Waging Peace Blog

For additional news and information from Women Against War, please visit our Waging Peace blog hosted by the Albany Times Union.

Interested in contributing to the blog? Send us an email.

For more about our blog, please read this letter from blog editor and moderator Mickie Lynn:

Hello women and men working for peace and justice in the world. 

What exactly, you may ask, is Waging Peace? The best way to discover more about our blog, Waging Peace  [First launched on  the Times Union website August 4, 2008 and now having been published for more than five years], is to visit the blog itself at http://blog.timesunion.com/wagingpeace.

While you’re there check out the articles and the categories on the right sidebar to find what interests you. Surprise us and leave a comment if you’re moved to do so.  It’s easy!

To give you a general overview of our goals, here’s the slogan on the header:

Waging Peace. Women against war exploring and supporting non-military ways of solving conflicts.

In June of 2009 we updated our “About Us” page to read, “Of course peace is possible! It takes courage, creativity, perseverance and a lot of hard work. Women Against War is dedicated to ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, preventing new wars, and educating people about the costs of war, especially in the lives of women and children worldwide.”

Our blog started with two exploratory meetings of interested writers back in the spring of 2008. Then we jumped into blogging with 9 authors, 3 teams of three. The team approach allowed us to provide at least 2 posts each week with each “team” taking one month and arranging days of the week to post articles. At the beginning there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm and each writer branched out into a particular style and subject matter. I agreed to be the one 

From our plain text beginnings we’ve added pictures, videos, and lots of links to relevant media. Over the years we’ve welcomed and bid farewell to several bloggers––not all of them members of Women Against War, but all of them interested in exploring alternatives to violence in all aspects of interpersonal and international conflicts.

Now, in the fall of 2013, from an original group of 9 bloggers we’re down to just 4 regular contributors, with some guest posts and single articles written by members of the local and regional peace and justice community. Each regular blogger writes articles for a month. We have a standard rotation that is actually made up of three teams: two teams of 1 person each, and one team of two. Our page views for a 30-day period range from a low of 1,360 to a high so far of 2,778, and although most of our readers live in the United States, we have readers all over the world.

Early in the life of Waging Peace, one of our long-term authors, Linda Muralidharan, summed up her thoughts about the blog this way: “I think that one of our strengths has been that we’ve covered many different topics.

Impressionistically, it seems to me that we get more responses when we address issues of policies and actions.  An example would be the post about violence toward women in the military. I think we’re meeting one of our goals, by demonstrating that there are numbers of thoughtful, well-informed women actively involved in peace activities.”

One of the greatest challenges of our blog has been dealing with a small group of hostile commenters, but I think that the dialogue has been lively and interesting while keeping negative speech to a minimum. Another challenge has been to provide enough varied voices, perspectives and ideas.

With diversity and fresh voices in mind, we’d like to reach out to our readers and invite women to contribute either one or more guest posts, or one article a month, or to join our blogging team, register as an author or editor, learn the WordPress software, and regularly contribute your own ideas and perspectives to Waging Peace.  Adding a few new writers will greatly revitalize our efforts and add to the appeal and power of the blog. This invitation also includes previous bloggers who might be interested in writing a few posts now and then.

If anyone is interested in contributing to the blog, please contact me at info@womenagainstwar.org  I’ll be glad to help you post an article or learn to blog more frequently.

As always, our 5-plus years of blogging continue to be a work in progress. I’m constantly astounded and delighted by the work of our bloggers, who currently consist of Maud Easter, Linda Muralidharan, Lyn Miller-Lachmann and myself.

We’d really like to have more of you as readers, commenters and writers. Please join us in our work on the blogosphere as well as in the streets, legislative offices, and meeting halls of the “real world.”

–– Mickie Lynn, blog moderator and editor