Book review. Roads, Runways and Resistance: From The Newbury Bypass to Extinction Rebellion by Steve Meliaby Ian SinclairPeace NewsOctober-November 2021 Steve Melia has taken a topic that could be dully technical and written a book that is both interesting and infused with a sense of urgency in terms of the climate crisis. Underpinned with 50 […]
Book review: How To Start A Revolution by Ruaridh Arrowby Ian SinclairPeace NewsJune-July 2021 Having directed the award-winning 2011 documentary about Gene Sharp, How To Start A Revolution, Ruaridh Arrow has now published an engrossing biography of the man who CNN once called ‘the father of nonviolent struggle’. Sharp, who died in 2018 aged 90, led […]
Written by Prem Kumar Vijayan & Karen Gabriel It is widely acknowledged that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and more specifically, his political method of non-violent struggle, was one of the major reasons that the British were forced to leave India. However, it is also evident that these Gandhian methods have failed on many, many occasions, and are likely to continue to[Read More...]
Book review. Twyford Rising: Land and Resistance by Helen Beynon with Chris Gillhamby Ian SinclairMorning Star23 February 2021 IN 1989 the Thatcher government announced the “biggest road-building programme since the Romans”. One of the new schemes was the M3 extension past Winchester across Twyford Down. With local groups having fought the planned road for decades […]
Book review. In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. Vicky Osterweilby Ian SinclairPeace NewsMarch 2021 Written in the wake of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Vicky Osterweil’s central argument is that looting and rioting are positive actions, which ‘in most instances… transform and build a nascent moment into a movement’. She […]
[Prefatory Note: First part of my Foreword to A Shared Struggle: Stories of Paalestinian and Irish Hunger Strikes, a collection gathered by Norma Hashim & Yousef M. Aljami. It was published as an opinion piece of October 27, 2020 by Politics Today. During my six years as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, I found […]
Book review. Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregmanby Ian SinclairPeace NewsOctober 2020 The basic argument of this book is very simple. Contrary to the ‘persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish’, Dutch author Rutger Bregman argues that ‘most people, deep down, are pretty decent.’ The assumption of human selfishness underpins huge […]
Black Lives Matter: the largest and most effective US social movement in history? by Ian Sinclair Morning Star 13 July 2020 Like many people I’ve followed and been inspired by the extensive news coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States. But I really didn’t understand their extraordinary size until I read […]
Watching a horse drawn wagon carrying the body of John Lewis cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma Alabama one final time is a stunning testament to the power of non-violence in 1965 and 2020. The body of Congressman John Lewis will lie in state in Montgomery and the U.S.capital as an honored American hero, a brave man, a moral[Read More...]
[Prefatory Note: I wrote the text below before being aware of the drastic challenges posed for the human species in 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, Trump & Trumpism. These challenges are posed in their most extreme forms in the United States, not only the first global state, but also the first failed global state, exporting its failures far beyond normal borders of time and space.
