Peace Pillars

Vision: We envisage a future where international relations are based on cooperation instead of competition and conflict, and where mutual benefit and shared security lead to a more peaceful and just global community.

Mission: NH Peace Action educates, mobilizes, and organizes, to build a more peaceful and just future for all.

Our Work: As an organization, we work on several issues, topics and problems in our world.  Our pillars guide our work and define how we see peace in a larger intersectional movement for a more peaceful and just future.

#1. Building Peace – Nonviolence, human dignity and reconciliation, public education, peacekeeping, and peace education fall under this pillar.  We seek to shift culture and do the foundational work of humanizing and focusing on peaceful coexistence.

#2. Restraining US Military Aggression – Looking for diplomatic solutions to foreign policy challenges, opposing the unnecessary use of military force abroad and in our communities; this pillar speaks directly to US acts of war and military aggression as well as violence against communities of color by domestic police forces.

#3. Shifting Economic Priorities – Pentagon spending makes up more than 50% of all discretionary spending, some nuclear weapons spending is done through the department of energy, and federal police forces from the NSA, FBI, and CIA to Federal Marshals and Border Patrol represent a massive investment in violent control of the world and our domestic situation, this investment starves the budgets for education, job training, health care, infrastructure, housing, and green energy. This pillar seeks to encourage the federal government to adjust spending priorities to the funding of human needs.

#4. Eliminating Nuclear Weapons – Stemming from our roots in the Nuclear Freeze, part of our mission has always included support for nuclear arms control treaties and diffusing the risk of nuclear war. This pillar calls us to pay specific attention to the dangers and costs of nuclear weapons.

#5. Confronting Structural Inequity – Recognizing that war is waged primarily upon black and brown people abroad, and using the poverty draft it disproportionately predates upon poor and working people and communities of color to enact imperial policy. This pillar reminds us that we are anti-racist, and that anti-war work is a part of dismantling the social and structural influence of racist narratives.  We also recognize the role of the Patriarchy in holding together the aggressive zeitgeist and power structure that continually chooses war and militarism. We hold the worth and dignity of all people as paramount.  We commit through this pillar to stand with marginalized people, to amplify their stories, and to work to undo the structures that attempt to deny lives of dignity to the vulnerable, this includes ethnic and religious minorities, differing racial and cultural identities, the LGBT+ community, the disabled, and poor and working-class people.

#6. Reversing Ecological Destruction – Recognizing that all recent US conflicts have been directed in places where struggles over control of fossil fuels have been central drivers, that climate change drives conflict globally, and that radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons still renders parts of the world uninhabitable, this pillar links our work to stewardship of and commitment to our planet and the ecosystems we depend on for life.

We often partner with other organizations working in these areas above because we believe that cooperation and strengthening the presence of a voice for peace is paramount to achieving the progress we all seek.