Reviews

I’ve never been that drawn to reading histories of the peace movement but this book, with its particular perspective, has been an exception. I do like a bit of theory and this book has just enough of it, accessibly written, to provide a framework for analysing and understanding the diverse cross-national case studies offered.

The framework is a feminist one which, as Cynthia Cockburn argues, ‘has opened up a pathway for the left’, and is a necessary rather than optional tool for understanding power relations, the relationship between…

A rich record of creative intervening, interfering and interpreting the physical and psychic destruction of East London by the Olympic monster. The contributions to this book speak in a language verbal and visual that poignantly describes the true, felt experience of state-sport-sponsored obliteration of communities and personal worlds.

The book is also an important reminder of 1000 people evicted from homes and businesses in 2005 to make way for bigger business.

A powerful and beautiful book.

Today’s corporate Olympics is a far cry from the movement’s original vision of ‘a potent… factor in securing universal peace’. Perryman believes a better Games is possible, proposing a combination of decentralisation, ditching “rich men’s” sports, and banning commercial use of the Olympics symbol. Worth reading even if you hate sport.

If you get off a train at East Croydon, you may well gaze around and wonder which of the towering office blocks is the infamous Lunar House that ‘processes’ foreigners and refugees; the building that decides who is welcome in this land and who is not. Look around and you will find, overshadowed by the rise of concrete, The Warehouse Theatre. ‘Oh look’, you’ll say, ‘a proper theatre’. It is intimate, adventurous, has no ‘corporate identity’. It is a place of art in the making.

Their recent show Call Mr Robeson – to be…

In November 1950, 52 delegates arrived in Dover, bound for the third congress of the (Communist-inspired) World Peace Council in Sheffield. All but one were denied entry.

Whether the Foreign Office considered modern art too esoteric to have much propaganda value (across the pond the CIA took a different tack, covertly promoting Abstract Expressionism as a Cold War weapon) or it was simply too embarassing to turn back the world’s most famous living artist, Picasso was admitted.

‘What can I have done that they should have let me…

Born in a small Oklahoma town in 1987, computer whizz-kid Bradley Manning enlisted in the US army in 2007.

Two years later, he was posted to Iraq where he worked as an intelligence analyst in a remote forward operating base close to Baghdad.

Increasingly concerned about US actions in Iraq and unhappy about his role in them, Manning allegedly sent hundreds of thousands of documents to the organisation Wikileaks.

The documents published by Wikileaks in 2010 included the Afghan War Logs (91,731 ‘significant action’…

These alternative audio tours are fun and innovative, interventionist sound artworks dealing with oil companies and their sponsorship of the arts. (In December, four of the UK’s biggest cultural organisations – the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House and the Tate galleries – renewed sponsorship deals with BP worth £10m.)

The three audio tours are for Tate Britain and Tate Modern (in London), and the Tate Boat that runs between them.

Gene Sharp is today better known than ever. This dictionary will further cement the 84-year-old American’s position as the world’s leading advocate of nonviolent struggle. Arising from decades of labour and action, including a stint at Peace News in the 1950s, Sharp hopes his book will bring clarity to a subject that has long been accompanied by politically-motivated ‘terminological confusion.’

Without clear thought and accurate definitions, he believes, ‘description,…

Gilad Atzmon has created a firestorm of controversy with this examination of Jewish identity, so I read it with some trepidation.

In the end I found it an engaging read, simply written, about complex ideas. He refuses to hedge words, to compromise in order to create allies, and in some cases he seems to have gone over the top, intentionally provoking friends and enemies alike.

Atzmon grew up in Israel, the grandson of one of the…

As if the peace movement hasn’t enough on its plate already, the military-industrial complex invents a new and easier way to wage war: the unmanned drone.

For the busy activist trying to grapple with the growing development of the drone wars, what’s needed is a well-written, easy-to-read book, coming from a committed nonviolent perspective, that lays out the issues in an accessible but not simplistic way. Thankfully, long-time US peace activist, Medea Benjamin, has written…

Andrew Cornell’s Oppose and Propose offers an extraordinarily well-researched examination of the 1971-1988 US-based organisation Movement for a New Society (MNS).

Cornell mixes documentary evidence and interviews with key participants in MNS to provide a comprehensive account of the movement, from its roots in Quaker anti-war groups through 17 years of rich and varied history, during which MNS was the only US-wide organisation explicitly advocating and working towards…

Think of those occasions in a group when it feels like you are collectively crashing into rocks or going round and round in a dreary, draining eddy. Starhawk is the Wise Woman of activism who you want to turn to for a magic spell to make it all better.

While she doesn’t give a magic bullet, she does offer an analysis of how groups can work most productively. She gives tools to embrace conflict rather than avoid it, recognising that the strength of a group is in nurturing its capacity to deal with difficulties intelligently and…

A big book in every sense, The Death of Others looks at the fate of civilians in American wars since 1945 – focussing on the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

John Tirman, executive director of the Center for International Studies at MIT and the person who commissioned the 2006 Lancet study on deaths in Iraq, argues that the American public is indifferent to the suffering of civilians in the wars their tax dollars pay for – just as the US military has little concern for civilians in the warzone itself.

The…

The Tricycle Theatre, ‘Britain’s leading political playhouse’ according to The Times, is running a packed season of events examining nuclear weapons and the nuclear debate.

A centrepiece of this season is an ambitious two-part, five-hour sequence of 10 new short plays exploring nuclear issues, the performances punctuated and complemented by verbatim readings, archive footage and images.

The 10 plays explore nuclear weapons from a refreshingly diverse range of perspectives, from Attlee wrestling with the decision to…

This is an important new book on a topic that could hardly have greater political relevance or urgency.

Its author, April Carter, comes from a background of nonviolent activism and has established herself as a leading academic specialist in this field and in the broader arena of political philosophy. She examines ‘people power’ with dispassionate thoroughness, taking account of the conceptual ambiguities in the term itself and theoretical and practical issues related to its implementation.

‘If people power provides no…