Cutting the ties between higher education and the military

Nonviolence Radio

This episode of Nonviolence Radio welcomes @hellaJinsella from the UK peace organization, DeMilitarise Education (dED/ ). Jinsella has been actively working to raise awareness about the ties between higher education and the military. As these relationships have not generally been made public, military funding, and the accompanying environmental degradation the arms industry entails, has been able to thrive within universities without sustained challenge. DeMilitarise Education seeks to bring these connections to light. To this end, it has set up a database which tracks schools’ ties with the military and arms companies to be used as a tool to pressure the universities to break these damaging ties.

Despite the size of this problem (to date, dED has uncovered over £1.3 billion worth of UK university partnerships with the military and defense sector), Jinsella remains motivated and optimistic. She sees dED as a “part of a much larger mission for the reevaluation of education…it’s a part of the decolonization movement. It’s the part of the fossil free movement. All these things that we want to see shift in our economics are represented within the higher education spaces.”

And Jinsella pushes beyond even the realm of higher education, her hope and conviction that a better, more peaceful and just world is possible has led her to set aside a time each week in which anyone anywhere can join her to:

simply hold the space for us to imagine peace together. Imagine world peace. Imagine what that means for our economies and care-based systems. And we meditate and actually make space for our minds to start prioritizing peace as the universal principle that we can all stand behind.