“Our South Africa moment has finally arrived,” is Omar Barghouti’s rallying call for a global BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement to support the struggle for human rights in Palestine. In this book he eloquently and persuasively sets out the arguments for BDS against Israel in order to end its oppression of the Palestinians that is in defiance of both UN resolutions and international law.
Academic and co-founder of BDS, Barghouti draws on the South African anti-apartheid movement to both describe Israeli oppression and to…
These books offer three very different perspectives on the exploitation of animals for food by humans: one from a land activist (Fairlie), one from an angry ex-vegan (Keith), and one written by passionate animal rights advocates (Torres and Torres).
Putting my cards as reviewer on the table, I’m philosophically an omnivore though practically a near-vegetarian; my agricultural experience is limited to growing up in Somerset and tending an under-producing allotment for 10 years; and professionally I have been involved with scientific…
This is a marvellous book about a marvellous man and it’s full of marvels. Remembering Colin Ward comprises transcripts of his friends’ tributes at his funeral – which various PN stalwarts attended – and his memorial meeting in Conway Hall four months later.
In fact, it amounts to a biography in just 50 pages and it makes you wonder at the hundreds of pages spent on lesser beings. To quote from its introductory note: “Colin Ward was an anarchist, a journalist, and an author of books on architecture, work, childhood, education,…
This collection of spoken word and song was originally a project for the 250th anniversary of Paine’s birth. The spoken element consists of quotations from Paine’s work, newspaper reports and diary entries from the period. The songs address contemporary issues and are performed with the passion and sincerity one has come to expect from Leon Rosselson and Robb Johnson.
The excellent sleeve notes by the performers chart the development of the project since its beginning in 1987. The songs have changed over the years which means that…
This book argues that global warming and bulging human waistlines are products of the same global problems. In Western societies, the car and the television have curtailed human physical activity to unprecedented levels, while a rampant food industry pushes more and more energy-dense foods. The developing world follows our oil-addicted lead, whether it wants to or not.
Fatness is not a personal problem: it is a political problem, as is climate change. Effective, essential action on climate change is essential action for public…
Can a book of “tweets” (140-character-or-less micro-messages) really be readable? The answer is a resounding yes (and don’t worry if you’re not Twitter-savvy, I certainly wasn’t).
Through careful selection the editors have created an inspiring and coherent narrative that not only explains the evolving strategies of both sides but also allows personalities to shine through. Nonviolence played a crucial role throughout, especially in the early decisive confrontations with the police (“Police throw rocks @ demonstrtrs while we raised…
“I like… Peace News, the best of the weeklies”. So wrote Jack Overhill in his diary of daily life and activities as a shoe repairer and pacifist conscientious objector (CO) in Cambridge during the Second World War.
Born into a family of bootmakers, and ordered by his father to leave school at 14, Jack devoted all his spare time to self-education and attempts at novel-writing, as well as keeping a diary for most of his adult life. The 25 typescript volumes were deposited in the Cambridgeshire County Library, and the editor has…
I don’t doubt that this is an important book, it’s got a quote from Chomsky on the front, so it must be. And there are plenty of powerful stories in it that need to be heard. But, I did struggle to love it, which might perhaps be my problem.
I think it’s partly stylistic – the writer does tend to describe events in rather breathless “action hero” mode when a simpler clearer prose might do. But it’s also infused at other times with the kind of earnest dourness that gives the peace movement a bad name.
Those quibbles aside,…
Ten years ago the Quaker project Turning the Tide (TtT) commissioned this short documentary which follows three activists – Trident Ploughshares activist Ellen Moxley, environmental activist Martin Shaw, and student campaigner Alison Matthias – as they take part in a variety of demonstrations and examines some of the core issues around protest, democracy and nonviolence. Can violence be effective? Is property damage justifiable and if so under what circumstances? Is civil disobedience anti-democratic or the life-blood of a healthy democracy…
In the final sentence of her book Judith Suissa sums up what she has attempted to do. This was to establish that however doubtful the feasibility of anarchist society may be, exploring anarchism is “an educationally valuable and constructive project”. The exercise involved prolonged comparison of anarchist and liberal views. Both anarchists and liberals, she says, adhere to the view that humans have an inherent capacity for goodness. The difference is that anarchists believe that before you can have an anarchist society, you must train…
With contributions from fourteen campaigners and corporate practitioners, The Fair Trade Revolution is the Fairtrade Foundation’s official, if somewhat dry, history of the movement. It grew out of the grassroots activism of the 1960s, and editor John Bowles contends a “fundamental paradigm shift” has occurred in the last decade, with sales of Fairtrade goods in the UK topping £1 billion last year.
With fair trade guaranteeing producers in the developing world a minimum price for their product and an additional premium to be invested…
Written by one of the foremost critics of UK foreign policy and published to coincide with the launch of War on Want’s YES campaign, calling for the withdrawal of British troops and “a negotiated settlement” to the war, this is a useful capsule summary of where things currently stand.
While much of this material (drones, “targeted killings”, secret prisons) will already be familiar to PN readers – and there’s less on negotiations than one might anticipate – there’s also some novel material on US attempts to privatise the Afghan…
In late January this year there was a very well-organised and dynamic anti-GM meeting in London called Gathering Momentum which attracted well over 100 participants, including farmers, scientists and activists, from all over Britain and Ireland. This very useful little booklet, distributed at the meeting, is essentially a print copy of the Stop GM website, but it reads very well in its own right. It provides a very clear and grounded rationale for opposition to GM and brings the reader quickly up to speed with worrying recent developments…
The poetics of the Zapatistas should have been a perfect read. I’ve been fascinated by the Zapatista movement, ever since they stormed into San Cristobel in January 1994, and my sister Lucy (who lived in Mexico at the time) has often enthused of the literary quality of Subcomandante Marcos’s writing. So why was this book such a let down in parts?
Part of the problem was, I think, the author isn’t quite sure who his audience is. The title and front cover (a masked Zapatista doll carrying a rifle) suggest an activist readership, but…
The basic argument of this book, originally written 18 months before 9/11, was that the “traditional” method of political control through the projection of military power, which Rogers dubbed “the control paradigm” would not work in an increasingly fragile and unpredictable world. He argued that a model of security based on a military security would simply fail as it did not address the growing socio-economic divide nor the rising environmental crisis, but merely attempted to keep a lid on the problem: “liddism” as he dubbed it. The hope…