Ritchie, Joseph

Ritchie, Joseph

Joseph Ritchie

1 December 2009News

One person’s experience of the NATO parliamentary summit

According to the NATO Welcoming Committee’s website, at 10.30am on 13 November, text message alerts would be sent out disclosing a “secret” meeting place, from which we would march towards the NATO parliamentary assembly in Edinburgh.

By 10.45am, I’d made it to Edinburgh’s Forest Café, which was providing the convergence space for the event. These “closed” meeting tactics – the pre-planned action, text message alerts and a small hive of activity directing the bigger picture –…

1 April 2009News

Following the inaugaral gathering last November , a second, smaller, Anti-Militarist gathering was hosted in Edinburgh on 1 March. By and large, we wanted to make sure that anti-militarist activists in Scotland were doing all they could to build up to NATO Parliamentary Assembly taking place in Edinburgh in November and the Brighton Anti-Militarist Gathering in May.

The main decision was that the network would issue a call-out for a UK “Day of Action” against the NATO summit in…

1 February 2009News

On 29-30 November 2008, Edinburgh Anti-Militarists hosted a gathering to build momentum against the NATO Parliamentary Assembly taking place in 2009.

What came out of this was a UK-wide network of anti-militarists, committed to mutual aid and a joint effort to shut down the NATO assembly with direct action.

Bringing together

When we started putting together an agenda for a gathering for opposing NATO in the coming year, a larger purpose became obvious.

We…