Features

As part of the week of G8 actions, more than 1000 people protested at Dungavel Detention Centre (officially Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre) on 5 July against the detention of asylum seekers, in a demonstration organised by groups including the

There are a whole range of repressive and outrageous measures increasingly being used by police and companies to try and intimidate and undermine all manner of protests - including peace and anti-war, anti-capitalist, Palestinian solidarity, environmental

Kicking off the G8 week in style, an estimated 2,000 people participated in a particularly “big” blockade at the Faslane naval base, home to Britain's four nuclear powered - and armed - Trident submarines.

Organised as a nonviolent, antimili

On Friday 13 May, 12 anti-nuclear campaigners established a peace camp on Drake's Island in Plymouth Sound, declaring it a nuclear-free state.

The protest, which lasted a week, highlighted the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) - currently

As Peace News went to press, a High Court hearing into the injunctions demanded by Brighton arms manufacturers to restrict anti-war protests was still continuing. Richard Purssell reports... The injunction is being sought by EDO/MBM Technologies Ltd, subsidiary of the giant US arms manufacturer EDO Corp, under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.
It seeks to create an exclusion zone, which would restrict all protest activities around the claimant's factory to two-and-a-half hours…

On 19 March tens of thousands of people are expected to take to the streets around the world to protest at the continuing military occupation of Iraq, and to call for coalition troops to be withdrawn.
National and local events are due to take place in Greece, Sweden, Iceland, Brazil, Australia, Senegal, Japan and South Africa. Here in Britain the largest event will be the march in central London, taking place under the banner “bring the troops home”, with similar demonstrations and…

February's climate change protest march in London brought back my memories of the huge protest march to Hyde Park after the recent third western invasion of Iraq in under a century.

As the then Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats it fell to me to address the largest war-time peace protest ever on behalf of the party in Charles Kennedy's absence. I had been urging Kennedy to tackle the issue of oil driven wars for some time but here I had an opportunity to address the issue myself…

I first got involved in women's liberation in 1970 and stayed very active for the next 20 years, including ten years as a member of the Feminism and Nonviolence Study Group.

I never gave up on activism or being a radical feminist, but for the following ten years I concentrated almost entirely on campaigning in my local community--fighting for childcare provision and against rampant cuts in local authority spending. Over that period (roughly the 1990s) I kept being told that the…

In 1936 I had the remarkable good fortune to be a youthful member of a local pacifist group which dreamt up and published the first Peace News. A modest trial printing of 2,000 copies based on #6 of funds, it was the brain child of a Quaker member of the No More War Movement, Humphrey Moore, a journalist who had worked for the National Peace Council.

Two pence a copy on the streets, my first stint was to sell 100 copies of the founding issue. Peace groups all over the country…

The elections in Iraq have been an unprecedented opportunity for ordinary people to influence the destiny of their country, but the National Assembly they have elected is so hedged in with US imposed restrictions that the cabinet it produces will be more like a chain-gang of prisoners than an independent government. A prominent Iraqi politician in the Shia coalition told the New Yorker in January that the US had quietly told the parties before the election that there were three…

Even for a lifelong pacifist it is hard in some circumstances to argue against military intervention.

The violence and brutality that are the fruit of thousands of years of militarismare so real that, in one situation after another, it is impossible not to long for aspeedy and effective solution. Military options are the ones we know best and that have the resources. The soldiers are ready and waiting, it seems. If they arenot sent in, we feel we have somehow connived in the…

The political/social situation in Kosova in autumn 2004, which most people call by the acronym UNMIK, is a conglomerate, a complex overlay of five years of inadequate solutions and stop-gap measures.

Each decision taken since June 1999 has had only short-term goals, a means to justify the end of not-deciding, and each unprincipled step failed to promote solutions and structures that are stable andjust, being founded, as they are, not on principles but by appeasement.
 
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There are many possibilities forcivilian intervention in conflicts. Today the UN, the OSCE,and even NATO, speak of the importance of civilian personnel in complexpeace-keeping missions.

Most industrialised countries have cre-ated conflict resolution budget-lines, and even the World Bank is concerned with”conflict prevention”. However, at the same time they all insist that in case ofviolence, there needs to be a military presence to protect the civilians. That hasbeen the ideology…

On 10 June, the fifth anniversary of UN Resolution 1244 establishing the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), protesters in Prishtina raised their red cards to tell UNMIK it was time to leave. Throughout the city their posters proclaimed six principles of nonviolence stated by Martin Luther King.

The demonstration was not very big: it had been pretty much kept out of the news in advance, and afterwards was to be downplayed by the powers-that-be--both local and…

After the NATO bombings, the world's most powerful intergovernmental organisations involved themselves in the administration of post-war Kosovo--not just UN and its subsidiaries or NATO, but the OSCE (for “democratisation”) and the EU and World Bank (for “economic regeneration”).Most of the major international humanitarians NGOs were also keen to be seen in post-war Kosovo. Per capita more money has been spent in Kosovothan in any other peace or humanitarian operation, and far more soldiers…

“Post-intervention peace operations” is the theme for this section of Peace News; an apt topic for the final edition of the paper to be co-published with War Resisters' International.

Our focus is less on classical peace-keeping, where the UN deploys a lightly armed force with the consent of the conflicting parties. Rather, while providing information on the whole contemporary peace-keeping scene, we examine in more depth the latest generation of “peace operations”, where…

In his report to the 2000 General Assembly, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan challenged the international community to forge consensus around the so-called “right of humanitarian intervention”: the question of when, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive - in particular military - action, against other states for the purpose of protecting people at risk in that other state. It was in response to that challenge that the International Commission…

Peacekeeping has changed a lot since 1956, when Lester B Pearson--then Canadian Foreign Minister--proposed that the UN send an international force to the Sinai desert to prevent fighting.

The Canadian government established the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre (PPC) in 1994. Its Peace Operations Summer Institute (POSI), which I attended, offers an overview of the whole array of peace operations, and while I was there several other courses were underway on such top-ics as humanitarianism…

The word at the UN is that there is a “commitment gap” - that is, the world's militarily most powerful countries want to see more military intervention around the world, but are reluctant to send their troops on missions run by the UN.

Each month the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operation (DPKO) publishes a list of how many troops, military observers and police each country supplies to UN operations (see following “tools” pages for latest details). Who heads the list of…

Bear in mind that the police are probably much better equipped and trained for close combat than you or we. They have been psyching themselves up for hours, are likely to have plenty of reserves standing by, and usually feel confident with the law behind them. Beating the police is about outwitting them, not necessarily hitting them over the head.

In Britain the Public Order Manual of Tactical Operations and Related Matters provides the police with clear instructions for dealing…