Remarks at#NoWar2026
Welcome to #NoWar2026 Past Borders. Welcome to folks from the opposite sides of numerous borders from the place I’m borders usually effortlessly and thoughtlessly crossed by reside photos and audio of us, but generally absurdly become limitations to a few of our bodily our bodies become such absurdities at huge monetary and environmental and cultural prices. May there be one other manner, barely or radically completely different from the present manner? This shall be our matter for these three days.
Thanks to the sponsors and endorsers of #NoWar2026. Our sponsors on the stage of Battle Abolishers are Dr. Michael D. Knox and the U.S. Peace Memorial Basis. On the stage of peace champion is Battle Prevention Initiative. On the stage of Peacemakers, our sponsors are Ann Wright, World Service Authority, Conscience Canada, Simply Peace Advocates, and Womens Worldwide League for Peace and Freedom U.S. Congratulations to that final one for being the recipient this 12 months of the U.S. Peace Prize from the aforementioned U.S. Peace Memorial Basis. On the stage of Supporters, our sponsor is Josette Wier. Our endorsers are far too quite a few to call, however you’ll find them at worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2026.
Thanks to our employees who’ve all had a task in placing this convention collectively, and particularly to Greta Zarro, its main organizer.
Thanks to our board and advisory board and chapter organizers and on-line course facilitators and affiliate organizations and all of you who participate in these annual gatherings and assist our work all year long.
One in all my favourite issues about our annual conferences is what number of completely different corners of the world folks attend from. It makes it very tough for anybody to say the kinds of issues that peace activists usually say, not less than the place I reside, issues like We simply threatened to obliterate Iran or We simply despatched troops to Panama. After all no peace activists ever, ever really do such issues. However they converse as if they’re the navy or the ruler of a nation. Thats exhausting to do after we, the folks collaborating in an occasion like this, are from dozens of various nations.
From early on within the existence of World BEYOND Battle now we have offered and inspired the sporting of sky blue scarves symbolizing the sky all of us share. The thought for them got here from peace activists in Afghanistan who created what they calledthe Border-free Blue Scarves mission.
After we created World BEYOND Battle 12 years in the past it was to create what World BEYOND Battle is, a corporation not primarily based in any nation, however with Board, Advisory Board, Employees, and individuals from any nook of the planet doable. From Day 1 we had no use for borders. Weren’t simply primarily based past borders however loyal past borders. We dont assist or oppose any specific authorities. We oppose all warmaking and all weapons making by any governments that do these issues, together with those that do them quite a bit and those that do them a bit of.
We additionally created World BEYOND Battle to be one thing else that it’s, a motion aimed toward no specific struggle or tactic or weapon, however on the whole establishment of organized mass killing. Weren’t right here to look at the struggle enterprise and determine the place it wants tweaking. Weren’t upset that an overpriced weapon doesnt work. Wed love for all of them to not work. We cant offer you a listing of the dangerous wars and a listing of the nice wars any greater than we will checklist for you the nice instances of every other atrocity. So had been inclined towards rejecting deceptive examples used to justify huge industries. A declare to have discovered a simply and correct militarized nationwide border is unlikely to win us over to walling off all nations, and extra more likely to lead us to ask for extra info.
In trying on the full image of struggle, we see the transformation of borders into struggle zones as one a part of the struggle drawback.
And we level out that in lots of instances its no transformation, because the borders are merchandise of wars. Our previous annual conferences have additionally checked out specific facets of wars destruction. #NoWar2017 checked out what struggle does to the pure setting, #NoWar2018 at what struggle does to the rule of legislation, #NoWar2021 on the enterprise of holding weapons festivals and of stopping them, #NoWar2023 at unarmed protection as a substitute for struggle, #NoWar2024 on the empires of bases struggle creates, and #NoWar2025 at abolition on the mission of eliminating one thing like wars or borders.
Borders is a important matter in the case of struggle and peace as a result of wars are driving extra folks to cross and to attempt to cross borders, as a result of the struggle trade is treating these struggle victims as one other struggle enemy and turning borders into everlasting wars, and since these wars in opposition to refugees might evolve into wider wars because the pressures to flee warzones and militarized governments and environmentally devastated climates construct on one facet, and the concern, greed, bigotry, and struggle income develop on the opposite except these vicious cycles are disrupted by wiser behaviors imposed on governments by nonviolent activists whove attended good conferences.
At World BEYOND Battle we regularly consider our work when it comes to schooling and activism and media, although the three areas can’t at all times be separated. We wish schooling to drive activism to drive media protection to drive extra schooling to drive extra activism and so forth. Thus we do all kinds of instructional occasions, resembling this one.
Borders accomplish that a lot injury that we predict they’re all over the place and at all times have been, a bit of bit like wars. However borders are a really unusual new invention and largely not there. A number of issues cross borders. Our work crosses borders. This convention crosses borders.
One of many nice many issues that cross borders is weapons.
Weapons cross borders when theyre resold, when theyre stolen, when theyre used, however particularly when they’re first bought. Most locations on Earth, together with most locations with wars, dont manufacture any important weapons of struggle. The few locations that do (the U.S., Israel, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, South Korea), promote them virtually all over the place. Weapons from one nation, the USA, cross U.S. borders to arm dictatorships and so-called democracies throughout the globe, in portions equal to the international weapons gross sales of just about all different nations mixed. World Battle II, the Iran-Iraq Battle, the Mexican Drug Battle, the Wars on Iraq and Libya and Syria, and lots of others, giant and small, have had U.S. weapons on either side and weapons from different nations on either side. One would possibly say that weapons sellers don’t have any respect for borders. They promote on this facet and on the opposite facet. I’d say that they’ve the utmost respect for borders. With out the borders theyd hardly be promoting something in any respect.
The U.S. authorities itself buys extra U.S. weapons than it sells, although it sells them exhausting. And it buys them largely primarily based on a pretended concern of China. I say pretended as a result of, amongst many different causes, the U.S. famously has invested in a bioweapons lab in China, and since Trump has been making an attempt to promote weapons to China. Once more, I feel that demonstrates supreme respect for borders. So long as the borders are there, so long as a international nation exists, he expects to promote struggle to his facet, even whereas promoting it to the opposite facet. And if he cant promote a struggle to the general public he would possibly have the ability to promote it to Congress Members if theyve been paid sufficient to consider it. Keep in mind that Reagan wouldnt hand over the Star Wars ancestor of Trumps Golden Dome, not even to rid the world of nuclear weapons, however he would have offered the identical threatening, malfunctioning dying missiles to the Soviets and known as that peace. I’d have known as it justification. You cant militarize a border till youve militarized the opposite facet of it.
However what concerning the nations that purchase weapons or permit the basing of weapons as a result of theyre ordered to. Are they nations or pawns? Have they got borders or simply traces on a sport board? Or do they only have borders on some sides for some folks?
One other factor that crosses borders is weapons know-how. A nuclear struggle, irrespective of who fought it, could be fought with know-how invented in New Mexico. The ensuing nuclear winter would cross borders. The world might fairly presumably be rendered lifeless or near it even by a unilateral nuclear assault. For a second authorities to affix in on the so-called different facet could be superfluous. This relatively extreme limitation to a nuclear second strike is what makes a few of us scratch our heads at calls for for no first strikes versus speedy unilateral abolition. Nuclear and different weapons testing and nuclear energy catastrophes cross borders. Weve all been impacted. Ailments cross borders. So do propaganda and firms and hurricanes and islands of plastic rubbish.
Tradition crosses borders. Music crosses borders. So do friendships and love and household bonds and social actions and birds and wildlife. All the things however folks. And even then, its just some folks and a few borders. Which individuals and which borders is decided by, or not less than popularly supported by, bigotry. This contains the brazenly fascist, hateful, pseudoscientific, racist kind of bigotry largely or totally rejected by many. It additionally contains the much less apparent, such because the acceptance of various values for folks with completely different passports, the thought that its merely pure for the two% of the casualties of a struggle who lived close to you to get many of the information protection, or the unthought perception that (with out inserting something above anything) a tradition must be protected in an imaginary frozen state, reduce off from all improbable enrichment and artistic influences and even simply the steadfast refusal to note that the locations from which persons are fleeing in giant numbers are the identical locations which might be being bombed and militarized.
I’ve nothing in opposition to anybody, however folks ought to obey the legislation and never cross borders with out authorized permission. Is that proper?
Ought to so-called coloured folks not drink from the water fountains of so-called white folks now that these legal guidelines have been modified? What about earlier than they had been modified? Are there not unjust legal guidelines? Whether it is unjust to discriminate primarily based on random demographic options youre born with, is it simply to discriminate primarily based on the place you had been born or to what mother and father you had been born? Is it true you could contemplate such a factor to be simply and don’t have anything in opposition to anybody? After we learn medieval so-called simply struggle idea discussing the killing and respecting of the enemy in struggle, will we cease and ask whether or not you possibly can really respect somebody whereas killing them? When my neighbor Thomas Jefferson is alleged to have had variety emotions for his enslaved mistress or his enslaved look-alike son, we generally query how full and deep such kindness can have been whereas enslaving its objects. Perhaps we should always start asking how fully we respect and even tolerate the particular person we inform to not cross a line the place ignorant armies as soon as grew drained and stopped.
There are insurance policies that change at borders. That is why folks declare they’ll see a number of distinctive borders from area, and never simply borders which might be approximated by rivers regardless that rivers transfer. Some borders exist between a rustic lit up like a Christmas tree at evening and a rustic the place folks can nonetheless see stars, or between a rustic lined in forest and one by irrigated farmland, or between the latter and a rustic turned to abandon sand. However these arent borders had been seeing precisely; theyre public coverage choices made at ranges too giant to be democratic, too small to be sustainable, and too egocentric to be accepted.
If nationwide borders had been not more than provincial or regional borders, a whole lot of media pundits would discover it exhausting to determine which locations they at present hated. They wouldnt immediately lose any racism or non secular bigotry. However theyd battle to use their nationalism. And it’s nationalism together with the demonization of nationwide dictators by the identical authorities that was arming them six months earlier that’s important for promoting wars. And the quixotic campaign of defending the wealthy from the poor, even whereas rendering swaths of the Earth uninhabitable by struggle and thru the environmental destruction exacerbated by struggle, are important for borders. And the mixture of wars and borders is important for the profiteers. We will add to that the militarization of police all over the place because the borders unfold inward. Yesterdays New York Instances has a narrative about AI video cameras on towers in cities close to the U.S.-Mexico border that may report detailed photos from two-miles away together with by peoples home windows. That is about two days after tales that the Pentagon would have the Division of so-called Homeland Safety take a look at close to borders a weapon that makes folks really feel like they’re burning. This stuff creep inward in a rustic, but additionally outward to different nations borders and capitals.
The excellent news is what number of extra of us there are than there are profiteers.
We dont revenue from borders or from the MICIMATT or, if youll permit me so as to add two extra letters, the MICIMATT-BS, the Navy Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Suppose Tank Borders and Surveillance advanced. And we, the nice majority, have an apparent answer that might profit everybody in a number of methods. Scale back the cash going to wars and borders and spend it on folks and the setting and all issues good and helpful, together with in these locations folks at the moment are having to flee looking for a safe or respectable life due to wars.
At World BEYOND Battle we generally discuss concerning the {hardware} and the software program of wars, the buildings and the cultures. The {hardware} of borders the partitions and weapons and cameras and prisons separate family members and kill and traumatize. They create disputes. If theres one factor you must generate a border dispute its a border. They stop cooperation throughout borders on pressing crises, they usually militarize entire nations.
The software program of borders is the normalization of borders within the backs of our heads, our legendary imagining that they’re natural self-creations by folks united by language and tradition and maybe even nonsense weve made up like race. The truth is, borders are fairly new within the grand scheme of issues, and the makes an attempt to pair them up with something apart from governments has at all times been a battle. Borders have crossed folks as usually as folks have crossed borders. Typically, borders have been imposed by brutality and slaughter. Many borders, had been they marble monuments of the individuals who created them, could be torn down and changed with one thing much less shameful. Borders might, in actual fact, be the most important, most distinguished monuments to racism on Earth, so giant we cant see them. However we will assume freed from borders as we work to reside freed from borders. We will determine with humanity, carry world passports, and manage occasions like this one globally, not nationally. We will work for the kind of large-scale international cooperation that’s wanted for survival, as if there have been no armed, walled borders, as if the suitable to maneuver round had been ranked up there with the suitable to talk or the suitable to self-govern. We will paint an image of what it could be prefer to spend trillions of {dollars} on constructive initiatives relatively than on traces that make us pawns of their sport.
To demilitarize borders, to deemphasize borders would match effectively with democratization of governance and with a shift in energy towards the native and the worldwide ranges, however it could hardly imply the whole elimination of borders, a lot much less of nations solely of borders and nations as they’re now conceived. It isnt exhausting to think about what that might appear to be.
At former president Jimmy Carters funeral, the present and previous U.S. presidents and employees and households, among the largest boosters of wars and borders on Earth, listened solemnly to a rendition of John Lennons Think about: Think about theres no nations. It isnt exhausting to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no faith too. Think about all of the folks residing life in peace. One hears that music in church buildings and authorities capabilities world wide, not purely on account of obliviousness or hypocrisy, but additionally as a result of big numbers of individuals know that constructive change has at all times began with imagining it. Any person needed to think about ending slavery or Apartheid, youngster labor or serfdom, lynching or human sacrifice, trial by ordeal, dueling, cannibalism, girls as property, capital punishment, public tortures and executions. Ultimately years annual convention of World BEYOND Battle, #NoWar2025, we tried to think about eliminating or completely remodeling all types of establishments, together with police or prisons. Except you possibly can think about a world with out our present incarnations of oligarchs, company energy, armed drones, robots manufacturing organic weapons, Zionism, fascism, capitalism, or agnotologism, youll by no means create anything.
Are you aware that phrase, agnotology? In keeping with it, you shouldnt realize it or anything.
Agnotology is the manufacturing of ignorance. Wars defend you. Immigrants hurt you. Large partitions and rows of weapons are fundamental requirements for the rule of legislation. Cheerfully thanking folks for treating you as a prison suspect for happening a visit is as a lot a civic obligation as procuring, waving a flag, or beating up a protester. Relating to reconceiving of one thing like wars or borders, schooling begins with unlearning numerous issues youve realized, earlier than transferring on to studying one thing new. Im hoping to unlearn and be taught many issues over these subsequent three days.
Here’s a bit about what’s coming.
First we’re going to hear some fast studies from a sampling of World BEYOND Battle chapters world wide. These are volunteer-run and arranged teams doing unimaginable instructional, activist, and media work towards the abolition of struggle, with assist from World BEYOND Wars employees and Board. We’ve 56 energetic chapters and rising and are desirous to work with you to create a brand new one if theres not one close to you. See our annual studies on the World BEYOND Battle web site, and the webpages for every chapter, for extra on what chapters do annually.
We even have 125 associates; these are impartial organizations that work with us towards the frequent objective of ending all struggle.
Subsequent, following a break, we can have a musical efficiency, adopted by our first panel, on the subject of the Militarization of Borders and the Criminalization of Migrants. Then effectively have an opportunity to get collectively in breakout rooms and talk about.
Tomorrow, we’ll open with a poetry efficiency, so be certain youre not late! That may lead right into a panel on Case Research of Militarized Borders and Demilitarized Zones. This guarantees to tell us on all types of historical past and impacts of militarized borders, in addition to on what students, organizers, communities, and governments can do to work towards demilitarization, self-determination, and a world with fewer partitions.
Following a break, effectively subsequent be going right into a hybrid session, that means a session that’s right here on Zoom for many of us however through video from a reside occasion occurring in-person in Amsterdam. The main target shall be on borders and the navy funds of the European Union. Fourteen years in the past, the European Union was given a Nobel Peace Prize for making peace inside its borders, in actual fact for doing to its inner borders between nations simply what the world would possibly profit from doing to all nationwide borders. But, Europe remained a serious provider of weapons to elsewhere, continued to pursue militarism in the direction of elsewhere, and has closely militarized its exterior borders. Properly be taught precisely what persons are doing to reverse this development.
Tomorrows closing panel, after a break, and previous to discussions in breakout rooms, will look into How Battle and Militarism Gasoline Displacement, but additionally what people, communities, civil society, and governments can do to forestall displacement, promote peace, and contribute to constructing a world past struggle.
On the third day of #NoWar2026, we’ll open with poetry, adopted by a workshop known as Nonviolent Communication: Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs. All of us must do extra of that! And if we will do it as people, possibly we will do it as governments too.
The ultimate panel of the convention will make the case for all that’s to be gained from open borders. The panelists will discover how border regimes function, whose pursuits they serve, and the way they is likely to be dismantled. Most significantly, the dialogue will invite individuals to think about what a border-free world might appear to be.
Then we shall be privileged to listen to Closing Phrases by World BEYOND Wars President Kathy Kelly, adopted one final time by dialogue in breakout rooms. I hope that these discussions shall be among the most precious periods for you. Its vital to acknowledge how numerous and contrasting we’re, how we strategy this from infinite views, and but how we will discover a consensus, unite, and act successfully.
Id like to shut with phrases from Percy Bysshe Shelley, value remembering if youre ever feeling beat down or walled in:
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable quantity,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many-they are few.
David Swanson
