Speck, Andreas

Speck, Andreas

Andreas Speck

1 June 2002Feature

A Peace News on antimilitarism - shouldn't that be an easy task for the international antimilitarist magazine? If we thought so before, then working on this issue certainly proved us wrong!

 

While we engage in antimilitarist practice in our daily work - in the Peace News or WRI office, or in our activism out on the streets, or at military propaganda events - our antimilitarist analysis seems to trail behind. That doesn't mean that we don't know what…

3 December 2001Comment

The staff of War Resisters' International provide their analysis of where we go from here.

While we are writing this, Britain - where we WRI workers live - and the US are dropping bombs on Afghanistan: it is the first weeks of the “war on terrorism”.

At the same time on Oxford Street - a couple of kilometres from the WRI office - mainstream Britain goes shopping; life goes on as normally as possible, although protective clothing and gas masks are sold-out, in response to fears of anthrax attacks. Who cares about the bombs dropped thousands of kilometres away in order to…

3 September 2001Comment

Following on from Peace News 2439 on noviolence and social empowerment (NVSE), Andreas Speck and Julia Kraft report on the War Resisters' International NVSE conference, which took place earlier this year in Puri, India.

In February 2001, a little later than originally planned, 70 people from 20 countries on five continents met for a week at the Gandhi Labour Foundation in Puri on the Gulf of Bengal, in order to exchange experiences of empowerment, to raise questions, and to search for new answers1.

The venue was well-chosen. The Gandhi Labour Foundation, an educational centre of the Gandhian union movement, lies at the edge of a place of pilgrimage – Puri – and only a few minutes walk from the…

1 September 2001Review

New Society Publishers 2001. ISBN 0 86571 418 5. 256 pp

This book is long overdue. Since Bill Moyer developed the Movement Action Plan (MAP) in the early 1980s, it has only been available in newspaper format, and in two separate parts. Doing Democracy now not only presents the entire MAP, it also includes five case studies, showing how MAP can help in analysing a movement.

The first time I heard about MAP was probably at a seminar in 1993. The eight stages and four roles of social movements then proved to be very helpful in understanding…

1 December 2000News

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.

This would have been the first Castor transport since the one to Ahaus (see PN April 1998) and the total ban on transports following the discovery of radioactive contamination of rolling stock (see PN July 1998). This would also have been the first transport since the red-green government took power in October 1998, and reached the so-called “nuclear consensus” with the nuclear industry, wrongly presented as a slow process to shut down all nuclear power stations.

The strategy of anti-…