WRI's Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns is now available in French! The translation was completed by friends at the Union Pacifiste de France, collaborating with WRI staff on the design work – to get a copy of the book, please email andrew@wri-irg.org.
Empowering Nonviolence is a project of War Resisters' International's Nonviolence Programme, offering campaigning resources and nonviolence training to grassroots activists around the world in several languages. Radical social change doesn't “just happen”; change happens when committed people take action together in ways that are effective and strategic. Empowering Nonviolence makes our resources available online, for free, to help activists build stronger, more powerful campaigns. Visit www.nonviolence.wri-irg.org to find out more.
Journalists in the UK and Denmark have uncovered evidence that BAE Systems – the UK's largest arms companies and one of the largest in the world – has profited from the sale of surveillance technology, including to many oppressive governments in the Middle East.
In May and June 2017, activists in Canada, Israel and France have taken nonviolent direct action against arms fairs. In Ottawa, Canada, 40 activists blockaded the entrance to the CANSEC fair for over an hour. CANSEC is an annual two day event hosting 800 companies from across the arms industries, and attended by 12,000 people. As well as exhibits of weapons and other equipment, attendees were given the opportunity to hear presentations from government ministers and attend evening receptions sponsored by Lockheed Martin.
In May 2017, US vendors of weapons made by German company Heckler and Koch received a letter purporting to be from Martin Obermann, the company's head of Transatlantic Sales, informing them of a mass recall of the weapons. The letter read,
This is a call-out to arms fair resisters across the world to join a Skype conversation with other grassroots activists.
REPRESSIVE RESPONSE AGAINST ANTI-MILITARIST MOC ACTIVISTS FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCEUP TO 12.000 EUROS FINE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF SEVERAL YEARS JAIL SENTENCE FOR BLOCKADE IN THE PORT OF SAGUNTO AGAINST NATO MANEUVERS.
The group of antimilitarists that paralyzed the transport of armoured vehicles to the NATO “Trident Juncture“ manoeuvres last October face accusations of “serious disobedience”, “breach of the peace”, and fines for “intrusion".
The second edition of the Handbook for Nonviolent for Campaigns was first released in English in 2014, at WRI's International Conference in Cape Town. The book has now been translated into Spanish via the support of a crowdfunding campaign, and is available from the WRI webshop here: http://www.wri-irg.org/node/24916
Andrew Dey
Originally published as part of Women Peacemakers Programme May 24th Pack.
During the NATO exercise Trident Juncture 2015 the alliance will practice military interventions in North Africa
The NATO exercise Trident Juncture 2015 will take place during October 2015 and until early November in Italy, Portugal, and the State of Spain. According to a variety of sources, this will be the “largest exercise of NATO since the end of the Cold War”1, “largest exercise conducted by the Alliance since 2002” (…) and “the Alliance’s most important exercise in 2015”2, or “the largest deployment of the Alliance in the last decade”3. The exercise consists of two clearly distinguished phases, a command post exercise (CPX, 3-16 October) and a phase of real action (Live Exercise, LIVEX, 21 October-6 November).
The United Nations has released a damning report into the operations of Canadian mining company Nevsun Resources in Eritrea, which accuses the company of using conscripted labour at it's Bisha Mine in the country. Nevsun estimated that the mine held over a billion pounds of copper and 2.7 billion pounds of zinc.