Rai, Milan

If I’ve ever met a personification of the word ‘staunch’, I think it must have been Pat Allen. Over many decades, Pat was a linchpin of London Region CND and an indispensable part of the national CND office. 

Pat was born at the beginning of the Great Depression, and his family lived on or near the bread line for most of the decade. His father had lost part of a lung due to a gas attack during the First World War. His mother, who often told him of her recollections of that war,…

On 4 June, six Christian peace activists were held overnight after breaking into the British drones base, RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, and planting a peace garden.

The ‘Disarm the Drone Six’, who posted information about British drone warfare around the base, were marking the fifth anniversary of the first UK drone strike, and the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression.

Susan Clarkson, Chris Cole, Henrietta Cullinan, Martin Newell, Dr Keith…

Then, just as suddenly, the talks seemed to be called off — by the Kabul administration. 

Afghan president Hamid Karzai was said to have been offended by the way that the Taliban’s political office in Qatar had been officially opened on 18 June, with the raising of the white Taliban flag, and many references to the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’, the name used by the Taliban during its five years in government.

The Taliban officials who presided over the opening…

The most serious threat of nuclear terrorism comes not from some fragmented, vengeful jihadist network, but from the western states who form the nuclear core of the NATO alliance, who have issued repeated threats against non-nuclear weapon states in the Global South.

It is in fact official policy that Britain will use or threaten to use its nuclear weapons to preserve its economic and financial advantages throughout the world. You just have to join the dots.

This is one of the…

It is a famous, but apocryphal exchange: ‘Mr Gandhi, what do you think of western civilisation?’ ‘I think it would be a very good idea.’ Europeans like to see their culture as springing directly from the fountains of Greek creativity, being refined within the formality of the Roman empire, then surviving ‘the dark ages’ to flower in the Renaissance and all that has followed.

The Irish journalist and UN civil servant Erskine Barton Childers wrote a passionate corrective in 1966: ‘I…

The theme for this year's Camp is "Taking a lead from the Global South", and the Camp will be featuring Mohamed Moghazy from the Egyptian Committees to Defend the Revolution, award-winning Nigerian performer Tayo Aluko and Dora Estella Munoz Atillo, a community organiser from the remarkable Nasa community in Colombia.

Welcome Dora!

This year, Peace News Summer Camp is honoured to be hosting Dora Estella Muñoz Atillo, a community…

Mohamed dresses for the UK summer

Peace News Summer Camp is proud to announce that Mohamed Moghazy, an organiser from the Egyptian Committees to Defend the Revolution, has accepted our invitation to speak at our camp at the end of July.

So, as well as the usual delights of PN Summer Camp – a warm and welcoming atmosphere, fascinating fellow campers, beautiful countryside, wonderful childcare and friendly campfire evenings – we are going to hear…

The biggest-ever US demonstration against climate change
brought 35,000 activists from 30 states to Washington DC
in February. Photo: 350.org / project survival media

The world’s most important CO2 monitoring station recorded short-term CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere above 400 parts per million (ppm), a level not seen for three million years.

Measurements at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii (and elsewhere) show CO2 concentrations…

Peace News Summer Camp:
Jameela singing in the evening

This year’s Peace News Summer Camp (25-29 July) is something unusual in British peace movement terms; it’s a major event that has been put into the hands of activists of colour – people whose heritage is from the Global South (Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East). Beyond the peace movement, it’s hard to think of any major, regular activist event in the UK that has been mainly…

Street art, corner of Saxon Street and Norman Road,
St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex. Photo: Milan Rai

This month, building on a wave of peace activism, a three-month peace pilgrimage will begin on the Scottish island of Iona, travelling across and then down the east coast of Scotland towards London. The message of the Pilgrimage for Peace and Economic Justice is the same as that of a series of events last month.

In April, the Scrap Trident coalition held a major…

It was the most unlikely victory-and-a-half.

In October 2006, direct action trainer and activist Daniel Hunter got a call from a friend, Jethro Heiko, asking him to join a campaigning group trying to stop two multi-million-dollar casinos being built in residential areas in Philadelphia where they both lived.

The backers of the projects were billionaires, the…

Despite a torrent of commentary in the British media to mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, there has been little or no reflection on what turned the largely-unopposed invasion in March 2003 into a guerrilla war that began two months later.

A double massacre in the largely Sunni town of Fallujah in central Iraq played a crucial role in galvanising the Sunni insurgency.

According to reports, during the US-led invasion in March, Iraqi troops…

On 23 March, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (the PKK) declared a ‘formal and clear ceasefire’ in the guerrilla war it has been fighting with the Turkish government since 1984, which has cost over 35,000 lives.

While this is the third major PKK ceasefire since 1999, there are signs that this time there may be an opportunity for a genuine peace process.

Jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan (known as ‘Apo’ or ‘uncle’) said on 21 March it was ‘time for the guns to go silent’.

…

Yes, this review is a bit late, for a book published in 2009, but this is a book we really didn’t want you to miss out on.

If you’re interested in Israel, then finding out that the foundation stones of the new society, the co-operatives known as kibbutzim, were explicitly as well as implicitly inspired by anarchism is pretty extraordinary.

If you’re interested in anarchism, then learning how these super-egalitarian…

Exuberant schoolgirl on a trip to the ancient remains of Persepolis Photo: Emily Johns

In Shiraz, on Day Four, while we were waiting for our minibus to show up to take us to lunch, a man walked by carrying an old rifle. I’m not an expert on guns, but it looked really old, perhaps even a First World War-type Lee-Enfield. (Now that I’m home, I find that these are still used all round the world.) The man carrying the rifle was dressed in civilian clothes, and walked along the road…