Bob Holman In 1899 in Glasgow, Keir Hardie, arguably the main founder of the Labour Party, launched a furious attack on Lord Overtoun in a pamphlet called White Slaves. Overtoun was a rich factory owner, a donor to charities and an evangelical Christian who criticised the local authority for allowing trams to run on Sundays. [...]

Simon Smart September 9, 2011 OPINION   I’m getting ready to duck, but don’t shoot the messenger. The results are in: religious people are nicer. Or so says Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard. Described by London’s Sunday Times as the most influential academic in the world today, Putnam is not a religious [...]

21 December 2011 Last updated at 00:58 GMT By Brian Wheeler BBC News, Washington Thousands of Iranian Jews and their descendants owe their lives to a Muslim diplomat in wartime Paris, according to a new book. In The Lion’s Shadow tells how Abdol-Hossein Sardari risked everything to help fellow Iranians escape the Nazis. Eliane Senahi [...]

 KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Nestled in the hills between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a small village called the Oasis of Peace—in Hebrew, Neve Shalom and in Arabic, Wahat al-Salam. While the Middle East conflict continues to churn all around, here they are trying to create a different reality, one that says Israelis and Arabs can [...]

When Deakin University PhD candidate Carolina Castano returned to Australia from Colombia, she came with a ‘gift’ of knowledge gained from working with disadvantaged children from a school in a suburb in Bogota, the capital of Colombia, where violence and animal cruelty is common. In Ms Castano’s luggage were lessons and pedagogical principles developed and [...]

by E. F. Schumacher The whole question of nonviolence was taken by various people as being primarily a question of revolution or change or avoidance of war, but the more I reflect on the matter the more I see that it goes very, very much deeper.  So I will start talking about technology because what [...]

by John Fullerton (written in appreciation of E. F. Schumacher) The inevitability of globalization and the dominance of increasingly large and powerful global corporations and financial institutions are an accepted fact of contemporary economic life. Competitive forces pushing us further in this direction continue to build.  The benefits of scale are real, furthered by accelerating [...]

Ray Anderson: 1934-2011 I never heard of Ray Anderson the first time I went to cover one of his speeches at a conference. But after a few minutes of listening to him, he became a hero. Anderson—as many of you probably know—became an unlikely, and influential, figure for the renewable movement. He built Interface, a [...]

10. United States, 1993: A twenty-something law student teams up with Burmese villagers against a California oil company. Katie Redford, a 25-year-old student at the University of Virginia School of Law, was doing a human rights internship on the Thai-Burmese border in 1993. During her time there, she heard many stories of villagers fleeing from [...]

9. Israel, 2002: A tank gunner refuses to pull the trigger, and sets off a buzz of objection instead. General, your tank is a powerful vehicle.
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver. -Bertolt Brecht Yigal Bronner, a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, included this [...]

8. Denmark, 1943: A nation conspires to save the lives of 7,000 Jews. In September 1943, the Nazis prepared for the deportation of all Danish Jews to concentration camps and death. But Georg Duckwitz, a German diplomat with a conscience, deliberately leaked the plans for the roundup, which was due to begin on Rosh Hashanah, [...]

7. Kenya, 2009: No sex without peace: Women unite in a nationwide bedroom strike. Aristophanes never intended the Lysistrata story to be taken literally. His play was a satire, a way of pressing for an end to the death and destruction of the long-running Peloponnesian War in Greece in the 5th century BCE. The story [...]