Contributors
David Barash
David P. Barash: evolutionary biologist and peace activist, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington, Fellow of the AAAS, author of more than 200 peer-reviewed technical articles and 41 books. Husband, father, grandfather, dog-, horse-, and cat-lover, antinuclear troublemaker.
Karen Carey
Karen Carey is a dedicated writer and researcher with a deep passion for peace studies. She focuses on exploring and advocating for peaceful solutions to global conflicts and social issues. Currently, Karen collaborates with renowned anthropologist and peace scholar Douglas P. Fry as part of her independent study, where she delves into innovative approaches to fostering peace and conflict resolution.
Clare
Clare, 6½, is a schoolgirl from Australia. She draws prolifically and, on a recent visit to the UK with her parents, having played badminton briefly only once before, she sustained a 20-shot rally with the Irenaut’s editor.
Johanna Fisher
Professor Johanna Fisher is an adjunct professor in the Department of English and Co-Director of the Women & Gender Studies Program at Canisius University. Her focus of study and teaching involves analyzing representations of gender and race in medieval literature. She also taught in the Modern Languages Department as professor of German and German literature with an emphasis on contemporary German fiction. Her current course, Representations of Nazis in Euro Fiction is a popular course that explores these representations. Johanna Fisher has co-authored two books of poetry, Join The Conversation and Time, Place, Home, Space-The Conversation Continues. She has also contributed to various online academic and literary journals and she currently contributes on a regular basis to the EU funded digital cultural institution, Europeana. Johanna sees writing as an important conversation between the writer and reader, as well as between the writer and the inner voice that speaks in ways that bring inspiration to create other imagined worlds-perhaps of those that stand anathema to war, hate and conflict. Moreover, the created spaces for writing can on the other hand, accommodate the language of conflict, trauma, and deprivation providing spaces of healing perhaps otherwise not possible. In this way she is always conscious of words and how words carry both meaning and connection to history and culture. Johanna is currently working on an historical fiction novel exploring her parents’ experiences of Nazi Germany and of racist America and the aftermath of trauma that left as she states a story of two wounded people who tried to carve a life together.
Duncan Forbes
Duncan’s poems have been published by Faber, Secker and Enitharmon, who brought our a Selected Poems, Lifelines, in 2009. It was drawn from five previous collections. Awards and prizes include a Gregory Award, TLS/Blackwells Prize, two Stephen Spender Times Translation Prizes and a Hawthornden Fellowship. A critic and translator, his essays and articles have been published in Acumen, London Magazine, Superpresent, The Author and elsewhere. From 2012 to 2016 he was an RLF fellow and then a consultant fellow. A painter as well as a poet, he read English at Oxford and has taught for many years. Now retired, he lives in Gloucestershire. For further details and for his most recent collections of poems, Human Time (2020), see www.duncanforbes.com
Karen Laws
Short stories by Karen Laws have appeared in The Georgia Review and Zyzzyva, among other literary journals. You’ll find her flash fiction in Wigleaf and X-R-A-Y. Karen recently completed a novel set in the High Sierra. She is a staff reader for Cagibi (Cagibilit.com), and she lives in Berkeley, California.
Brian Melican
Brian Melican is a journalist, translator, and author living in Hamburg and London. Working freelance since completing a degree in modern languages in 2007, he has appeared in a range of printed and digital media in the UK and Europe and has written several books about Germany, including Germany: Beyond the Enchanted Forest – A Literary Anthology (2013). Both as a journalist and a translator, his work also extends to other European countries, notably France and Sweden, covering a range of topics in politics, economics, history, and literature.
Nij
Nij is a miniaturist who works chiefly in pen and ink. She has recently become curious about the possibilities of image-editing software. Her creative process usually begins with an abstract idea that sternly resists materialisation—often successfully, but sometimes not. So her images represent ‘the failed efforts of some ideas to enjoy a purely cognitive existence’.
Renata O’Mahoney
Educated at University College London, where she specialised in European philosophy, since her student days, Renata has devoted herself to the pictorial arts, holding one-woman exhibitions in London, Paris, Madrid, and Buenos Aires. She contributes cartoons and other artwork to various publications under a variety of pseudonyms. She describes herself as a nomad, seldom living for more than a month in any one place.
Jack Parvid
Jack Parvid is a philosopher, essayist, and short story writer currently living in the UK. His non-fiction work is mainly concerned with ethics.
Chris Pigott
Chris Pigott is a New Zealander who lives in Sydney. He has previously had work published in quarterlies in Australia and New Zealand.
Danny Singh
Dr. Danny Singh is currently Senior Lecturer at The University of Law. His previous academic experience included working as a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Teesside University. The role involved creating and course leading the MA in International Relations courses. He has taught at the University of York’s Department of Politics and Politics and International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Leeds Beckett University. His teaching expertise rests on international relations, political science, international law, sociology, criminology, human rights, humanitarianism, terrorism and peace and conflict studies. In relation to research, Singh has published three monographs on the Russo-Ukraine War (The Tripartite Realist War: Analysing Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine) with Palgrave Macmillan, police corruption in Afghanistan (Investigating Corruption in the Afghan Police Force: Instability and Insecurity in Post-conflict Societies) with Policy Press and on just war theory (Comparative Just War Theory: An Introduction to International Perspectives) with Rowman & Littlefield. Singh has recently completed a book titled Applied Afro-Communitarian Ethics and Foreign Armed Intervention that is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. His journal articles include coverage on interventions in war-torn states leading to police and judicial reform and anti-corruption in Conflict, Security & Development, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Security Sector Reform Resource Centre, The Journal of Legal Pluralism & Unofficial Law, Journal of Developing Societies, Policy Studies, Criminology & Criminal Justice, Crime, Law and Social Change, Laws, Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism and The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles. Singh’s book reviews have been published by the American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Conflict Transformation and Security and Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Singh has provided expert opinions in the media. This has included Russia’s political economy with the Express and why Afghan police reform failed to curtail the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan with Panorama.
Staff Email: [email protected]
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2261-6063
John Sullivan
John Sullivan was an ACTF Playwriting finalist, received the Jack Kerouac Literary Prize; the Writers Voice: New Voices of the West Award, AZ Arts Fellowships (Poetry & Playwriting), an Artists Studio Center Fellowship, and a WESTAF Fellowship. He was also a featured poet at the Bisbee (AZ) Poetry Festival, a featured playwright at Denver’s Changing Scene Summer Playfest, an Eco-Arts Fellow with Earth Matters On Stage, and Artistic Director of Theater Degree Zero (TDZ). During his tenure, TDZ collaborated with future U.S. Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, on a bilingual / bi- national performance project, El Exilio de Quentino, that toured in Arizona (U.S.) and Northern Mexico (Nogales, Sonora). TDZ produced world premieres of Dire Moon Cartoons, Too Much I Say, War, and Memoria(s) of an Exiles Note Book of the Future (also written by Juan Felipe Herrera), a montage version of Sam Shepard / Joe Chaikin’s The War in Heaven, and facilitated an ongoing playwriting workshop as an incubator for new voices and perspectives. He and Sheli Rae (Producing Director: Theater Degree Zero) facilitated a series of acting/playwriting workshops inside the Pima County Jail (sponsored by the Pima County Library and Tucson Writers Project). Sullivan directed the Augusto Boal / Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) wing at Seattle Public Theater. Rae and Sullivan also directed the Amnesty USA (Houston TX Group #23) “Eye & Tooth Project” focused on political torture and capital punishment; “Eye & Tooth” produced devised work, an Ariel Dorfman collage, and Harold Pinter’s New World Order and Mountain Language, as well as TO. Sullivan now uses Theatre of the Oppressed with vulnerable communities to promote dialogue on environmental health, climate justice and advocacy with environmental scientists. His writing has been published in a variety of venues. Weasel Press (Manvel / Houston TX) published Bye-Bye No Fly Zone in December 2019. When Story Stops, the Leak Begins came out with Unsolicited Press (Portland OR) in April 2020. Weasel Press released a collection of performance pieces, Dire Moon Cartoons, in October 2021. His latest collection of hybrid writing, The Big Forever Swim, was published by Red Ogre Press (Los Angeles CA) in September of 2023. He served as Drama Features editor / writer for an online Canadian independent literary journal, Fleas on the Dog, until it closed up shop in spring 2024.
David Swanson
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of World BEYOND War and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include War Is A Lie and When the World Outlawed War. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk World Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. Swanson was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize by the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation. He was also awarded a Beacon of Peace Award by the Eisenhower Chapter of Veterans For Peace in 2011, and the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award by New Jersey Peace Action in 2022, and a Global Peace Leadership & Excellence Award in 2024. Swanson is on the advisory boards of: Nobel Peace Prize Watch, Veterans For Peace, Assange Defense, BPUR, Military Families Speak Out, Fields of Peace, and Peace in Ukraine Coalition. He is an Associate of the Transnational Foundation, and a Patron of Platform for Peace and Humanity. He is on the Consultative Council of the SHAPE Project. He is on the International Coordinating Committee of No to War – No to NATO. Find David Swanson at MSNBC, C-Span, Democracy Now, The Guardian, Counter Punch, Common Dreams, Truthout, Daily Progress, Amazon.com, TomDispatch, The Hook, etc.
Ward Wilson
Ward Hayes Wilson is one of the most original minds working on nuclear weapons policy today. His first scholarly article was published in the foremost security studies journal in the world — Harvard’s International Security. His next article won the 2008 McElvaney Prize for the best essay on nuclear disarmament. His work has shaken the foundations of the nuclear weapons debate. He showed that atomic bombs did not force Japan to surrender, and has challenged both the origins and efficacy of nuclear deterrence. He is a powerful speaker. A recent talk at Kings College London inspired a young man to reverse his decision to join Britain’s nuclear forces. He has spoken in 23 countries, at the Pentagon, the State Department, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Georgetown, the Naval War College, the Sorbonne, Kings College London, Nagasaki University and many others. He wins debates. He bested Sir Lawrence Freedman in a Chatham House debate and turned a pre-debate majority in favour of nuclear weapons at the Cambridge Union into a three to one drubbing against. His writing reaches across ideological boundaries. It has appeared in anti- nuclear journals like The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Nonproliferation Review, military journals like Parameters, Joint Force Quarterly and Revue de Défense Nationale, foreign policy journals like Survival and Foreign Policy, as well as in news media like the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and others. Using fundamental challenges to established nuclear weapons thinking, he has created an entirely new approach to eliminating nuclear weapons.
