Linked with Women in Black worldwide, with The Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, with Global Action, and with Britain’s new nuclear abolitionists.
She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.
Rebecca Johnson is a feminist, peace activist and citizen diplomat, whose work on disarmament negotiations prompted government diplomats in 1996 to call her ‘civil society’s ambassador’. While living at the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp (1982-87), she co-founded the Aldermaston Women’s Camp(aign) in 1985, extending the resistance to US and Soviet nuclear weapons to the UK nuclear programme and Trident. She currently directs the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy and is a member of the international steering group of Global Action to Prevent War … (1000peacewomen 1/2).
She says: « My passions are women and peace ».
While her present research priorities (2005) are WMD, space weaponisation and international security, Rebecca Johnson has authored numerous articles and reports on the United Nations system and multilateral disarmament and negotiations, notably the NPT and CTBT; civil society; and British defence policy, and gives papers and lectures on these subjects to a wide range of UN and other international conferences, seminars and meetings … (full text).
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Rebecca Johnson – England
She works for (Women in Black WiB) for justice, against war, for the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, and for Global Action to Prevent War.
Find her and her publications on The Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy.
Dr Rebecca Johnson combines her job as director of an internationally-renowned think tank with voluntary campaigning with various grassroots anti-nuclear and women’s groups. The youngest of eight children born into the Hutterian Society of Brothers, Rebecca was raised in North Dakota, USA and Sussex, England. After studying physics, philosophy and politics, her travels took her to Japan, where she became involved with a radical group of feisty Japanese lesbian feminists and never looked back!
She arrived at the US Airbase at Greenham Common on August 9, 1982 and ended up living at the Women’s Peace Camp for the next 5 years, during which she campaigned for the removal of nuclear weapons from Europe, danced on the missile silos, occupied the air traffic control tower, took President Reagan to court, painted cruise missile launchers while they were on military exercises and poured blood, paint and porridge on cluster bombs and other munitions at the nearby US base at Welford, for which she was brutally beaten by US soldiers and then imprisoned by the UK courts.
In 1985 she also co-founded the Aldermaston Women’s Camp(aign) which continues to this day in feminist, nonviolent resistance to UK nuclear weapons. After the success of the 1987 INF Treaty, which required the removal of US and Soviet intermediate nuclear missiles from Europe, Rebecca left Greenham and served time as Greenpeace International’s nuclear campaign director and also Vice Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). She also drove aid trucks to ‘Former Yugoslavia’ and helped organise Women Against Warcrime, which morphed into Women in Black London, following support work with Women in Black Jerusalem and Belgrade.
In 1995, she established the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy in Geneva and London, creating a ‘virtual’ think tank to analyse treaty negotiations, security and arms control developments in the UN system and inform other non-governmental organisations and governments, with the purpose of enhancing disarmament progress and accountability in international relations. In addition to participating in numerous international non-proliferation and security meetings, authoring many reports and book-chapters, and supporting women’s peace campaigns, she studied part time to get her PhD in international relations (multilateral diplomacy) from the London School of Economics.
She has been serving as an advisor for various international bodies, including the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, chaired by Hans Blix, and was also recently Vice Chair of the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Rebecca seems to be as much at home when she’s singing powerfully on a blockade as when strategising with diplomats at the United Nations. Her life reflects her vision of a better world where women are free and strong, and people learn to celebrate their differences and resolve conflicts through diplomacy, politics and the search for just and peaceful solutions rather than by violence and force of arms. (1000peacewomen 2/2).
Loch Goil and Greenock Trial, Evidence from Rebecca Johnson, Prepared for the Greenock Trial of Ulla Roder, Ellen Moxley and Angie Zelter, Compiled 19.9.1999.
Subject: objection to 07/02438/COMIND, from Rebecca Johnson, Dec. 11, 2007.
Johnson is the founding director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, which works with policy makers and nongovernmental organizations to promote nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament by disseminating information and maximizing opportunities in all available fora. As part of this mandate, she edits the organization’s in-house quarterly journal Disarmament Diplomacy. Her expertise is in British nuclear weapons policy, multilateral disarmament negotiations, and grassroots activism. From 2004 to 2006, she served as a senior adviser to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission chaired by Hans Blix (the bulletin).
(My comment: there are many good personalities with the same name in the internet).
links:
UNITED NATIONS – Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA);
FCNL (a quaker lobby);
Britain and the European Union;
WMDC;
A UNEPS ‘White Paper’ Launched in Washington, DC (on Global Action/Homepage).