About

World BEYOND War hosted #NoWar2022: Resistance & Regeneration, a virtual global conference from July 8-10, 2022.

Thanks

Hosted virtually through the Zoom Events platform, #NoWar2022 facilitated international solidarity by bringing together nearly 300 attendees and speakers from 22 different countries. #NoWar2022 explored the question: “As we resist the institution of war worldwide, from crippling sanctions and military occupations to the network of military bases that encircle the globe, how can we simultaneously ‘regenerate,’ building the alternative world that we want to see based on nonviolence and a culture of peace?”

Throughout three days of panels, workshops, and discussion sessions, #NoWar2022 highlighted unique stories of change-making, both big and small, around the world, that challenge the structural causes of war & militarism while, at the same time, concretely creating an alternative system based on a just and sustainable peace.

View the conference program booklet.

Sister Actions in Montenegro:


#NoWar2022 was organized in partnership with the Save Sinjajevina campaign in Montenegro, which aims to block a NATO military training ground & preserve the Balkans’ biggest mountain grassland. Save Sinjajevina representatives Zoomed in to the virtual conference and there were opportunities to support the in-person actions happening in Montenegro during the week of the conference.

#NoWar2022 Schedule

#NoWar2022: Resistance & Regeneration paints a picture of what the alternative to war and violence can look like. The “AGSS” — the alternative global security system — is World BEYOND War’s blueprint for how to get there, based on 3 strategies of demilitarizing security, managing conflict nonviolently, and creating a culture of peace. These 3 strategies are woven throughout the conference panels, workshops, and discussion sessions. Additionally, icons on the schedule below indicate specific sub-themes, or “tracks,” throughout the event.

  • Economics & Just Transition:💲
  • Environment: 🌳
  • Media & Communications: 📣
  • Refugees: 🎒

(All times are in Eastern Daylight Time – GMT-04:00) 

Friday, July 8, 2022

Explore the platform before the online conference starts and get familiar with the different features. Meet other conference participants using the networking feature, plus browse the expo booths for our sponsoring organizations.

A modern folk troubadour, Samara Jade is dedicated to the art of listening deeply and crafting soul-centered songs, inspired greatly by the wild wisdom of nature and the landscape of the human psyche. Her songs, sometimes whimsical and sometimes dark and deep but always truthful and harmonically rich, ride the crest of the unknown and are medicine for personal and collective transformation. Samara’s intricate guitar playing and emotive vocals draw upon influences as diverse as folk, jazz, blues, Celtic and Appalachian styles, woven into a cohesive tapestry that is a sound distinctly her own that has been described as “Cosmic-soul-folk” or “philosopholk.”

Featuring opening remarks by Rachel Small & Greta Zarro of World BEYOND War & Petar Glomazić and Milan Sekulović of the Save Sinjajevina campaign.

WBW Board Member Yurii Sheliazhenko, based in Ukraine, will provide an update on the current crisis in Ukraine, situating the conference within the larger geopolitical context and highlighting the importance of anti-war activism at this time.

Additionally, WBW chapter coordinators around the world will provide brief reports about their work, including Eamon Rafter (WBW Ireland), Lucas Sichardt (WBW Wanfried), Darienne Hetherman and Bob McKechnie (WBW California), Liz Remmerswaal (WBW New Zealand), Cymry Gomery (WBW Montréal), Guy Feugap (WBW Cameroon), and Juan Pablo Lazo Ureta (WBW Bioregión Aconcagua).

Meet other conference participants using the networking feature, plus browse the expo booths for our sponsoring organizations.

Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. She has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist, Palestinian liberation, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One is Illegal and Women’s Memorial March Committee. She is formally trained in law and works with women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She is the author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013) and Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021).

Meet other conference participants using the networking feature, plus browse the expo booths for our sponsoring organizations.

These discussion sessions offer a glimpse into what’s possible by exploring different alternative models and what’s needed for the just transition to a green & peaceful future. These sessions will be an opportunity to both learn from the facilitators as well as to workshop ideas and brainstorm with other attendees.

  • Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) with John Reuwer and Charles Johnson
    This session will explore Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP), a nonviolent safety model emergent in recent decades. Communities worldwide suffering from violence in spite of the alleged protection of armed police and military forces are seeking alternatives. Many envision UCP replacing armed protection altogether – but how exactly does it work? What are its strengths and limitations? We will discuss methods used in South Sudan, the U.S., and beyond to explore this grassroots, weaponless safety model.
  • The Transition Movement with Jul Bystrova and Diana Kubilos 📣
    In this session, we will focus on what it really means to live in a world beyond war on a very practical and local level. We will be sharing ways we can unplug from the extractive economy, while emphasizing the vital importance of learning how to work together, resolving and transforming conflict with each other and doing our own personal work necessary to step out of the conflict mindset. After all, it is the human tendency towards conflict that compounds into war. Can we find ways to live and work together in new systems based on peace? There are many trying to do this and lean into this great transition.
  • How Public Banking Helps Us Wage Life, Not War with Marybeth Riley Gardam and Rickey Gard Diamond💲

    Public Banking can help keep millions of public dollars local every year, invested in the world we want, instead of going out of state to Wall Street banks that invest in war, weapons, climate-damaging extractive industries, and lobbyists who support profiteering. We say: In Women’s Ways of Knowing Money, No One Need Make a Killing.

    The Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom is the world’s oldest women’s peace organization, and its US Section’s issue committee, WOMEN, MONEY & DEMOCRACY (W$D) has played a pivotal role in teaching about and organizing to reverse corporate threats to our democracy. Their revered Study Course is currently being reworked as a PODCAST, to help get the message to younger activists, so they can unravel the Gordian Knot of judicial corruption, corporate power, capitalism, racism and a rigged monetary system… all conspiring to oppress the 99% of us.

    In their quest to reach out with a radical feminist perspective, W$D helped organize AN ECONOMY OF OUR OWN (AEOO), an alliance representing a dozen organizations. For the past two years AEOO introduced powerful online conversations and learning circles that give women a voice and showcase economic solutions they innovate. These conversations address economic topics from diverse women’s perspectives, and model how to talk about and own a realm still intimidating for many women. Our message? Feminism must not settle for “equality” in a corrupt economic system waged as war. Instead, we must transform the system to benefit women, their families, and Mother Earth, and reject our present money king-making system.

Meet other conference participants using the networking feature, plus browse the expo booths for our sponsoring organizations.

Saturday, July 9, 2022

Meet other conference participants using the networking feature, plus browse the expo booths for our sponsoring organizations.

In working towards the abolition of the institution of war, this panel will highlight that demilitarization alone is not enough; we need a just transition to a peace economy that works for all. Especially throughout the past 2.5 years of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been ever more apparent that there is an urgent need for a reorientation of government spending towards vital human needs. We’ll talk about the practicality of economic conversion by sharing real-world successful examples and models for the future. Featuring Miriam Pemberton of the Peace Economy Transitions Project and Sam Mason of The New Lucas Plan. Moderator: David Swanson.

  • Workshop: How to Block a Military Training Ground & Preserve the Balkans’ Biggest Mountain Grassland: An Update from the Save Sinjajevina Campaign, led by Milan Sekulović. 🌳
  • Workshop: Demilitarisation and Beyond – Leading the World Forward in Peace Education & Innovation with Phill Gittins of World BEYOND War and Carmen Wilson of Demilitarise Education.
    Empowering young people and intergenerational collaboration to lead impactful community actions towards building sustainable institutional change and the development of peace education and innovations.
  • Training: Nonviolent Communication Skills with trainers Nick Rea and Saadia Qureshi. 📣Preemptive Love Coalition’s mission is to end war and stop the spread of violence. But what does that actually look like on a granular level? What does it take for you, as a citizen of this world, to create a snowball effect of love and peacemaking in your local community? Join Nick and Saadia for a 1.5 hour interactive workshop where we will share what it means to be a peacemaker, learn tips on how to communicate with others when you often don’t agree, and to love anyway in the context of your own world.

Meet other conference participants using the networking feature, plus browse the expo booths for our sponsoring organizations.

This panel will both concretely explore how to divest public and private dollars from extractive industries like weapons and fossil fuels, and at the same time, how to rebuild the just world we want through doable reinvestment strategies that prioritize community needs. Featuring Shea Leibow of CODEPINK and Britt Runeckles of Towards a People’s Endowment. Moderator: Greta Zarro.

Meet other conference participants using the networking feature, plus browse the expo booths for our sponsoring organizations.

Sunday, July 10, 2022

Meet other conference participants using the networking feature, plus browse the expo booths for our sponsoring organizations.

This unique panel will explore ways that communities around the world — from Afghan permaculture refugees to the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó in Colombia to Mayan survivors of genocide in Guatemala — are both “resisting & regenerating”. We’ll hear inspiring stories of how these communities have revealed the hidden truths about militarized violence they’ve faced, risen up nonviolently to war, sanctions, and violence, and forged new ways of peacefully rebuilding and co-existing in community rooted in cooperation and social-ecological sustainability. Featuring Rosemary Morrow, Eunice Neves, José Roviro Lopez, and Jesús Tecú Osorio. Moderator: Rachel Small.

Meet other conference participants using the networking feature, plus browse the expo booths for our sponsoring organizations.

  • Workshop: How to Shut Down & Transform a Military Base Site with Thea Valentina Gardellin and Myrna Pagán. 💲
    The United States maintains around 750 military bases abroad in 80 foreign countries and colonies (territories). These bases are the central feature of U.S. foreign policy which is one of coercion and threat of military aggression. The U.S. uses these bases in a tangible way to preposition troops and weaponry in the event they are “needed” at a moment’s notice, and also as a manifestation of U.S. imperialism and global domination, and as a constant implicit threat. In this workshop, we will hear from activists in Italy and Vieques who are actively working to resist U.S. military bases in their communities and to regenerate by working towards the transformation of the military base sites towards peaceful purposes.
  • Workshop: Demilitarizing the Police & Community-Based Alternatives to Policing with David Swanson and Stuart Schussler.
    Modeling the conference theme of “resistance & regeneration,” this workshop will explore how to both demilitarize the police and implement community-centered alternatives to policing. World BEYOND War’s David Swanson will describe the successful campaign to end militarized policing in Charlottesville, Virginia by passing a city council resolution to ban military-style training of police and the acquisition by police of military-grade weapons. The resolution also requires training in conflict de-escalation and limited use of force for law enforcement. Beyond banning militarized policing, Stuart Schussler will explain how the Zapatistas’ system of autonomous justice is an alternative to policing. After reclaiming hundreds of plantations during their uprising in 1994, this indigenous movement has created a very “otherly” system of justice. Instead of punishing the poor, it works to bind communities together as they elaborate projects for cooperative agriculture, health, education, and equality across genders.
  • Workshop: How to Challenge Mainstream Media Bias & Promote Peace Journalism with Jeff Cohen of FAIR.org, Steven Youngblood of the Center for Global Peace Journalism, and Dru Oja Jay of The Breach. 📣
    Modeling the conference theme of “resistance and regeneration,” this workshop will begin with a media literacy primer, vis-à-vis FAIR.org’s techniques to expose and critique mainstream media bias. Then we will lay out a framework for the alternative — principles of counternarrative storytelling from a peace journalism perspective. We will conclude with a discussion of practical applications of these principles, such as through independent media outlets like The Breach, whose mission is focused on “journalism for transformation.”

Featuring a performance by Guatemalan hip-hop artist Rebeca Lane. Closing remarks by WBW Board President Kathy KellyPetar Glomazić and Milan Sekulović of the Save Sinjajevina campaign. The conference will conclude with a collective virtual action in support of Save Sinjajevina.

Meet other conference participants using the networking feature, plus browse the expo booths for our sponsoring organizations.

Sponsors & Endorsers

Thank you to the support of our sponsors & endorsers who helped make this event possible!

Sponsors

Gold Sponsors:
Silver Sponsors:

Endorsers