 10 September, six Greenpeace activists won a historic legal victory after they were found “not guilty” of criminal damage by a jury at Maidstone crown court – after admitting causing £30,000 worth of damage to a smokestack at Kings-north coal-fired power station.

The legal defence was mounted by Michael Wolkind QC, barrister Quincy Whitaker, and Mike Schwarz and Catherine Jackson of Bindmans Solicitors, and supported by testimony from, among others, the world’s most eminent…

In early 2008, Voices for Creative Nonviolence began organising “Witness Against War,” a 500-mile walk from Chicago Illinois, to St Paul Minnesota, timed to arrive just before the US Republican party’s National Convention.

Generally, three to five local participants would join our core group of nine to walk, on average, fifteen miles each day. Our signs called for an end to war in Iraq, for health care, not warfare, and for rebuilding both Iraq and the US. “We Hold Both Parties…

China, which spent £6bn on green energy projects last year, may soon become the world’s largest investor in renewable energy.

The ministry of public security has listed pollution as one of the top five threats to China’s peace and stability. In 2005, China experienced 51,000 riots or demonstrations of 100 or more people protesting against pollution – according to official estimates.

Li Junfeng, an energy expert at the National Development and Reform Commission said in…

In October 1916, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz wrote in her diary: “It’s not only our youth who go willingly and joyfully into the war; it’s the same in all nations. People who would be friendly under other conditions now hurl themselves at one another as enemies.” All she could see in the war was “criminal lunacy”. “I have been thinking,” she wrote later, “whether I could not contribute something to the propaganda for peace.”

Kollwitz was born in 1867 into a family with a…