Features

Timed to coincide with the annual Prisoners for Peace list and associated articles, Peace News takes a look at prison and nonviolent struggle.

Not only because nonviolent activists and war resisters frequently end up in prison—and have to continue their struggle while inside - but also because the core issues of prison poses many conceptual challenges to nonviolence, challenges which we also feel we have failed to address adequately in this issue.

As a nonviolent activist who has been to prison for short periods on a number of occasions over anumber of years, the issue of how much we, as prisoners and as activists, participate in our own incarceration is something I have found quite perplexing.

Take - for example - the issue of work in prison as a simple starting point. The vast majority of prisons worldwide depend very heavily - if not entirely - on the goodwill and complicity of their captives, backed up by a range of…

A scholar of Gandhi and Tolstoy from the US asked the founder of the Vedchhi Ashram “How do you decide when to offer Satyagraha and when to continue with constructive (village development) work?”

"I never went to prison, the prison came to me!", he answered, and added “we do not seek issues nor do we seek confrontations. Ours is a way to life. So live; So live! that the perpetrator of injustice, be it the state or the landlord, may understand how to correct…

At 8.30am on the morning of Tuesday 11 September, as my subway train took me just under the World Trade Center (WTC) from my home in Brooklyn to my job in upper Manhattan, I am struck by a headline from The Daily News, New York's “hometown” newspaper. Alongside of a photo of mild- mannered African American educator Patrick Critton screams the news: “Cops Bag Panther - Nabbed 30 Years After Deadly Bank Heist.”

The story told of a hijacking to Cuba, following a 1971 bank…

I can't offer a historical analysis of the situation for the gai or lesbian community in prison. I do not have any statistical information regarding the total number of lesbians and gais in prison, neither information about their sentences, nor information about their crimes, and even less information about the law. The only resources I have to draw on are from Amnesty International and other human rights groups.

Editors note: before reading this article you might find it helpful to…

I have been invited to write about torture for this issue on prisons and really, much or nothing could be said, the topic simply does not allow for neutrality or impartiality.

It has not been easy to find a way of approaching the subject in such a way that allows us to enter - even superficially - into the paradoxes, the emotions, dilemmas and the rationality provoked by this human manifestation: something which is painful, hard, and even tortuous to communicate. So why examine this…

On 23 August a Finnish antimilitarist civil disobedience group - The Wall Breakers - symbolically attempted to rescue a total objector from prison.

As part of a small support demonstration at the Katajanokka prison, one of the group threw a rope over the prison wall while two others started digging a tunnel under it. The digging went on for half an hour until the police ended the performance. No arrests were made, though it is possible that indictments might follow.

The man on…

Internationally, the role of the private sector in the criminal justice system is now substantial and set to expand. On top of contracted services such as food, cleaning, laundry and medical care, the last 20 years have seen private companies take charge of designing and building prisons as well as managing them, particularly in the US, Australia and Britain; with Puerto Rico, Canada and South Africa following closely.

In the US, the prison-industrial complex…

According to the Washington Post "FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated by the silence of jailed suspected associates of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and some are beginning to that say that traditional civil liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract information about the 11 September attacks and terrorist plans".

So far more than 150 people have been detained in the US in connection with the World…

Gandhi practised two types of Satyagraha in his mass campaigns. The first was civil disobedience, which entailed breaking a law and courting arrest. When we today hear this term, our minds tend to stress the “disobedience” part of it. But for Gandhi, “civil” was just as important. He used “civil” here not just in its meaning of “relating to citizenship and government” but also in its meaning of “civilised” or “polite”. And that's exactly what Gandhi strove for.

We also tend to lay…

The stark images of child soldiers in armed conflicts today are shocking: sometimes under 10, dressed in uniforms too large or sportsgear that belongs in a park, armed with high powered weapons that are often bigger than themselves.

Many of these children are often forcibly recruited at gunpoint, but often it is poverty, propaganda and alienation that drives them into armies, paramilitaries and militias. Many join armed groups because of their own experience of abuse at the hands of…

Sitting under the scant shade of a tree, a small huddle of boys started to talk about their life. I want to be the boss of a garage, said Xavier, a small boy; they all did.

This hope is what keeps them coming back, day after day, year after year. No they were not paid, as apprentices; food at lunchtime is all they receive. I watch them learning their trade in the blazing sun: Xavier and Bernard watch intently while the mechanic welds the car chassis, no more than a foot away from…

Valparaiso sits staring at the Pacific Ocean, its multicolour houses hanging from its 37 hills, indifferent to the rain and wind that sweep through the city's narrow, winding streets.

In Chile's oldest port, you are never too far away from the sea or the sky, and you are far too close to poverty. Since its leading industries abandoned the city for Santiago, its fortunes have slipped and it has become capital of the one of the country's poorest regions. One group of residents has…

In France, the strong ties that bind the national education system and the army are as old as compulsory schooling itself. Both institutions served in the building of the nation.

Schools served as one of the coloniser's main means of acculturation, enrolling pupils in 1914 to send out letters to the front or to organise fund-raising fairs which helped to maintain hatred and the warlike frenzy of the time. The Second World War saw the Marshal Petain1 children trained to sing…

When a student takes a gun to school and goes on a shooting rampage—as one 15-year-old is charged with doing in a community near me in California— the public immediately expresses its shock and confusion over how such a thing could ever occur.

Educators, politicians, and the mental health professionals who are called upon to deal with tragedies of this sort all struggle to come up with a plausible explanation. Usually, their attention focuses on narrow, individualistic conditions…

For more than 20 years, Colombia has been caught up in a brutal conflict between political opponents. On the left, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other groups have conducted guerilla warfare against the government since the mid-1960s. Unlike other insurgents in the region who were dependent on support from the Soviet bloc, the Colombian “revolution” has been self-financed through kidnapping for ransom, extortion, and by “taxing” coca producers and cocaine exporters.…

Cyprus isn't in the headlines much these days but, 26 years on from the nationalist-inspired fighting that resulted in its partition, it remains a sharply divided country. The UN-guarded Green Line is all but impenetrable, except by tourists and other internationals.

South of the Line is the actual Republic of Cyprus, now monoculturally Greek. North of the Line is an unrecognised entity known as the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, remote-controlled from Ankara.

Heavy…

During the last ten years, the Dutch Armed Forces have seen dramatic change, of two kinds. First, instead of an army of conscripts, it has become a professional army. Second, like its counterparts in other European countries, it is no longer supposed to be defending the “free world” from a communist/Russian threat, but to be a peace-keeping army. Taken together, these two changes are seen as requiring a mobile and highly trained professional army, ready to go and perform peace-keeping…

In this article we present the conjecture that Zapatismo is a feminine movement. It is not feminist: it was not organised mainly, exclusively or expressly for the defence of women's rights, nor was it based on the conventional claims of many feminist traditions. In describing it as feminine we want to suggest not only that women had and have a decisive role in its conception and realisation, but also that they gave it colour and meaning. The orientation and practices of Zapatismo openly…

Just three years ago my son Yinnon approached me and told me that he could not serve in the military on moral grounds. He said he knew with growing certainty that pacifism was his ideal. He was sixteen years old.

The soul-searching that followed this declaration was not just my son's. It became mine as well, and that of the entire family. The process was deep and often painful. It forced us to question our core values, demanding a re-evaluation of ourselves as parents, siblings, as…