The whole frame of geopolitics…seeks to manage tensions and power struggles among those who rule, while the vast majority of people—as well as plants, animals, land, and water—are controlled, confined, or killed to serve those interests.—Ray Acheson, ‘Abolishing Geopolitics and Building a World Without State Violence,’ Metapolis, September 2022  Read More

Author’s Note: On 3 May 2019, a Thanksgiving Service was held in Westminster Abbey, attended by senior members of the Government and Royal Family, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD)—charmingly known as ‘Operation Relentless’—of the Royal Navy’s nuclear-armed submarines. As you read this, one ofRead More

“War is not the only thing that, to occur, must be waged.” —Judith Lipton and David Barash, Strength Through Peace   It now seems like a bygone age, but it was only on December 15 last year that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs presented a draft Treaty on ‘SecurityRead More

On September 24, the Canadian anti-war community suffered a grievous loss with the death, at the age of just 71, of Bill Blaikie, New Democrat MP for Winnipeg for nearly 30 years (1979-2008) and devout Christian believer in a peace on Earth secured not through the chimera of military ‘strength’Read More

  1 Witch. When shall we three met again In thunder, lightning, or in rain? 2 Witch. When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won. Shakespeare, Macbeth   Shakespeare’s Macbeth opens in the “fog and filthy air” of an “open place,” a no-man’s-land where three witches – theRead More

On April 21, Siegfried Hecker, a world-leading authority on nuclear security and proliferation, told John Mecklin, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constituted “a major hinge, a turning point in the nuclear world”: as “big a hinge as when the Soviet Union dissolved.”Read More

I want to escape from my own threshold. Where to? The street is dark And conscience shows up ahead of me, white, Like salt scattered for pavements. Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938)   On 23 January 2015, 49-year-old Ruslan Kotsaba – journalist and blogger, president of the Ukrainian Pacifist Society and anRead More

  Sometimes it seems we are living in different worlds — Vladimir Putin, 23 December 2021 There is another world, and it is this one — French poet Paul Éluard   The curtain was raised on 2022 with the stage set for not one, not two, but three major regional conflicts,Read More

It’s Stockholm, 14 December, 1992, and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev has begun to address over 50 of his counterparts at a summit meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), an institution widely considered instrumental in helping end the Cold War. Just two years afterRead More

As previewed in last month’s column, on January 22, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) – popularly known as ‘The Ban Treaty’ – became international law. Hailed by UN Secretary General António Guterres as “a major step toward a world free of nuclear weapons,” itRead More