Maybe it’s just me – but I suspect it’s not just me – but hope seems in short supply at the moment. The weather certainly doesn’t help, but it’s not fair to just blame the Bradford rain when the day-to-day newspaper headlines repeatedly paint a picture of a world spiralling, which couples with the longer term, more insidious sense of heaviness, of unease.

But our book of the month is called Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit, was written in 2003 and early 2004, “written against the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq”. I was born in 1988, 9/11 happened when I was 11 years old, the invasion of Iraq when I was around 13 – as a “millenial” Solnit is writing about a period of time that defined my own worldview and that of many activists my age. At the time – and, now I think about it, ever since – cynicism felt like a blanket, a buffer against a world that seemed content with hurtling over a precipice. “I can take the despair, it’s the hope I can’t stand…”

When so much is at stake, it makes sense to frame the world in binaries – either we win and the war doesn’t happen or the whales don’t go extinct, or we lose, and millions die. 

Solnit invites us to look at the world and where we should look for hope very differently – less in terms of outcomes (whether we win or lose), and more in the process, the relationships, the act of building something together. In her analysis of movements and organising over several decades, Solnit finds hope in the way our movements have adapted and changed, finding new ways to communicate and organise, a readiness to challenge “leadership cults”, the wide embrace of an anti-doctrinal plurality, and a rejection of “the static utopia in favor of the improvisational journey”.

She also sets out to remind us that cause-and-effect is often difficult to understand and recognise, and that we often fail to recognise or embrace the huge cultural impacts of activism – either historically or currently. Learning about what movements have achieved less in terms of their campaign “wins” but what they achieved in their organising. How did they empower their communities? What was the long term cultural impact of their work? What used to be “normal” that is now unthinkable? What transformation occurred in an individual, or a group of people, or a home, or a workplace, or…? In a 2016 reflection on her book ten years after it was published, Solnitt quotes Patrisse Cullors, a founder of Black Lives Matter, who said that BLMs goal was to “provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams”.

Solnit invites us to look for hope in the cracks and the margins and the edges – not in a naive “everything will be ok” sort ofway, but in the future’s uncertainty, in the simple fact that no one knows what will happen next. That uncertainty is terrifying, but it’s also a crack in which we can place ourselves – and we can’t do that without a little bit of hope.

In a world that feels increasingly fraught, violent, laden with intersecting crises, putting time and energy into thinking about something like friendship might feel a bit wasteful, even a little self-indulgent. The first pages of our book of the month – Friends in Common, by Laura C. Foster and Joel White – immediately challenges us to think about friendship as a cornerstone of our movements, which frames the rest of this powerful and engaging book.

Friends in Common opens with an extended quotation from Yvonne, the co-founder of Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment (MORE), who shares her experience of detention in the Yarlswood Immigration Centre. Yvonne describes the “domino effect” of the solidarity she experienced from members of Glasgow’s Unity Centre and how it encouraged her to support others in detention, before reminding us that such work has to be rooted in a “love for humanity” that doesn’t reduce people to a “cause”. This tension – between what we want to achieve, and how we want to go about achieving it, means and ends, goals and methods – will be well known to anyone who has been involved in activism and organising. Friends in Common makes an uncompromising case for thinking about and reflecting on friendship as more than an incidental by-product of our campaigning and activism, (“not peripheral to the real intellectual ‘meat’ of political ideas”) but as an essential foundation of building a better world. Many people who have been involved in grassroots activism will instinctively know this, that the relational bonds built through months, years, decades of working together are as important as the goals the group is working towards. However, we can still be guilty of undervaluing the importance of relationships and bonds of trust, and find ourselves taking on some of the individualistic norms we see in wider society. 

I want to draw out two key threads in the book that I found particularly helpful: exploring communication in the digital age, and trust.

Communication in the digital age

Social media is a key theme throughout the book, which makes sense! Many people’s lives are now completely interwoven with social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and others. Facebook and Instagram have over 3 billion monthly active users, Tiktok 1.5 billion, and X has over 500 million. While these platforms have become an essential tool to mobilising and activism, they are also part of why many people experience life in a very atomised way which leaves relationships feeling very transactional. 

Forster and White argue that social media platforms have tried to “co-opt, contain and destroy relational bonds”, and many of us will recognise how social media is fuelling a competitive and accumulative version of friendship defined less by informal interactions and bond-building and more by individuals presenting versions of themselves that they believe will be attractive or interesting to others.

When our friendships are mediated by social media platforms we might end up more “knowing of” people, rather than knowing them in a way that builds the sorts of trust and bonds that are essential to effective organising.  As more and more people become reliant on platforms like Facebook and X to earn incomes, advertise their work, and “build a personal brand” Forster and White challenge us to think about the way “ambient friendships” sustained through social media are reducing us to think about friendships in terms of “productivity”. The nature of the space that we interact frames the nature of those relationships; social media platforms might present themselves as neutral, but they are actually cleverly designed structures that have a huge impact on the way we relate to others.

Balancing the power of social media platforms with their many and often insidious problems is a challenge. What should we share, and who should we connect with? What should we keep “offline”? 

Trust

The other key theme I wanted to highlight is around “trust”, which I think of as foundational to my own interpersonal relationships, but also to the way our movements function. Trusting that people will follow through on what they’ve said they will do is both foundational to movements and organising, and when there is a breakdown of trust it can be difficult to rebuild. The degree to which we trust the people around is perhaps a luxury we don’t identify unless we don’t have it – many groups and organisations have fallen apart simply because trust among members has become irrevocable.

There has been significant coverage in recent years of the “spy cops” scandal. Over 140 undercover police officers infiltrated more than 1,000 political organisations in what one of the key agents described as a “black operation”, a highly secretive process designed to gather information and disrupt the activities of political groups in the UK. The officers sought to abuse the trust others placed in them in order to embed themselves in the personal lives of people they met through these activities. They regularly built intimate and long-term relationships with activists, and even had children with people they were monitoring. Since 2010 several of the police officers involved have been identified, and an inquiry into the issue began in 2020.

Friends in Common places the spy cops scandal in a historical context, highlighting the many and varied ways that authorities have sought to disrupt protest or revolutionary activity by embedding spies, informers and even agent provocateurs among those seeking to challenge powerholders and instigate social change. Forster and White explain that “infiltrating and fabricating friendship has long been a strategy of the state…the explicit strategies of these agents include deliberate and sustained attempts to create intimacies, and to penetrate intimate and informal spaces, be they bedrooms, bathrooms or barrooms.” and that as well as gathering information and reporting on plans and activities, the role of such infiltration (drawing on an example of FBI agents infiltration of the Black Panther Party and the anti-Vietnam war movement) as creating “suspicion, isolation and loneliness” within organisations and movements. We could think of these activities as a conscious attempt to weaponise trust, a way of using the very human bonds that are built through activism to undermine attempts to organise, challenge, and resist.

While the impact of such behaviour by security forces is shocking and upsetting (and, for those who experience the deceit and deception directly, it can be deeply traumatic), Forster and White also argue that the amount of energy and resources put into these activities “signal the revolutionary importance of friendship”, that because friendship is “policed as a threat” we should recognise its central importance to our ability to build lasting social change.

The question we are perhaps left with is: in a climate where even people we think we know and trust deeply – perhaps even love – could be weaponising such human tendencies against us, how do we continue to trust others? Forster and White have an almost counterintuitive answer – to “dig deeper into bonds of real friendship”, pointing to the story of Lisa. Lisa received an email from her former partner “Mark Stone”, asking for forgiveness. Considering the deceit and betrayal Lisa experienced we might expect her to never trust again, but instead she explains “I’m being shown such a huge amount of fiercely true love from so many incredible people that I can’t let down. I choose them.”

In an age where more of our activism takes place online, where we have the potential to be connected to people from anywhere, and where state surveillance and limits on the right to protest and organise are increasing, Friends in Common is both inspiring and refreshing, and gently provocative and challenging, a thought-provoking reflection on the nature of the bonds of friendship that are the scaffolding of our work to build a different world.

Friends in Common was published in June 2025 by Pluto Press. We hold a copy in the Commonweal Collection, and you can check its status here

In recent weeks there has been lots of coverage in the British media about the hunger strikes conducted by a number of people who are being held in prison on remand, awaiting trial for a range of offences related to involvement in Palestine Action. At the time of writing, two hunger strikers have gone without food for 50 days and have been hospitalized.

Many of us will have a deep, emotional reaction to these stories – knowing that people are refusing food to the point where they are risking their lives might be upsetting or troubling. Even those in agreement with their aims and objectives might ask what has driven someone to refuse food? What could be so important that people would risk their own wellbeing – even life – in such a way?

When imprisoned, people lack many of rights and freedoms, and throughout history hunger strikes have been used by those in prison to demand changes to their living conditions or for wider political changes. The Commonweal Collection has a range of resources that explore the history of hunger strikes by activists in the UK and around the world; reading their experiences can help us to understand what motivates people who choose to take part in hunger strikes.

Irish republicans

The first book that jumps out is Hunger Strike: reflections on the Hunger Strike, edited by Danny Morrison. Hunger Strikes explores the history and impact of the hunger strikes carried out by Irish republicans who were imprisoned in the 1980s, many because of their involvement in Irish republican paramilitary groups. The book is made up of contributions from forty-nine different writers, politicians, poets, playwrights and activists and includes essays, poems and photographs. The book starts with a history of the blanket protest and ‘dirty’ protest, and the hunger strike that began on 1st March 1981, but the majority is short chapters detailing the experiences of hunger strikers, mediators, family members, and others who observed the hunger strikes.

Gandhi

The Commonweal Collection holds a large number of books related to Gandhi, who undertook several fasts and hunger strikes for a number of reasons throughout the Indian Independence campaign, including as a protest against “untouchability” and outbreaks of violence by different groups, to demand the release of political prisoners, and in support of Muslim-Hindu unity. Gandhi began a number of indefinite hunger strikes, and the longest he went without food was 21 days.

In the Commonweal Collection, The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi by Robert Payne shares details of the fasts and hunger strikes undertaken by Gandhi throughout his satyagraha campaign in India.

Suffragettes

The first Suffragette to go on hunger strike in prison was Marion Wallace Dunlop, who was incarcerated as a “second division” prisoner – she wanted to be reclassed as a “first division” political prisoner. She was released after 91 hours, and while this was the initial reaction by the authorities to other Suffragettes, eventually the response changed. Prison authorities began to use the violent, gruesome tactic of force feeding.

American women also took part in hunger strikes, including Alice Paul, who became a leader of the American movement for women’s suffrage after spending time in the UK.

The Commonweal Collection holds a number of books about the Suffragettes, including Sylvia Pankhurt’s The Suffrage Movement, which shares details of the Suffragette’s hunger strikes.

In the current political climate, the wealth of wisdom contained in the Collection (the history, theory and practice of nonviolence) is needed more than ever. I write this Annual Report at a time not simply of global uncertainty, but of increasing authoritarianism and rising right-wing populist politics. These anti-democratic forces highlight an immediate need for responses which foreground human security and dignity, not the protection of wealth and power. But they also bring with them a crackdown on nonviolent action, precisely because it is on the rise and effective. We see this globally, not least in the US under Donald Trump, and sadly we are also seeing it here in the UK. For the first time, an apparently nonviolent organisation has been proscribed, against the backdrop of a political culture marked by a shocking growth in divisive rhetoric. Rhetoric which embeds cultural and structural violence along class as well as race and gender lines and encourages direct violence towards refugees, asylum-seekers and other vulnerable groups. The agenda that underpins this violence is well-funded, well-organised, omnipresent online and increasingly accepted as normal in our communities. It thrives on pessimism and a sense of powerlessness. 

It is easy to feel pessimistic and powerless ourselves at times like this, but the stories and ideas within the Commonweal Collection (the history, theory and practice of nonviolent action) are a reminder that abuses of power can be challenged, evil can be resisted, rights can be defended. They are also a call to action. 

The world needs hope right now. The world needs nonviolent activists. 

We are passionate about the role active nonviolence can play in building hope, fostering respect for the dignity of others, and helping people embrace their own political agency. Against this need, I am very pleased to report that over the past year our JRCT-funded project ‘Growing the Movements’ has hugely increased Commonweal’s visibility and reach. 

Our Collection Development Worker, Sue Easterbrook, has reorganised and relabelled our resources, and added new titles, including new holdings on Disability Rights activism, as well as a new fiction and poetry section. The Collection is now much more accessible and easy to engage with – we urge you to come and visit!

Our previous Outreach Worker, Donna Craine, left us last Summer through mutual agreement. In November, we were delighted to welcome Emma Goodway in her place. Emma has hit the ground running, and has facilitated hundreds of conversations on nonviolence and activism. Emma has focused on a different theme each month: hope, creating a community, women and peace, poetry and storytelling – to name but a few. We have made connections with a wide range of people and organisations (religious, cultural, creative, trade unions, activists, political and more). We have hosted events and talks, facilitated a nonviolence book club, trialled resources and used creative workshops to encourage learning and conversation. 

We are grateful to Ludi Simpson and Mollie Somerville for sharing their thought-provoking reflections on their Just Stop Oil soup-throwing action, and to Dr Majbritt Lyck-Bowen for an inspiring talk on her new book: Moving with Dignity, a positive peace approach to migration. Our link with the Peace Museum continues to provide a gateway to new audiences, and we look forward to collaborating ever more closely with them as they go from strength to strength in their wonderful new premises. 

We also now have a set of book lists and other online resources, which we hope you will find useful. You can find all our digital resources here: www.commonwealnonviolence.org/resources.

Through this work, membership has grown, more books are being borrowed (in person and via inter-library loans) and we have a thriving mailing list who regularly receive an email newsletter from Commonweal. 

However, we have also identified challenges in the much-needed work we are doing to increase the visibility and use of nonviolent tools and resources. Firstly, people’s information habits have changed vastly since our founder David Hoggett founded the collection in the 1960s! Not only are people reading books less, but they are more likely to buy second-hand than borrow from a library. Secondly, there is a disconnect between short-form internet content and the resources we hold for deeper exploration and engagement with these vital ideas. Thirdly, we are acutely aware of the historical structural biases in traditional approaches to nonviolence. 

These challenges are also opportunities, and Emma is leading on our work to decolonise the Collection, as well as bringing her wealth of creative experience to develop more emotionally engaging ways of connecting people with the ideas within the collection. We also plan to employ a new member of staff on a fixed term contract to work with us to develop our digital strategy, and are seeking ongoing funding for all areas of our work. 

Allied to this, we are working to integrate the internationally significant Civil Resistance bibliography established by Michael Randle, April Carter and Howard Clark www.civilresistance.info with Commonweal’s own online presence. 

As Commonweal has grown, we have this year invited applications for new trustees. We are very moved by the interest shown in the Collection by some incredible people – some of whom we hope to welcome as new Trustees at this year’s AGM. At present, the Trustee body comprises: Susan Mottram (Chair), Ellie Clement (Vice-Chair), Heather Blakey (Secretary), Jen Fox (Treasurer), Rachel Julian and Ute Kelly. Our wonderful Chair, Susan Mottram, sadly leaves us as a Trustee this year. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Susan from the heart for the huge amount she has contributed to Commonweal over the years. You will be sorely missed, Susan!

Commonweal Fundraiser, with Ceilidh, buffet supper and raffle

As we grow, we urgently need to ensure our financial stability, not least as we now employ staff and take our responsibilities towards them very seriously. To this end, we are having a Klezmer Ceilidh! It should be a fantastic night, with the wonderful Ey Up Klezmer! (who have generously donated their time for this event). Tickets include a buffet supper – all for £15! Solidarity tickets at £20 are also available, which enables us to also offer low-income tickets at £10. I hope you can join us – get your tickets here. 

As you can see, there is a lot going on at Commonweal. We would love to hear your reflections on the work we are doing, and your ideas for what we can do next. And if you’d like to get involved – whether as a volunteer, a prospective Trustee, or simply to join our mailing list, please get in touch: 

• Sue Easterbrook – Collection Development commonweal@peacemuseum.org.uk 
• Emma Goodway – Outreach commonwealoutreach@peacemuseum.org.uk
• Trustees commonweal@riseup.net 

Finally, thanks are due as always to the staff of the JB Priestley Library, as well as the Peace Museum, to our fantastic staff Emma and Sue, and to our amazing volunteers. 

Thank you also to our supporters, to our readers, and most of all to the nonviolent activists here and around the world who continue to inspire us and give us hope. 

Heather Blakey on behalf of the Commonweal Trustees, 

September 2025

Download the report here.