Features
These are questions and answers taken from the XR FAQs (frequently asked questions) section. Some of them are responses to Gabriel’s
1 November criticisms.
Q: ‘Some…
I grew up in a small West German village, Hamm an der Sieg. Without television or computers, my friends and I played outside and acted out adventure and survival stories. This daily practice taught me not to be afraid of physical encounters, and I developed a capacity for quick thinking and action. I didn’t know how useful that would turn out to be.
At 16, my mother and I moved to the large city of…
After four years of touring, PN’s The World is My Country exhibition had its final show in Hastings from 30 October to 11 November.
Emily Johns displayed her powerful posters celebrating anti-war resistance during the First World War – and some other political and war-…
Protests are well known, and popular. The trouble is, when I look back on the one-off protests I’ve joined over the years, I don’t remember a single one that changed the policy we were protesting against.
In February 2003, I joined millions of others around the world on the eve of US/British war on Iraq. The BBC estimated that a million protested on 15 February in London alone. In the US,…
In November, PN reporter Rebecca Elson-Watkins wrote to 53 British peace groups with a Brexit questionnaire. She received four responses. Peace groups may be unsure or divided on Brexit or perhaps unaffected by it. Here are the responses we received, in the order they came.
Welsh Anti-Nuclear Alliance
1) Your name and group: Richard Bramhall, Welsh Anti-…
Waging Nonviolence (WNV) has been publishing must-read reporting and analysis on nonviolent action around the world since 2009.
It started out as a blog, the brainchild of three young people: Eric Stoner, Bryan Farrell and Nathan Schneider, who all shared an interest in nonviolence and civil resistance, though each approached the topic from a slightly…
This essay was written on 1 November, before the bridges actions on 17 November that we report on p5.
If Extinction Rebellion plans to gradually build capacity for its big demands by winning smaller-scale victories then why has it launched itself with (apparently) no indication as to what these smaller-scale wins are going to be?
Lots of people seem to be very excited about Extinction Rebellion (XR)’s ‘declaration of rebellion’…
The text below is from Conscientious Objection Remembered, a booklet produced by Haringey First World War Peace Forum. The booklet tells the story of the 350 men in Haringey, a borough in North London, who refused to fight in the First World War. The booklet also contains background information about Haringey 100 years ago and a two-mile walk through Haringey (which goes past houses where…
On 28 June 1916, Karl Liebknecht – Germany’s most famous anti-war campaigner – was put on trial for treason for his opposition to the war. That same day, some 55,000 munitions workers left their workplaces to march in perfect discipline…
It must have been a strange sight: the ex-suffragette leading a procession of soldiers marching four abreast down Whitehall, under the banner ‘Lift the Hunger Blockade!’
The Women’s International League (WIL) had been demonstrating in Trafalgar Square on 6 April 1919 against the continuing blockade of Germany and Austria-Hungary. WIL was the British section of an international peace group, the International Committee of Women for Permament Peace (ICWPP), which had been established at…
Building on the 2016 gathering in Rome (see article), Pax Christi International created the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, invited by the pope to ‘revitalise the tools of nonviolence, and active nonviolence in particular.’ The project has been organised around five international round tables, to pull together and document experiences of the theory, thinking, theology and practice of…
Peace News readers will be familiar with the names of Gene Sharp, Jean Paul Ledarch, George Lakey, Martin Luther King and Gandhi, as among those who have lived, taught and supported nonviolent peacemaking through the decades. For some of those named, the Christian Gospels and the life and witness of Jesus will have been a source of motivation and inspired their thinking and practice of nonviolence.
In 2016, Catholic peace practitioners, academics, theologians and members…
Photo: US National Archives and Records Administration [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons
'How did the workers' councils emerge in Germany? They emerged from the big strike movements of the last years, in which we – who have always been strong opponents of the war and who have lived with tortured souls for four years given the pressure and the lies the German people…
In July 1945, US president Harry S Truman had two powerful options his advisors believed could end the Pacific war – apart from a bloody US land invasion of Japan, or the use of nuclear weapons.
One was a Russian declaration of war. The other was to allow the Japanese emperor to keep his throne, despite his war crimes.
Truman refused to try either of these options before using the atom bomb.
Russia
On 8 July, the top-level US-UK…
Have you heard about the minister for peace and disarmament?
Did you know that the Labour party has promised to establish a minister for peace and disarmament (MPD) if they win the next general election? If so, do you know what policy areas this minister might focus on and how they could work with other…
Currently, I’m suing a whole street. Or, at least, that’s what people say; the actual reality is more complicated than that.
I’m a disabled person; I’ve got several linked invisible conditions and also a genetic condition as a result of which I’m a powered wheelchair user. While the world has changed positively for disabled people, the pace of that change has slowed enormously in the last 10 years, and in some areas it’s gone backwards. The Equality Act…
It was a warm and sunny afternoon on 9 June but the church was packed.
The speakers were Paul Davies, standing in to explain current Labour Party policy in the absence of a Labour MP or union official prepared to defend it, and Bruce Kent presenting the opposing view.
It turned out to be an ‘unbalanced’ meeting because there did not seem to be anyone in…
There have been four Anarchist Studies Network conferences, one every two years since 2010. The theme for this year's fifth conference, 'decolonise', was chosen for two reasons: to confront and tackle the…