Johns, Emily

Johns, Emily

Emily Johns

3 April 2014Review

Taschen, 2013; 520 pp; £44.99

All the fights that we cover in Peace News against fracking and roads and climate change have at their heart an anger and a love for our intimate home landscapes. We fight for the hills of Lancashire to the fields of Norfolk. Sebastião Salgado’s grand photographic project Genesis opens one’s eye and heart to a world beyond anything most of us will ever experience. Here are images that bring one to tears for the magnificence and frailty of the earth.

The Genesis project ‘is an attempt…

20 March 2014Feature

by Emily Johns. The first in the Peace News poster series celebrating the anti-war movements of the First World War. For the whole story see www.theworldismycountry.info

18 March 2014Feature

An occupied Spanish social centre brings people together to struggle for their rights


The social centre before it was occupied.
Photo © Enredadera Tetuán

On 3 February, the PN co-editors interviewed a key figure in the Centro Social Okupado la Enredadera (the Vine occupied social centre) in northern Madrid. The social centre is one small part of the huge, nonviolent, anti-austerity, non-hierarchical ‘15M’ movement which began in May 2011, and has shaken up Spanish politics and empowered millions of people.

Peace News What was the beginning of the social…

18 March 2014News

On 1 February, over 300 people squeezed into an auditorium in southern Madrid designed for half that number, to remember and celebrate the life of Howard Clark, a key figure in Peace News and War Resisters’ International (WRI) for several decades.

The evening event, organised by WRI, was attended by peace activists from across Europe, as well as many folk from Madrid, where Howard has lived with his partner Yolanda Juarros Barcenilla since 1996. (Yolanda organised a weekend programme…

21 February 2014Comment

Howard's proposal for a network of nonviolence study and action groups

It’s still unbelievable that he has gone. Howard Clark has been a key figure in Peace News for several decades – as a co-editor, collaborator, contributor, (re-)organiser, trustee, director, defender. His 1971 essay Making Nonviolent Revolution, which we re-published as a pamphlet two years ago – over his modest objections – with a new, very valuable afterword by Howard, remains one of the most important explanations published of the liberatory politics that PN aims to…

19 January 2014Blog

A letter from Peace News published in The Guardian, 16 Jan 2014

In his 2011 book To End All Wars – the only recent account of the first world war to foreground the anti-war movement – Adam Hochschild asks: "If we were allowed to magically roll back history to the start of the 20th century and undo one – and only one – event, is there any doubt…

31 December 2013Comment

Jonathan Cape, 2013, 56pp, £20

This is one segment of the outstanding 24-foot-long drawing by Joe Sacco of the first day of the battle of the Somme from his concertina book The Great War: July 1, 1916 (an illustrated panorama with an essay by Adam Hochschild. Jonathan Cape, 2013, 56pp, £20). At first, the mass of figures shuffling through trenches appear to be Where’s Wallys, then peering closer you see that they are all…

31 December 2013News

The peace process between the Turkish government and the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) guerrilla movement which was revealed publicly in March seems to have slowed to a glacial pace.

After some deft public relations interventions in September and November, Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is not expected to make any serious moves before the March 2014 local elections.

In April, we speculated that Erdogan was spurred to initiate peace talks with the PKK by the mass nonviolent uprising of Turkish Kurds last autumn, sparked by a Kurdish prisoners’ hunger strike that began last September (see PN 2556, and 2552-2553). It may need another…

1 November 2013News

Preparing ourselves to do extraordinary things ...

Effective nonviolence at the Reclaim the Power camp in Balcombe, West Sussex, part of a summer of action against fracking exploration by Caudrilla. PHOTO: Reclaim the Power

Nonviolence study groups underpinned much of the success of the US civil rights movement in the 1960s (see editorial, p12). Campaign Nonviolence, a new year-long project initiated by California-based peace group, Pace e Bene,  aims to promote the formation of such study and action groups. Campaign Nonviolence has been…

1 November 2013Comment

PN co-editors Milan Rai and Emily Johns examine some of the precedents for the Campaign Nonviolence initiative

We remember the lunch counter sit-ins that electrified the civil rights movement in the US in 1960. We remember the dignity and persistence of the hundreds of young African-American who asserted their right to be served as equals, day after day, despite repeated beatings and arrests.

The direct action of these Black students achieved desegregation of many businesses within weeks, and dramatically escalated the confrontation with institutional white racism. Many of the students…

1 October 2013Feature

Obama and Cameron have been forced to bow to their populations' anti-war sentiments

On 14 September, instead of launching air strikes on Damascus, US president Barack Obama was forced to agree to a Russian plan for disarming Syria’s chemical weapons under the supervision of a UN agency, the organisation for the prohibition of chemical weapons (OPCW). The resolution of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis by diplomacy was a triumph for what the New York Times in…

1 October 2013Comment

We need a common agenda to tackle the twin threats of climate change and nuclear warfare.

We are of the generation who came of age in the 1980s, terrified that the world might end at any moment through nuclear holocaust. In the decades since then, the people of the world have grown less frightened of a nuclear war.

The risk is still there, as the number of nuclear weapon states increases, and conflicts continue around nuclear tinderboxes, but the fear has declined.

Recent studies suggest that even a ‘small’ nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each…

1 October 2013Feature

Emily Johns commemorates tje life of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa

On 10 November 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues were hanged by the Nigerian military government for campaigning against the devastation of their homeland in the Niger Delta by oil companies, Shell in particular. Ken was an activist, writer, political journalist and…

1 September 2013Feature

New CIA files show US supported Iraqi chemical warfare against Iran

  Chemical bombing of Halabja, 1988, pencil (30 x 42cm).
Osman Ahmed

As the US and Britain threaten to attack Syria on the basis of an alleged chemical weapons attack on the Ghouta suburb of Damascus, confirmation has emerged of US government…

1 September 2013Comment

PN co-editor Emily Johns reflects on difference and the difference it makes.

When I gave birth to my child, there he was, he was a boy! So different from me. If he had been a girl, I would have looked ahead at his childhood through the template of my own. I remember thinking: ‘Oh no, I don’t like football, I’ll need to get to grips with boys’ interests and needs’. I nevertheless gave him my dolls’ house furniture and found that he was his own person, didn’t like football anyway, and we did pretty well on gender, power and politics over the next 18 years.

But…