Study War No More

The global arms trade is wreaking havoc around the world. In its current form it is not primarily focused on helping create or keep peace, but on making profit. This means selling as many arms as possible regardless of whether or not they are needed. It is ordinary people who pay the price:

• There is now one weapon for every ten people in the world and one person dies every minute as a result of armed violence.
• Development in poorer countries is hindered as their governments are pressured into spending money on arms at the expense of healthcare and education for their people. For instance, South Africa, with its huge AIDS problem, is an important UK arms market ¹.
• Tensions between communities and countries are more likely to escalate into armed conflict, and to then last longer, because of the availability of arms. 90% of people killed in armed conflicts are civilians.
• When arms fall into the wrong hands they are used to perpetrate human rights abuses. In 2005 the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Human Rights Annual Report identified 20 ‘major countries of concern’. In the same year the government approved arms export licences to 12 of these countries ¹.

As Christians we’re called to address injustice wherever we see it. We can’t change the whole global arms trade overnight, but we can tackle one of the organisations involved in the arms trade: our local university. As students, alumni and local residents we can ask the university to refocus their efforts on research that will have a positive impact on the world. Between 2001 and 2006 the university had the second highest number of military or military-industrial funded projects out of all universities in Britain. The income this generated amounted to the fifth-highest amount of funding given to a university during this period for military projects ².

Overflow, Open Heaven’s social justice group, is calling on the university to take the following steps. You can do the same by signing our petition online. We're asking the university to:

1. Create a central register of all university ties with military and/or industrial funders to include funding sources and another industrial connections. This should include which departments have accepted funding from military sources and what the funding is for.
   
   
2. Establish an ethics committee whose purpose will be to consult on and create an ethical policy on where the university will and will not accept funding from.
   
   
3. Establish a committee which reviews all offers of/applications for funding against this ethical policy before funding is accepted. This committee should also review all existing funding for research with military applications and, where possible, terminate contracts which don’t meet the standards of the ethical policy.
   
   
4. Create and provide structures of support for academics and departments affected by the rejection of funding according to the ethical policy to find funding from alternative sources for work which provides civil benefits to society, for example by helping to address social or environmental problems.

You can also keep up with campaign developments by visiting us on Facebook.

Posted by: Caroline Harmon on Friday Apr 3rd, 2009

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