According to the New York Times, “of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just eight percent of recorded history”. Eight percent! Even back then people were probably arguing over whose turn it was to do the dishes or the kids treating the cave like a hotel.
The 2017 Global Peace Index found that while “the world became more peaceful in the last year … over the last decade it has become significantly less”. As a planet, we continue to spend huge amounts of time and money creating — and subsequently containing — violence, yet relatively little on, you know, not actually causing all that trouble in the first place.
So, is the concept of peace just some abstract idea? Or is it still something worth fighting for?
A lot of people certainly think so. Take the tens of thousands of women who took to the streets of Washington to “assert the positive values that the politics of fear denies” a year ago this weekend. Isn’t an end to the sexist oppression they were marching against an essential requirement of genuine peace?
Or how about brilliant environmental campaigners such as actress turned activist Bonnie Wright and 15-year-old British Bangladeshi bird-twitcher Mya-Rose Craig — two young women who are working to protect the planet’s natural abundance. Isn’t an environmentally conscious community pretty much central to a happier, more prosperous world?
This week we’re handing i-D over to the young people talking loud for peace in 2018. We’ll be hearing from a New York book club dedicated to the promoting phenomenal black women (“past, present and the ‘beautyful’ ones not yet born”); asking Amika George, a UK teenager campaigning for free sanitary products, about the myths and meanings of being a woman; and hearing all about Julia Cumming’s ANGER CAN BE POWER movement, a DIY experiment encouraging young people to integrate politics into their everyday lives. While we’re aware that we could never be exhaustive in our coverage, we have tried to be uplifting and inspiring — hopefully it will be wherever you are in the world.
We’ll also be playing host to special pieces of content throughout the week curated by three friends of i-D: grassroots movement Raw Power Movement, activist platform Good Trouble and Palestinian designer Shukri Lawrence. From a fashion story shot on the West Bank to images from an Orange County jail using art as a tool for growth, we couldn’t be more honoured to share the work they have submitted.
In a forward to our rebellion-themed Action Issue in 2003, i-D co-founder Tricia Jones wrote, “It seemed that we had to do something; that however small our contribution, we had to stand up and be counted, to lend our voices to the growing consensus of dissent — because the truth is that if we stay silent, it can only be presumed that we acquiesce.” Well, we’re silent no more.
Rumble young activists, rumble.
This is peace 2018.