Peace and women

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...

TFF Associate and more… Luna Rossa: Sacred Blood, Cycle Wisdom – an art journal and peace offering – publication. Here is the pre-order campaign and free online events on feminine health & power themes with a deep cyclical understanding of how inner and outer peace can combine.. I’m inviting you… We may think we live in modern, advanced times. On many accounts, including the fact that we still solve conflicts through wars on this planet, we are not.  Menstruation is still a taboo in many cultures around the world, being associated with impurity, shame, and guilt for being a woman. Even though access to sanitary products has increased in many countries, education about menstruation as something to be embraced rather than ignored and medicalized is still lacking. The very ability to give life and reproduce the species that menstruation is a sign of becomes a sign of inferiority or, in other...

Letter from a soul-sister stranger for peace One autumn day in 2022, a mail winged into TFF’s inbox from a woman in the United States. Here first some excerpts; the first sentence reveals a sense of being in a larger world. ” Ihope you’re feeling all right, even though it’s difficult to feel that way now. I’d like to send you this letter that I’m sending to as many people that I can think of. Given the urgency of the international situation I figure it’s no time to be shy. Here it is! Hardly a soul responds to me, but I was hoping maybe you would. Peace will never arrive if people are not able to listen to the other side’s perspective. Peace will never arrive if people on one side of conflict tell half-truths and lies to paint the other side as only evil, thus falsely justifying weapon shipments,...

Lea has been working in the area of international relations since 2011. First, for the UN, later for a think tank on foreign policy and currently she is the Secretary-General of the UN Association in Switzerland. Originally from Switzerland, she lived in Russia and volunteered in humanitarian projects in Mongolia and Colombia. In 2017, she founded “PeacePrints – Following the Footprints of Peacebuilders” – a blog for which she travels as peace reporter to post-conflict countries to report about outstanding individuals committed to bringing a positive change. Here Lea speaks about her work and how important it is that we know, follow, learn from and honour those millions of fellow citizens around the world who cross borders, reach out and often risk their lives. Every day. And for peace.

Unlike most of my interviews, this one is not directly about current political concerns. It rather explores ‘peace’ in its manifold identity. The interview was conducted by Miguel Mendoça a couple of months ago for a book project consisting of such interviews from a variety of persons whose life and work touches on the theme of peace. Miguel has since abandoned the project in favour of producing his own poems. Whether such abstract ideas as peace can be usefully explored independent of concrete circumstances haunts this text. I accept most of the blame. The interaction made me realize how little thought I have given to peacefulness as a personal trait and peace as the core of benevolent political arrangements, whether local or planetary and how their interaction may be understood. I recall being rather bemused more than 25 years ago when a meditation practice was premised on the confidence that...

Den norske arkitekt og fredsforkæmper, Susanne Urban har forfattet en righoldig bog, som netop er udkommet for at markere at en af verdens absolut ledende samfundsforskere, Johan Galtung, fylder 90 den 24. oktober 2020. Han er matematiker, sociolog, freds- og fremtidsforsker med en utrolig produktion af foredrag, artikler, gæsteprofessorater og hederdoktorater bag sig – f.eks. medvirket i 170 bøger heraf som eneforfatter af 96. Her mere om ham på Norsk Biografisk Leksikon. Bogen er det 7. skrift fra Hardangerakademiet for fred, utvikling og miljø. Den er på 115 sider og har tre hovedkapitler – de som udtrykkes i undertitlen – og den er fyldt med forklarende tekster, figurer, tegninger og fotografier – så man drives videre i denne forskers univers på en utroligt levende måde. Susanne Amira Maria Urban er kosmopolit, bosat i Norge siden 1977 – belønnet som “innvandrere med suksess i Norge.” Hun er arkitekt, byplanlægger og samfundsdebattør...

A must-see and must-followup! February 6, 2020 Here is the knowledge, the experience, the passion and the vision that the US needs – and needs to set through before the militarists destroy America and more or less the rest of the world too. And while Kinzer’s introduction to Iran is impressively forceful, correct and pedagogic – listen to it even twice! – this 76 minutes conversation contains so much more than what pertains to Iran which makes it even more important. Now share everywhere you can… And please take note of this: This type of – free, critical – discussion can happen in the United States but how often do you see Europeans talk about these issues in this way? I know of no Danish, Swedish or Norwegian channel, intellectuals or active politicians who would come anywhere near these three personalities and would produce a similar high-quality debate. If you...

The amazing person and phenomenon called Greta Thunberg can be looked at from many perspectives. What connects them all is the energies of hope. Thus, for instance, her own personal story and what drives her so passionately – and scientifically – at the age of only 16. Or, how she is challenging the entire global establishment as a youth leader not allowed to vote herself but demanding that decision-makers take into account the millions and millions she speaks for as well as the yet unborn generations. That’s a non-contractual, non-reciprocal way of thinking foreign to Western culture’s “I do something for you if/when you do something for me”. And you can’t ask something in return from the yet unborn. Or, how the role she plays now makes visible and catapults a fundamentally moral criticism into the political discourse where it hasn’t existed, I would say, for decades. Or, how her...

Gambia – or properly The Gambia – a small country in West Africa with about 2 million inhabitants, was peaceful since its internal independent rule was established in 1963. There were good relations with its only neighbour, Senegal. For a long time there was no military force in the country. One could then expect that there would be no militant coups, as in so many other African countries. However, in 1981 a “Revolutionary Council” took power. The revolutionaries were soon ousted by troops from Senegal who reinstated the president.  Now obviously Gambia needed an army “to establish stability” and an army was established. The outcome was that in 1994 a group of soldiers, led by lieutenant Yahya Jammeh, took power. He became the leader of the country, and was elected and re-elected president in 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011. At least in the early years of his reign, he was...

The story teller who also just became TFF board member for a second time has set up her video channel on YouTube, of course called Imagine Creatively. She did that while working in Zambia – as you will see in the videos. So play for peace, use the love glasses and create happiness making children smile across borders and differences. Isn’t that peace? Now explore the first spontaneous videos on the Imagine Creatively channel! And read more about Ina here.

In examining the future, we must look to the past. As we watch the media today, we are spoon fed more and more propaganda and fear of the unknown, that we should be afraid of the unknown and have full faith that our government is keeping us safe from the unknown. But by looking at media today, those of us who are old enough will be reminded of the era of Cold War news articles, the hysteria of how the Russians would invade and how we should duck and cover under tables in our kitchens for the ensuing nuclear war. Under this mass hysteria, all Western governments were convinced that we should join Western allies to fight the unknown evil that lies to the east. Later through my travels in Russia during the height of the Cold War with a peace delegation, we were shocked by the poverty of the...

“I was born in Vukovar, Croatia, in what was at the time known as Yugoslavia. I grew up and lived there during the years of its dissolution wars. I first met Dr Jan Oberg in early spring 1998 when the TFF conflict-mitigation team came to my hometown, which was a designated war zone with the United Nations’ UNTAES mission HQ very close to our house. They asked whether I could help them, not the least in terms of language and I, being a highschool kid, thought that was a very interesting challenge and said “Yes, I shall try!” Our first task was to take a group of young people – also highschool students – in UN busses across the war check point to Osijek, which was understood as “the other side”, for a reconciliation workshop. We who came from Vukovar were from Serb families and the Osijek students were Croats....