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 […]

6. Liberia, 2003: “Mama, what was your role during the crisis?” Ordinary women end extraordinary violence. The west African nation of Liberia was founded by freed American slaves. The country’s coat of arms declares, “The love of liberty brought me here.” In the last years of the 20th century and the early years of this […]

5. Burma, 1990s: Notes on Democracy: A subverted state-backed banknote becomes a “bright collection of small victories.” The brutality of the Burmese military junta made international headlines following the massacre of hundreds of peaceful pro-democracy protesters in 1988. When, in 1990, the party of opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi won an overwhelming election victory, […]

4. Britain, 1984: Breaking the bank: Graffiti artists put a stop to investment in Apartheid. In Oxford and other British university cities, an unusual set of graffiti appeared above pairs of Barclays Bank cash dispensers in 1984. Above one ATM was spray-painted the word BLACKS. Above the other: WHITES ONLY. The graffiti changed nothing, of […]