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…
It would be very easy to argue that the true “axis of evil” is actually rather short, and stretches from the White House across the river Potomac and down to the Pentagon. But perhaps we would begin to sound like “America bashers”.
The problem is, as many have noted, that in this reality there is one dominant force (in a hegemony that also includes Britain, most of the European Union and some of south Asia) and that is the United States.
Total warThe “war on terror”, or…
So, what hasn't been said? And who hasn't yet said something, anything, however repetitive, however vacuous, however well-meant, about the war in Afghanistan? Suddenly we are all commentators, suddenly we all decide we oppose war, and suddenly we are all interested in the experience of Afghan civilians.
But the number of words spewed about the crisis reveals a desperate scramble to find higher ground. For many, there is a well-rehearsed, reflexive response to conflict, and in…
Is it just another perverse display of the self-destructive “human condition” or are there structural requirements which demand “power-over” children and which can—in theory at least—be dismantled? This issue of Peace News takes a look at the experience of children in relation to war and peace. Not just a catalogue of trauma and misery—child soldiers, child labourers, child victims—but also a presentation of children as survivors, as (small) people who are constructing peace in their own…
War and militarism are highly gendered phenomena—they are difficult if not impossible to understand without reference to gender.
In the first place, national leaders who want to shape our ideas so that we favour fighting a war often address us in gendered terms. They appeal to the nation's manhood to stiffen its spine, recall its heroic past and protect its women-and-children. They represent warriors as manly; draft resisters as wimps and sissies. The technologies of war fighting…
We spent time attempting to pin down exactly what we would focus on, and in the end rejected creating an issue which focuses on globalisation however topical. Instead, while acknowledging the context provided by the ease with which capital, goods and services have been enabled to flow around the world, we decided that what we were really doing was creating an issue which would look at the economies of militarism.
To this end, PN 2442 has tried to focus on four distinct areas:
The…Since 1993 the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been responsible for the provision of many services (health, education, social etc) to its population, but it has not had control of the most basic resources such as land and water, or access to international economic markets. Consequently the Palestinians have remained dependent on the state of Israel for economic co-operation (one figure suggests that 25% of Palestinian GDP comes from such co-operation).
Economic separation
The…
