Nonviolence

PRESS RELEASE – 6 OCTOBER 2025 LAY DOWN YOUR ARMSPEACE PRIZE FOR 2025 is awarded Francesca Albanese The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – as the person who, in accordance with Alfred Nobel’s will, has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations and for the abolition or reduction of standing armies as well as for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Francesca Albanese has forcefully and unwaveringly worked against Israel’s full-scale war on the occupied Palestinian territories, in particular Israel´s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. She has confronted Israel’s systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in a truly global outreach. Further, she has brought governments, international organisations and people’s groups together to underline the responsibility of the world at large to act and to stop arming, enabling, and profiting from Israel’s ongoing criminal actions. But first of all, Albanese...

Contrary to what we stated when publishing this Call, the UN General Assembly (GA) opened on September 9, 2025, in New York, not in Geneva, as we initially wrote. However, due to the host role-violating US ban on visas to Palestinians, the Special GA Segment on Palestine will be held in the UN Geneva from September 22. And it builds up to something historic. Anyhow, here is what we believe you must advocate or do to help stop the Israeli genocide. It’s called people’s power or citizens’ diplomacy. SHARE! The first of three appeals from TFF. The second is here, and the third here. Across the world, people are witnessing the systematic destruction of Palestinian lives, homes, and communities. The scale and intensity of Israel’s military operations — especially in Gaza — have led leading legal bodies, including the International Court of Justice, to warn of a plausible genocide. The...

Joie De Vivre, 1946 by Pablo Picasso Not recognizing the magic of the present moment may just be a crime against our humanity. David Andersson August 5, 2025 TFF publishes this with particular joy because, while we have always been pro-peace, future-oriented and proposal-making, we need even more of that now: Peace is to be FOR something and go for it. In my recent article, From Personal Development to Human Development, I explored the imbalance between our inner growth and society’s relentless focus on external activity. One of the greatest obstacles to genuine human development today is the sheer level of negativity we encounter daily. As an editor, I regularly receive submissions from Western contributors. Many center on themes like political corruption—even among progressive leaders—technological control, cognitive warfare, genocide, alarming climate forecasts (“only three years left to avoid the worst”), and Europe’s persistent, deadly hypocrisy. The list continues, each entry more...

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Foreword The Board of The Transnational Foundation in Sweden has decided to publish an easy-to-read, scholarly anthology that addresses one of the most important – and potentially dangerous – issues of our time: Why are the political, economic, and medialised Western images of China so consistently negative – and what can you do to understand China better? These images may be expressions of a political will to present only various shades of grey and black with the aim of building a consciousness about China as an enemy and not a partner. They may also be seen as a sort of world-dominating ethos of ignorance based upon the assumption that “we’ve-got-nothing-to-learn-from-others,’ we are the teacher. Another possibility is that the West, deep down, feels that it is getting relatively weaker from a macro-historical perspective and comforts itself with denial and accusations against “the other” of being the reason for its manifest...

War-preparation and militarism are now the main factors that keep the West together, and will make it fall faster. The Western world has lost its consciousness, perception, and instruments of conflict analysis, resolution, peace-making, and reconciliation. They’ve been squeezed out by militarism’s kakistocrats – a political science term that means government by “the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.” Consequently, there is now a risk of more than 50% that a major war will happen in Europe. I’ve been observing silently for weeks and months now how geopolitical experts – also very qualified ones – and people who comment independently as well as in the mainstream media and many others have worked on the tacit, implicit assumption that President Trump would help create peace in Ukraine; they seem to believe that what we have witnessed has anything to do with knowledge-based, professional peace-making or would have even the slightest...

A new, innovative, and visionary anthology about the world that is unfolding behind the doom and gloom that the media and politicians try to foist on you. It’s edited by Bijana Vankovska, Richard Sakwa, Weiwei Zhang and Toni Mileski and obviously provocative in the eyes of some (lesser minds). Preface “This volume is the outcome of what might seem, at first glance, to be an ordinary academic conference. Cooperative Multipolar System: In Quest of a New World Order was held on October 3–4, 2024, organized by the Global Changes Center (GCC), the youngest research center at the Faculty of Philosophy. Тhe Chamber of Emigrants from Macedonia eventually joined as a supporting institution, following a formal agreement with the Faculty. Yet, this gathering was far from conventional. It was designed as an intellectual intervention to engage with the evolving global order and challenge the one-dimensional narratives that dominate academic and political...

Swanson is the founding director of World Beyond War and a TFF Associate. Fredrik Heffermehl (1938-2023) established the prize, which Lay Down Your Arms awards. This is the public announcement about the November 10, 2024, ceremony in Oslo. You are hereby cordially invited! WHO WILL RECEIVE THE PRIZE IN A PUBLIC CEREMONY ATLITTERATURHUSET IN OSLO, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2024.Participating Jannik Bonnevie (poetry), Xiangtian Liu (grand piano), Marie Flognfeldt Jones (song), Jakob Rekdal Jones (guitar). After lunch, David Swanson will introduce a roundtable on “How can we stop today’s militarization?” with among others Glenn Diesen, Ingeborg Breines, Jan Oberg, Thore Vestby, Mariell Leraand, Ola Friholt, Tomas Magnusson and Ola TunanderFree entry More about Fredrik Heffermehl, his impressive research work and last book, “The Real Nobel Peace Prize” here and here.

TFF Associate, Professor Chaiwat Satha-Anand has died at 69: Professor of nonviolence who opened path to peace in Thailand Noblest and kindest among – and for – humanity. TFF Associate since 1991 and a dear friend of Christina and me since before that, a great scholar of nonviolence, a mediator and a Muslim in the 94% Buddhist Thailand. We worked together for decades in IPRA, the International Peace Research Association, as teachers in Italy at IUPIP and throughout the decades at TFF, where we have published many of Chaiwat’s deeply insightful peace research analyses. His death is a great loss to true peace research, but his legacy will remain with all of us in this academic field. Years ago, Chaiwat invited me to a conference in Bangkok, but not only that. He told me that he thought I worked too hard and needed to relax a bit, so, consequently, he...

July 4, 2024 “Each of us has had our own experience of the cascading failures of process, leadership, and decision-making that have characterized this Administration’s intransigent response to this continuing calamity. Taken together, these paint a picture of an overlapping and systemic set of problems in this Administration’s policy approach, and a series of warnings that have gone unheeded…” Read the entire – extraordinarily important – statement here. It is a significant example of civil disobedience and personal ethics. It all began with Josh Paul when he resigned from the State Department last year. See also the video below. This is the way to go. May thousands upon thousands feel inspired and resign, too – and not only in the U.S. but in all Western countries that facilitate and support the genocide in Gaza and the barbaric policies in the Middle East.

The India that goes to the polls this month is a markedly less democratic one: Narendra Modi has hollowed out institutions and targeted opponents, all the while sowing inter-ethnic tensions. Christophe Jaffrelot April 16, 2024 In 2001, I walked for 7 weeks in the footsteps of Gandhi, his most important places including parts of the Salt March. Already back then, the ruthless emergence of Hindutva and the growing animosity toward Gandhi was easy to sense. One man I struck up a conversation with on a longer bus drive told me that it was high time that Gandhi was murdered. Today, statutes of his murderer are put up, and Gandhi is being marginalised. That is no wonder in Modi’s India – although, of course, Modi has Gandhi in his office and likes to be seen as a Gandhian. Regrettably, TFF seldom published anything about India. But what seems to be a...

Suzie Halewood April 15, 2024 “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime”Ernest Hemingway, 1946 This tax year, the so-called Ministry of Defence will be given £69BN of taxpayers’ money, to effectively subsidise the arms industry and fund more wars of aggression while offering little or nothing in the way of defence. A further £116BN of taxpayers’ money will go to the banks, interest on money that never existed for wars that are not only unnecessary and illegal, but which neither benefit the UK taxpayer, nor those who have lost life and limb in any one of the smorgasbord of conflicts the UK has instigated since WWII. Originally published on Off-Guardian on April 12, 2024 War was outlawed in 1928 by the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War. Known as Kellogg-Briand Pact, the treaty was signed by sixty-three nations, including Britain &...