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When I see a man approach and I cast down my eyes
I’m not laying down a hand, I’m not looking for a prize
It’s just a force of habit, this avoiding the male glance
’Cos it isn’t worth the trouble and it isn’t worth the chance
Of them thinking that you’re actively ‘giving them the eye’
And not simply acknowledging a fellow passerby...
And no, I don’t know what they’re thinking but I know what men have thought
And I live by my experiences and the lessons I’…

Chelsea Manning was already a hero of mine after releasing hundreds of thousands of classified documents revealing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her whistleblowing was digital direct action akin to the 1960s Spies for Peace revelations of UK preparations for nuclear war and exposure of the US COINTELPRO programme in the 1970s.

And then, as the world watched a military judge give her a 35-year sentence, she opened herself up with a beautiful and articulate statement: ‘I want…

Yarn bombing, Lidköping, Sweden Photo: Shyguy24x7 [CC-BY-SA-3.0/Wikimedia Commons] Yarn bombing, Ohio, USA Photo: Otuiccip [CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons] Yarn bombing, Madrid, SpainPhoto: Alvaro Léon [CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons] Yarn bombing, Madrid, Spain Photo: Alvaro Léon [CC-BY-SA-3.0 via…

Press, supporters and passers-by stop to hear South African president Jacob Zuma at the Hector Pieterson Memorial in Soweto.photo: Marcela Teran

With Nelson Mandela’s illness earlier this year, the eyes of the world’s media looked to South Africa. More specifically they looked to a single building in South Africa – Pretoria’s Mediclinic Heart Hospital, host to a man who more than any…

Nuclear weapons have been used since 9 August 1945. They have been used ‘in the precise way that a gun is used when you point it at someone’s head in a direct confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled.’

These are the words, over 30 years ago, of analyst Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon insider who leaked the US government’s top secret internal…

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…

A demonstration in the city of Banyas, Syria on the 'day of rage' on 29 April 2011. Photo: Syria Frames of Freedom

Despite the civil war and the threat of US military intervention, the nonviolent movements that began the Syrian uprising continue to struggle for social change – and for a ceasefire.

‘Nonviolent civil resistance started this’, Mohja Kahf of the Syrian Non…

More info here: http://thecockpit.org.uk/show/come_out_we_have_you_surrounded

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…

The connections between the UK’s Trident nuclear weapon system and the Scottish independence referendum in September 2014 are both fiendishly complex and absurdly simple

Here are a few of the complications. It is partly a tale of two governments that have their own referendum agendas but that are also highly sensitive to the potential effect on the referendum vote of positions they adopt publicly. The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), conscious of the power of the old principle — ‘…

Halabja Chemical Bombing, 1988, oil (120 x 100cm), Saqqez. IMAGE: Osman Ahmed.

There were many chemical attacks on Kurdish villages in northern Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s army in 1987 and 1988. Osman himself was a witness and victim of the chemical attack and once went blind for a few days, hiding in a cave.

This image was made in 1988 after the attacks and shortly…

While the world was aggressively preparing for the First World War between 1900 and 1914, many people and organisations in Britain and Europe were boldly campaigning for peace. This is not generally remembered because that war destroyed so much, even the memory that many people had tried to stop it happening.

So amongst the military and political pressures of preparing for war, with its Boer War inadequacies, Dreadnought battleship-building, Baden Powell boy-scouting and much more,…

  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 complicity in Iraqi chemical weapons attacks during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

As PN went to press, UN…

Mohamed Moghazy and Dora Estella Munoz Atillo. PHOTO: Roy St Pierre Everything! Being welcomed by people, and being with like-minded people. The very interesting workshops – the more participation the better – the laughter, games & singing. Compost toilets, etc. Good food and generosity. Peaceful environment that reaches out to all. A kind and loving community. Good…

From 12-16 August, the Zapatistas hosted a course in freedom and autonomy for 1,700 supporters from Mexico and abroad. Originally they had planned on 500 students, but such was the response that they expanded the school to hold 1,200 more people, and announced two more little schools will be held, in December this year and in January 2014.

The main requirement for any applicant is ‘an indisposition to speaking and judging, a disposition to listening and seeing, and a well-placed heart…

More info here: http://thecockpit.org.uk/show/come_out_we_have_you_surrounded

Suppose you get a reply from a government ministry to your carefully-crafted letter – about Trident maybe. The minister or official should think about this one. Off-the shelf answers will not do.

But that’s just what you usually get – the creaky story about living in uncertain times, and how we must maintain a ‘credible’ nuclear capability.

We’re not asking much. We don’t expect a sudden conversion to sanity. We just want considered replies to considered questions or…

This year’s fifth Peace News Summer Camp was a satisfying, at times electrifying, five-day experience, bathed yet again in good weather and good humour.
The camp broke new ground in a number of ways. We moved to a new venue (in Diss, Norfolk); we invited international speakers for the first time (flying them in from Colombia and Egypt); we had an almost entirely new organising group, composed entirely of people of colour; and our presenters were mostly people of colour for the first…

As I write, individuals and families are taking to the streets in Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia. Governments globally pursue policies that lead to further inequalities and push more and more families into poverty, experiencing hunger, unemployment and illness without hope that things will get better. 

In the UK, the government’s own lawyers warn of a new ‘underclass’ unable to defend themselves and insist on their rights. Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi youth in England face…

Satta Hashem grew up in Buhrez, Diyala province, and left Iraq in 1978 aged 18, having been involved in opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime. He trained in Algeria and the Soviet Union, later moving to Sweden and then the UK. He has kept a daily diary of drawings throughout the wars of 1990-1 and 2003-. A departure from his practice in painting, in which Hashem draws on scientific theories of…