Activism

Throughout the court case the people of Liverpool came up trumps, a higgledy-piggledy tapestry of different characters and communities and politics: the Catholics with their rituals of remembrance, the ravers with their repetitive antimilitarist beats, the Quakers with their silence, the local pagans with their reverence and mischief, the local socialists and feminists, the Buddhist nuns and monks and punks from further afield. All were present to support four women on trial for disarming a…

The British National Party came to have their annual meeting in our patch last November.

I got stopped by the police for having a scarf round my face and was held down an alley way, shouted at and pushed and threatened until I took it off and gave my details - right by the BNP security men.

I felt the police put my life in danger by asking me to unmask in front of the BNP while the fascists took photos. And the police made me shout out my name and address.

Over the 40…

1.5 hours

As activists, many of us love tactics! So here's a tool which uses that to help us think about overall strategy more effectively.

Two methods for introduction:
Method 1: Mingling

Hand out letter-sized pieces of blank paper…

We all have something to share and sometimes the most effective way of imparting information, offering and combining this with opportunities for safe discussion and exploration, is via a workshop format. In my experience, workshop organisers often forget that participants are supposed to do some “work”! and session are often very loosely structured, with no clear and specific outcomes expected. This can be extremely frustrating: being precise about what's on offer, or pinning down what…

When you put strangers, caffeine and ideas in the same room, brilliant things can happen. For that very reason, the British Parliament banned coffee-houses in the 1700s as hotbeds of sedition. Might we brew up a similar social liveliness now? With democracy, critical thinking and “the ties that bind” all under siege, this may be the most radical cup of coffee you ever drink.

Conversation Cafe's arose from the questions, “How can we create a culture of conversation?…

We are killing each other and the planet: the arms trade, car-culture, exploitation of other species, domestic violence, racism, cash and GM crops, capitalism and ingrained militarism — the list seems endless.

It can seem so bleak, overwhelming and dispiriting, it can fuel the belief in the ultimate futility of human existence: if we are going to live, why should we live like this?

Feel like giving up? Feel like getting on with our relatively comfortable lives and…

It's quite simple when you think about it: every injustice is a direct consequence of a power imbalance. People do unjust things ... well, because they can. The advantages out-weigh the disadvantages and any resistance can be overcome. It seems to me, then, that achieving justice is all about evening up the power.

A big "Aha!" moment for me was when I came across Gandhi's idea thatpower was not a possession that you acquire, like a house or a better job title, but a relationship.…

If protest is to achieve anything, it should offer both a means and an end in itself. That is to say, the act should serve the location and situation in hand and, ideally, should energise those participating to further actions. Ordeal is not hugely conducive to spirited resistance.

If this all sounds either obvious or prescriptive, the point is only made because of the fundamental role media responses play in determining the success or failure of any act. So much of the time,…

“...The rebels search each other out. They walk toward one another. They find each other and together break other fences.” Part of the scene-setting statement from the latest volume to claim space on the shelf marked “new world order, resistance to”. Have we been here before? And yet... sometimes a book, a film, an action, grouping or artefact feels like a step shift, feels like it embodies a significant new dimension of thought or relevance.

With this 500 page “brick” of a book,…

In 1991, during the first Gulf War, I joined an ad hoc demonstration to protest at president Bush's visit to the Andover, Massachusetts, Raytheon plant. Bush choppered in for a photo op of himself congratulating the workers for making the Patriot missile, while secular and religious activists did their best to rain on his bellicose parade.

This was my first demonstration at Raytheon, but hardly my first protest. I participated in long campaigns against the Trident submarine, made by…

On 5 June 2003 a small group ofactivists managed to successfully blockade BAe Systems(BAeS) offices in North Edinburgh for three hours. The company refused to press charges and the police were extremely pleasant, although they stopped short of passing out tea and biscuits. A local news reporter showed up and stated that his editor would only run the story if there were arrests. There emerged an ironic situation where a peaceful protest against a developer and promoter of violent products can…

After introducing the TokyoProgressive website at the International Green Forum (Japan) that was held over two years ago, I was asked by a member of the German IndyMedia collective why Japan had no IndyMedia of its own.

In fact, I could only suggest that she speak with representatives of some of the Internet service providers here which actually host good progressive websites,of which there are actually many. In fact, one such provider is a member of the internationally known…

The Iraq Pledge of Resistance is a US campaign of nationally coordinated nonviolent civil disobedience to oppose the war in Iraq. To my knowledge it is the only US campaign of coordinated nonviolent resistance in opposition to the war.

To this date the campaign has been sponsored by about a dozen of the country's major peace organisations. It is being actively organised in 53 cities, with new ones coming on every week; over 5000 people have physically signed the pledge, with another…

This has turned into a bit of a funny issue really, but the original idea was to try to generate a snapshot of the “health” of the international peace movement in the “post 11 September 2001 security environment”.

To do this, we invited a wide range of activist and campaigning groups to provide fairly detailed answers to specific questions (see box).

We thought it would be useful to hear about the campaigning methods and tactics…

It has become fashionable again among a few artists and groups in some alternative publishing companies here in France - but also, I believe, in Belgium, Switzerland, the US, Canada, and Britain - to talk about culture and resistance...

For me the topic conjures up this comment: agriculture and culture are both spaces of struggle against the elements, wastelands of liberties, areas of autonomy. This is also the place where the forces, hopes and actions to change the world lie.