Issue: 2441

Small-scale peace teams have played an important role in supporting local groups and facilitating dialogue between divided communities. Robert Sautter reports on the work of the Balkan Peace Team in Kosov@.

What were the hot topics nearly fifty years ago? We travel back in time and take a peek at interventions 1950s style

Was UNAMETs mission in East Timor an example of an unusually large, unusually well-resourced nonviolent intervention? If so, it presents interesting dilemmas, and perhaps some lessons, for the nonviolent movement, argues Maggie Helwig.

Using the example of Peace Brigades Internationals work in Colombia, Luis Enrique Eguren discusses the significance of the role of international observers in the protection of local people working in conflict.

Why intervene?

In this personal reflection on his work with Christian Peacemaker Teams, Jamey Bouwmeester laments paradises lost.

Can the international peace movement create a nonviolent peace army in the image of Gandhis ideas of shanti sena? Building on decades of small-scale nonviolent interventions and the work of peace-teams, the Global Nonviolent Peace Force are developing ideas on a grand scale. Donna Howard explains.

Former peace team member Kate Witham challenges us to examine the gender dynamics of nonviolent intervention, arguing that feminist-pacifist interventions may differ because they recognise the links between masculinity, militarism, patriarchal domination and war.

Julia Guest reports from the West Bank city of Hebron on the work of the Christian Peacemaker Team and the philosophy behind their approach to nonviolent interventions.

A Plowshares/Ploughshares support person describes the networks which keep prisoners in good shape - and how they use the prison experience to activate and animate the people around them.

When on 14 October 1996, Osman (Ossi) Murat Ulke began to serve his sentence in the military prison of Mamak in Ankara, a flood of protest and solidarity letters soon poured in. His case shows how effective letters to Prisoners for Peace can be. Ossi's imprisonment had been expected and partner organizations in Western Europe (including many sections of the WRI) and in Turkey were prepared.

It is an oft-repeated question: does reform undermine revolution, or can they co-exist? In semi-response to George Farebrothers article The Law v Nuclear Weapons (PN 2440) Janet Kilburn argues "probably not".

Landscape of Memory, a set of videos produced by a coalition of Southern African film-makers and reviewed in PN 2440, covers the different ways that people have found to deal with the great traumas that have been visited on the region through war, apartheid and repression. The Namibian video, Nda Mona (I Have Seen), discusses the difficult and doubly painful issues raised when the repression comes from your comrades, your "own side". The director, Richard Pakleppa, talked to Lorna Richardson.

In October anti-nuclear activists in Germany recommenced their resistance to nuclear waste transports (Castor) - one of which is due to leave the nuclear power station at Philippsburg in the south of Germany for the reprocessing plant in La Hague, France.

By the beginning of November the escalating war in the Middle East had claimed more than 160 lives (predominantly Palestinian), 2000-6000 had been wounded and more than 700 arrested.