The back-cover blurb describes this book as "superbly accessible" - a phrase I greet with caution as it usually indicates a subject the publishers don't actually expect their readers to understand.
This time, however, it is the author's background rather than her subject which caused the publicity department to pull out the reassuring language. Alison Hills is a philosophy lecturer, so her book debates the status of animals against a formal framework of moral ethics.
As…
This is a piece of academic research geared towards producing an internationally acceptable methodology for assessing the effects of the arms trade on sustainable development in developing countries.
Its aim is to persuade all arms exporting countries (mainly in the "first" world) to apply sustainability criteria to all applications for arms export licences. It is not, therefore, against the arms trade per se, but neither does it confine itself to the banning of arms sales to…
I stumbled across this book in the early nineties after listening to the track of the same name, on Consolidated's album Friendly Fascism, in which Adams reads passages from her book.
Having lived in a women-only non-meat-eating community, the ideas expressed in this book - linking the objectification of women and non-human animals - were not exactly news, however the uncompromising delivery, the musical collaboration, and the use of historical literature through which to explore the…
To us who were around at its beginning, it may be as shock to realise that CND is approaching its 50th birthday in 2008. A new review of its progress and achievements is therefore timely.
Kate Hudson, Chair of CND, took on a daunting task, and it is not surprising that more attention is given to the dramatic developments of the past 25 years than to the earlier ones - though that is no bad thing given the errors and omissions in the earlier history.
Kate does not actually…
Unbelievably Spanner Films have done the impossible. By putting what should already be a multi-award winning documentary on to DVD, they have made it even better.
McLibel tells the story of how a postman and a gardener
In an effort to prevent the war on Iraq, millions of people around the world took to the streets and demonstrated their own passion for peace. The war still happened. The occupation of Iraq continues. But why couldn't we stop that war? What more could we
Offering a singular take on recent US/UK strategies in the Middle East, A Letter to the Prime Minister follows international activist Jo Wilding on her remarkable journey of the last few years, in solidarity with the people of Iraq.
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Despite the subtitle, this is not “The story of Britain's biggest mass movement”. There are brief inspiring accounts scattered throughout and some wonderful poems and posters, but these are in the margins, drowned in a sea of analysis and national pol
World leaders could benefit from this simple parable set in North India. “The transformation of a terrorist into a Buddha still inspires hope that even the terrorists today - whether stateless murderers on the run or leaders of governments - can face
James Pettifer has written and spoken about the Balkans for the likes of The Times and Wall Street Journal for many years. This point is important to make from the start, because when he speaks or writes he does so with both clarity and authority, qualities that many other commentators who deal with the region do not have.
The Balkans are not the most straightforward part of the world, as anyone who follows affairs there knows, and so it is an enormous pleasure to at last be able to…
Suicide in Palestine: Narratives of Despair is the first book to deal with the increase in suicide among ordinary Palestinians living under occupation.
It is not about so-called suicide bombers, although this phenomenon is also examined by way of contrast. This work is about individuals in the general population, and the various circumstances which lead them to become depressed and, in greater numbers than in the past, commit suicide. This is what the author Dr Nadia Dabbagh refers…
Many Peace News readers will have written polite(!) letters to their MPs and various ministers.
Usually a reply comes, written in mandarin, full of comforting phrases, often regretting that such and such a question could “only be answered at disproportionate cost”. A waste, perhaps, of time and postage, with no satisfaction. What if, though, you stopped being polite to the criminals who run the show? Kevin Wicker has found out, receiving a few anodyne replies and even fewer…
A praiseworthy initiative by an on-the-street group of Cotswold peace activists brings us a new edition of Camus's timely and profound anti-war essay. A world famous French essayist and playwright, Camus first contributed his assessment of the world outlook in 1946 to the Parisian resistance newspaper, Combat, to which he had been an underground contributor during the Nazi occupation.
The New York magazine Liberation, the foremost US advocate of nonviolence during…
This collection of essays and speeches by India's award winning writer ranges across the world on many important issues from globalisation to AIDS.
Roy's acceptance speech for the USA Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom urges her US audience to remember their history of brave resistance. She speaks as “a subject of the American Empire” when she says the change has to begin in America. She calls on its citizens and says, “The only institution more powerful than the US government is…
Chechnya is a war that was never especially popular in the West. Such is the paucity of news coming out of that destroyed place that those who may once have been aware of the violence there could be forgiven for thinking that it is over.
Since 2001, when Putin was welcomed by America as a valuable ally in the “war on terror”, it seems we are told that anything that happens in Chechnya is just a part of this struggle against those set on destroying our way of life. The only time that…
