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 & Pablo Domínguez, 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.

• Solidarity Cities with Sharmeen Khan 🎒 

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