The trend toward a neoliberal global economy and the prevalence of militaries and militarism worldwide are often treated as separate, unre- lated phenomena. Many activists and scholars who critique and challenge the negative effects of increasing global integration emphasize economic factors (e.g., Bales, 1999; Chossudovsky, 1997; Greider, 1997; Mander and Goldsmith, 1996; Sassen, 1998; Teeple, 1995). These include the fact that workers in one country are pitted against those of another as corporate managers seek to maximize profits, that systems of inequality based on gender, race, class, and nation are inherent in the international division of labor, that nation-states are cutting social welfare supports, that women and children experience superexploitation especially in countries of the global South, and that there is increasing polarization of material wealth between rich and poor countries, as well as within richer countries. Critics also point to the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), which require structural changes to make economies more profitable for private investors and to open markets for so-called free trade.

Activists and scholars who are concerned primarily with militarism and de-militarization critique the prevalence of war or the threat of war to resolve transnational and intranational disputes (e.g., Reardon, 1996; Hague Appeal for Peace, 1999). They point to bloated military budgets that absorb resources needed for socially useful programs in many countries, to the fact that civilians make up the vast majority of the casualties of contemporary warfare, and that massive numbers of people are displaced 90% of them women and children as a result of wars. They note the profitability of the arms trade. They also emphasize connections between militarism and violence against women, and the incidence of human rights violations in military conflicts.

We are not suggesting that such analysts and commentators see no overlap between these two clusters of issues. However, in critiquing and challenging neoliberal economic integration, it is essential to take account of militarism as an intrinsic element. Conversely, in analyzing militarism, war, and armed conflict, it is also necessary to consider global economic forces and institutions. The goal of this special issue, then, is to show how neoliberalism and militarism are inextricably linked.

In planning this issue, we sought to include articles from different parts of the world, with an emphasis on the work of activists. We believe this collection breaks new ground and we are excited about the material included here. Given U.S. dominance in the world, many of the articles inevitably focus on the U.S. government and U.S. corporations. We assume that the readers of this work will be academics involved in progressive issues, as well as organizers, activists, and students.

Our personal connections to this topic stem from life-changing experiences. Margo Okazawa-Rey undertook a research project of mixed-race Amerasian children abandoned by U.S. military fathers in South Korea (Okazawa-Rey, 1997). Gwyn Kirk was active in the women's peace movement that supported Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in England in the early 1980s (Cook and Kirk, 1983; Kirk, 1989). The rape of a 12-year-old girl by U.S. servicemen in Okinawa (Japan) in September 1995 precipitated our first joint writing about the complex inequalities of gender, race, class, and nation that characterize U.S. military relations in East Asia (Okazawa-Rey and Kirk, 1996). As we learned more about U.S. military operations in the region and local opposition to it, we began to understand the interconnections between militarism and neoliberalism. In 1997, we founded the East Asia-U.S. Women's Network Against Militarism together with activists and scholars from Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. The Network's purpose is to share information and strategize together so as to organize more effectively in all our countries (Kirk and Okazawa-Rey, 1998). Our emphasis on a radical redefinition of security genuine security, not military security came from this work (Okazawa-Rey and Kirk, 2001). This was a key theme at the Network's third international meeting (Okinawa, June 2000), timed to precede the G-8 Summit in Okinawa and to spark public debate there about the global economic context of militarism.

Our theoretical framework draws on the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and nation and provides a critique of capitalism as an economic and cultural system. We recognize the historical and contemporary interconnections among economic domination, militarism, colonization, and imperialism. As feminists, we are particularly concerned with how militarism a profoundly masculinist institution although with some variation from nation to nation affects women and draws on deep-seated patriarchal assumptions about women's roles, capabilities, and sexuality. We also seek to make theoretical and practical connections between U.S. domestic and foreign policy often thought of separately. Around 50% of U.S. federal discretionary spending is directed toward the military, amounting to $309 billion in FY 2001 more than the military budgets of the next 12 countries combined.1 Military budgets, bases, and operations have negative effects on communities in many parts of the world, as well as in the United States. Military spending has been kept at very high levels while socially useful spending on education, health, job training, social services, and welfare supports have been cut. This disinvestment, which disproportionately affects poor communities, together with automation and the movement of manufacturing jobs overseas, has led to high unemployment for young working-class and poor African Americans and Latinos. Their main "choices" are to join the military or to work in the informal economy, often ending up in jails and prisons. In the United States, military recruitment and the criminalization of people of color are two aspects of increasing global economic integration.

Worldwide military spending totaled a massive $785 billion in 1998, of which the United States accounted for 30% (National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund, 2000). Indeed, the U.S. has had what Seymour Melman (1970; 1974) termed a permanent war economy since World War II. A Department of Defense website currently describes the Pentagon as "not only America's largest company, but its busiest and most successful," and boasts a budget considerably larger than that of ExxonMobil, Ford, or General Motors.2 Addressing CEOs of major U.S. corporations in October 1998, William Cohen, then the U.S. Secretary of Defense, expressed the relationship between economic investment and military activity in the most basic terms:

As Friedman (1999: 40) put it, McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas.

The current integration of the world economy into a neocolonial system of capitalist production, consumption, and reproduction requires access to and control of resources including labor so that transnational corporations can maximize profits. Corporations need the assurance of political stability and protection of their investments. As part of the nation-state apparatus, the military is on hand whenever necessary to intimidate and repress popular resistance to exploitative working conditions, to structural adjustment programs, or the privatization of resources in aid of profit accumulation.

In the first article, Steven Staples argues that:

As several contributors note, colonial expansionism and the quest for control of strategic locations historically have been a major justification and impetus for military intervention. Control over scarce resources is an essential element in many contemporary conflicts. The Persian Gulf War was about oil, as the U.S. catchphrase, "our oil is under their soil," made clear. Michael Renner's list of international water disputes provides examples on every continent (Table 1). These disputes are of varying intensity and have not led to armed conflict in most cases, but the potential is there. Fighting between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, for example, which has been going on for over 50 years, concerns control of this watershed region. Water allocation, water diversion, and water rights are also key elements of tension in the Middle East.

In the third article, Ian Smillie discusses the role of the lucrative diamond industry in war-torn Sierra Leone, noting that "diamonds small pieces of carbon with no great intrinsic value have been the cause of widespread death, destruction, and misery for almost a decade." He argues that the point of this war "may not actually have been to win it, but to engage in profitable crime under the cover of warfare." Although U.N. Security Council Resolution 1306 bans trading in diamonds from areas held by the Sierra Leone Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the RUF has financed its military activities since 1991 by selling diamonds for arms. Pressure on traders and consumers to avoid purchasing "conflict diamonds" has led to recent efforts to reorganize the diamond trade somewhat. Since the 1950s, Smillie notes, the government of Sierra Leone has made no pretence of being able to provide security for mining companies, and has required them to provide their own security. Talbot comments on the role of privately held Military Protection Resource Inc. in former Yugoslavia. Lochbihler (1999: 19) makes a more general point, noting "an increase in the dissolution of state structures, which also means an erosion of the monopoly of violence by the state." This has given rise to a "new security industry" comprised of paid military experts and mercenaries who are "of service to whomever can pay."

In contrast to the neoliberal imperative for the transnational movement of goods and profits, borders between countries of the global North and South have become increasingly militarized to control the movement of workers. For example, the highly militarized U.S.-Mexico border, discussed by Maria Jimenez in the fourth article, keeps workers available for low-paid maquiladora production in Mexico although the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed by the United States, Mexico, and Canada has reduced the impact of borders for the movement of goods. Where countries of the North and South do not share a land border, immigration policies in countries of the North are closely linked to the labor needs of corporations, with work permits available for those with appropriate education and skills.

The articles in Part I focus on connections among nation-states, militaries, and corporations. Staples uses the term "corporate-military complex," rather than President Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," as more accurate for contemporary times. In an early draft of his speech on leaving office in 1961, Eisenhower used the phrase "military-industrial-congressional" complex, but dropped the reference to Congress in the public version (Nelson, 2000: 6). Lockheed Martin, the largest weapons maker in the world, provides a current example of these connections. The company received over $18 billion in U.S. government contracts in 1999, $12.6 billion from the Pentagon and over $2 billion from the Department of Energy for nuclear-weapons activities (Fischer, Sredanovic, and Massen, 2000). When Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta in 1995, U.S. taxpayers paid $1.2 billion for merger-related costs such as employee relocations and plant closures. Lockheed Martin has given over $1.6 million in Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions since 1997, plus another $500,000 in soft money to Democratic and Republican Party committees; it also spent $10.2 million on lobbying in 1997 and 1998. Key Lockheed Martin company associates are involved at top levels of the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns and in foreign-policy decision making. Many commentators have noted the weakening of the nation-state as a corollary of increased corporate power. Despite some significant changes, we argue that nation-states continue to fulfill their major function: maintaining conditions for capital accumulation. Financing the military and, where necessary, generating strong ideological support for it, whether by invoking patriotism, ethnocentrism, or national security, is a crucial state role.

The military is both a state agency and a highly profitable sector within industrialized economies due to weapons manufacturing and the international trade in arms. Governments of countries with arms industries pay for weapons production twice over. Public funds underwrite the often decades-long development process for complex weapons systems, and governments are the sole customers for them. Steven Staples argues that the large U.S. military budget "is for all practical purposes a corporate subsidy" siphoning public money into private hands, and protected under Article XXI of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which allows "governments free reign for actions taken for national security interests." Staples argues that with global economic integration the "weakened state no longer has the ability to reign in weapons corporations, and is trapped increasingly by corporate interests: greater military spending, state subsidies, and a liberalization of the arms trade."

Tamar Gabelnick and Anna Rich take up the issue of the arms trade in the fifth article. They emphasize potential contradictions between security policy and international arms sales, noting that "U.S. arms export policy was established to protect national security, but has become increasingly focused on commercial interests" such that "proposed export reforms will lead to further loss of control over conventional arms proliferation." An outcome of international sales is that militaries can find themselves up against an enemy armed with weapons provided by their own governments if political and military alliances shift. This happened to Britain in the Falklands/Malvinas war and to the United States in the Persian Gulf War. In an attempt to reduce arms sales, U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has proposed a Code of Conduct that would restrict the sale of arms to countries that are "nondemocratic, aggressors, human rights abusers, or not open about their military spending." This is a step in the right direction, but as Gabelnick and Rich suggest, it will need to be applied consistently to have much impact. The definitions of nondemocratic, aggression, or human rights abuse are open to interpretation. Russia's assurance, for example, "that it will not sell offensive weapons to Iran despite [its] decisionto resume arms sales to Teheran" (Reuters, December 7, 2000: A16) suggests a clear-cut distinction between offensive and defensive weapons that may be meaningless in practice.

Many countries are involved in arms trading. Most people are killed by small arms that are cheap and easily available worldwide, rather than by highly sophisticated weaponry. A good deal of the cross-border trade in small arms is illegal, but highly profitable for manufacturers, dealers, brokers, shippers, and financiers (Lumpe, 2000). This trade is an important way for poorer countries to earn hard currency to repay foreign debt. Staples notes that "foreign embassies and trade missions abroad are used to aid arms sales," a point reiterated by Karen Talbot, who argues that "bombing and missile strikes, are, more than ever, giant bazaars for selling the wares of the armaments manufacturers." The Persian Gulf War and the bombing of Kosovo allowed stocks to be displayed, tested, and reduced somewhat. William Greider (1998) argues that there is no technical reason to update U.S. weapons the most sophisticated in the world except for the need for continued profits. He notes that the biggest enemy of future U.S. weapons production is the copious supply of weapons already in existence; hence, the need to use them so as to justify continued production.

The relationship between economic and military policy is not always a smooth fit, of course, as Karen Talbot notes. In the seventh article, John Feffer explores significant contradictions underlying U.S. policy in East Asia, with the U.S. seeking to open up new markets, especially in China, while still pursuing Cold War foreign policy objectives in the region through the continuing presence of U.S. bases and military operations. He notes:

Economic explanations for militarism do not find their way into mainstream discourse and reporting; rather, the focus is on ideological support for militarism. As mentioned earlier, nation-states generate popular support for "defense" measures, supposedly to protect citizens from possible attack from inside or outside the country. The fall of the Berlin wall precipitated a crisis of legitimacy for the United States military with the demise of its long-term Soviet adversary. Although peace organizations, liberal policymakers, and New York Times editorial writers called for a "peace dividend," the Pentagon was quick to find new military adventures to justify high military spending and continued contracts to suppliers. Examples include the Persian Gulf War, the military's self-imposed international policing role allegedly to maintain human rights, and the "war on drugs."

Throughout the 1990s, the U.S. used the "war on drugs" as a rationale for military operations and widespread spraying of herbicides in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. In June 2000, Congress approved $1.3 billion in military aid for Colombia Plan Colombia ostensibly for counternarcotics operations. Much of that money will go directly to U.S. contractors who make the weaponry and aircraft required by the plan. Page (2000) argues that the "Black Hawk gunships alone represent a $234 million contract for Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. of Connecticut." In the ninth article, Justin Delacour argues that Plan Colombia is a pretext for a counterinsurgency strategy, and that the U.S. is strengthening a repressive regime that has used paramilitaries in brutal attacks on civilians and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who oppose privatization of state-owned companies and infrastructure. He argues that U.S. policy in Colombia has the support of weapons producers (United Technologies and Bell Helicopter Textron), oil companies (BP-Amoco and Occidental Petroleum), and the U.S. energy group, Enron, which is interested in buying Colombia's state-run power generator. According to Delacour, as long as there is high demand for drugs in wealthy countries like the United States and a lack of viable economic options in poorer countries like Colombia, the trafficking of illegal narcotics will continue to thrive, driven by systemic inequalities in wealth and living standards. Like the trade in arms, the drug trade is a lucrative earner of hard currency for producers and those who procure and sell them. Delacour's analysis of U.S. press coverage of Colombia shows how mainstream media outlets have relied on official U.S. sources for their news reports, partly due to threats from the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá that reporters would be banned from embassy-sponsored briefings unless the embassy approved of their coverage. He shows how biased and simplistic reporting serves to generate ideological support for U.S. policy at home.

Delacour's article provides a detailed example for the more general argument developed by Tony Ward and Penny Green in the following piece. They seek to provide a theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics of state crime such as genocide, torture, and war crimes and how the seemingly universal discourse of human rights is often used to mask particular economic agendas. These authors extend Gramsci's analysis of the concept of hegemony to international relations and argue that the "U.S. and its allies exercise hegemony in a Gramscian sense: their dominance appears to serve universal interests, rather than the interests of transnational capital, because it is portrayed as upholding human rights and democracy."

Delacour's discussion of the way in which mainstream U.S. news reporting has generated ideological support for U.S. military aid to Colombia exemplifies this exercise of hegemony and the masking of counterinsurgency measures as a counternarcotics policy. Ward and Green note that "the pressures that powerful states and international institutions place on weaker states to institutionalize human rights form part of a wider agenda. For example, at the core of the conditions that Turkey is required to meet to qualify for membership of the European Union are trade, military, and economic issues; but these are made palatable by a human rights discourse that Turkey must acknowledge and to a certain extent incorporate to win acceptance."

They note that the U.S., Britain, and NATO have dealt very differently with ethnic cleansing by Serbia, for example, than they have with ethnic cleansing by Turkey against the Kurds, suggesting the very different economic and political stakes in these two situations. Moreover, the notion of human rights that the U.S. and Britain invoke involves an instrumental appropriation and co-option of the concept of human rights utilized by grass-roots activists and nongovernmental organizations.

Although economic restructuring is an essential factor underlying much violent upheaval, this is rarely the focus of media reporting and mainstream discourse. Many recent conflicts have been characterized as ethnic and cultural conflicts based on old enmities and aggressions as in much mainstream representation of violence in the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda. An emphasis on ethnic tensions or religious strife masks economic factors, the importance of class inequalities, and the role of military intervention and harsh police measures in neoliberal economics. Such explanations may be particularly effective in the United States, where the dominant national discourse highlights racial and ethnic divisions and downplays the significance of class as an economic category. Because people are very poorly informed, because there is no familiar economic explanation for intranational conflict or for wars between nations, and perhaps because people wish to believe that their government is genuinely concerned with human rights, this focus on ethnic and cultural conflicts has been widely accepted.

By contrast, in the eighth article, Karen Talbot emphasizes economic reasons for the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and the NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999. She argues:

She details the mineral and oil wealth of Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo, as well as the current and proposed transhipment of oil and gas from the Caspian Sea region through the Balkans to Europe. President Clinton is quoted as saying, "If we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key.... That's what this Kosovo thing is all about." Talbot argues that the push to expand the role of NATO eastward is both political and economic. It comes from corporate interests in selling arms and other products to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, admitted to NATO in the mid-1990s. For U.S. companies alone, this expansion is worth an estimated eight to 10 billion dollars in sales of fighter planes and $35 billion in total weapons sales over 10 years (Lochbihler, 1999). The expansion will have the effect of stretching U.S. political and military domination further eastward, as the United States is the strongest and most influential member of the NATO alliance.

Talbot emphasizes the profits to be made from rebuilding infrastructure destroyed by war in Yugoslavia and the maneuvering for contracts that began as soon as the bombing stopped. Neoliberal imperatives mean that peace agreements do not address the root causes of conflict or make provisions for meaningful reconciliation or reparations (Lipschutz and Jonas, 1998). Rather, their goal is to provide short-term efforts to patch up and "normalize" the situation so that "business as usual" can resume as quickly as possible. Adel Samara provides an example of this in the tenth article, arguing that the Oslo peace accords are entirely based on neoliberal assumptions that are shared by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israeli state. Areas of the West Bank and Gaza under the jurisdiction of the PA remain dominated by Israeli economic policies and subordinate to prescriptions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Samara urges the PA to delink from the Israeli economy as quickly as possible and to give priority to "food security, basic needs, and the protection of independent producers, especially those cultivating the land," as happened during the intifada when investments were directed toward survival needs.

Beyond producing profits directly from weapons production and indirectly through rebuilding, the corporate-military complex is a major employer of military personnel, weapons designers, manufacturers, sales personnel, and many others who work for companies that produce and sell vehicles, uniforms, foods, equipment indeed, everything the military needs. The central place of militaries worldwide means that much outside the military is also militarized. Enloe (2000: 3) defines militarization as "a step-by-step process by which a person or a thing comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas." This includes those who produce, advertise, sell, or buy war toys, military-chic fashions, war movies, and militarized advertising images, for example. Given the widespread recruitment of young people into militaries around the world and the lack of civilian jobs, many boys are much more likely to know how to use weapons than to have a paying job.

In North America and Western Europe, public spending on the military is often justified in terms of job creation. Since it is highly capital-intensive, however, military spending is a poor investment in the job market. According to the National Priorities Project, an investment of one billion dollars in the U.S. would create 47,000 jobs in health care, 41,000 in education, 36,000 in housing, or 30,000 in mass transit, compared to 25,000 jobs in military-related employment.4 In contrast to these other forms of public investment, military spending generates far greater profits. Taxpayers subsidize militarism directly by funding research and the production of weapons. They also pay for it indirectly in lost investment for socially useful programs. According to Ruth Leger Sivard (1996: 39):

Women and children are especially affected by these distorted priorities, as Sivard's comparison of the costs of protection suggests (Table 2).

Reviewing Cynthia Enloe's book, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives, Francine D'Amico points out that militaries "manipulate social conceptions of gender," using assumptions about feminine respectability, duty, sexuality, and skills as grist for the military mill:

For the past 20 years Enloe has focused on the many ways in which women are used by militaries as wives, nurses, soldiers, defense industry workers, civilian workers on military contracts, and women in prostitution. D'Amico notes:

The articles included in Part I make suggestions for demiliarization at the micro, macro, and transnational levels: scrapping the WTO, controlling and reducing arms proliferation, supporting border communities and migrant workers, building cooperative political organizations, and redirecting investment to meet human needs. In Part II, we include articles and statements explicitly concerned with demilitarization and positive visions of sustainability and genuine security.

In the eleventh article, Ichiyo Muto notes that globalization has posed a major challenge to peace movements that are focused primarily on the dangers of nuclear weapons, or those who define security in national terms. The concept of security is virtually synonymous with military security in mainstream political discourse, and this form of security is so entrenched that it is taken for granted by many people. He notes that the UNDP Human Development Report (UNDP, 1994) introduced the concept of human security, shifting "emphasis to personal, economic, and social security, which, given the destructive effects of the globalization process, certainly address the issues and aspects of people's everyday lives that are totally neglected in national security discourse." The UNDP approach, however, "does not properly address the whole problematic of military forces and societal militarization." Muto argues for a demilitarized "people's security." Repudiating the nation-state as an intrinsically military institution, he argues that people must "ensure their comprehensive security through their struggle, movement, and initiatives," while also engaging with and intervening in state, regional, and international politics. He notes the need for strong people's alliances across borders, the need for a "people's discourse" free from the nationalism of state discourse, and the need for a transformative process toward equality and social justice, rather than "merely imposing a compromise" that retains "dominating/dominated and exploiting/exploited relationships intact." This process should involve the past as well as the present, acknowledging and rectifying the legacies of injustice caused by war and colonialism.

One such legacy was addressed by the International Tribunal on Violation of Human Rights in Puerto Rico and Vieques by the United States in November 2000. The Tribunal denounced U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico since the invasion and conquest of 1898, and found the U.S. government guilty of denying the people of Puerto Rico the right to self-determination. The U.S. military occupies 12% of the land area of Puerto Rico and 75% of the island of Vieques, the site of concerted protests against long-term bombing training that has reduced parts of the island to rubble and contaminated the land and water. The U.S. "has rented the firing range to the private sector and other countries for testing most conventional and nonconventional weapons" for an estimated annual income of $80 million. The Tribunal calls for sovereignty for Puerto Rico, removal of all military installations, and redress for all damage caused to natural resources and injuries to people.

The Declaration of the African Women's Anti-War Coalition focuses on the effects of war on women. The Coalition's final report notes:

The Coalition was founded at the West African Workshop on Women in the Aftermath of Civil War (Dakar, Senegal, December 11-13, 1998) to bring together women on all sides of civil conflicts to initiate a dialogue on healing, to develop ideas to address the diverse problems of aftermath experiences, and to develop strategies to influence the process of democratic representation of women in achieving durable peace. In their Declaration, workshop participants recommend that all governments "make a firm commitment to end conflicts" and take "full responsibility for the facilitation of holistic reconstruction (social, psychological, physical, and economic) of society, taking particular note of women's needs." From international agencies and Northern industrial governments, workshop participants seek acknowledgement of their roles "in creating or supporting political conflict for their own interests," compensation for victims, particularly women and children, and a commitment to prevent future conflicts.

The statement made by Farliz Calle to the Hague Appeal for Peace (May 12, 1999) on behalf of the Children's Movement for Peace in Colombia emphasizes children's right to peace. In November 1996, 2,700,000 Colombian children voted for this. A year later, 10 million Colombian adults voted for peace, life, and liberty in a citizens' mandate (mandato ciudadano), demanding that "the actors of the armed conflict should stop involving children in the war, that they should end torture, that there should be no more threats, no kidnapping, no massacres, and no more displacement of the civilian population from their homes."

The Unity Statement of the Women's Pentagon Action (USA) was written for the first Women's Pentagon Action in November 1980 just after the election of President Ronald Reagan (King, 1983). Twenty years later, as we write this introduction on the eve of the inauguration of President George W. Bush, it is still current, with its opposition to "the financial connections between the Pentagon and the multinational corporations and banks that the Pentagon serves," and its resolve to work for genuine security "a healthy, sensible, loving way to live."

These themes are echoed in the final statement issued by the East Asia-U.S. Women's Network Against Militarism following an international women's gathering in Okinawa, in June 2000, that preceded the G-8 Summit there. The purpose of the meeting was "to challenge the principle of 'national security' on which the economic policies of the G-8 are based." Participants argued that:

The current economic system depends on deep-seated attitudes and relationships characterized by greed, fear, domination, and the objectification of "others" expressed through racism, sexism, imperialism, and the desire to control the physical environment. Vested interests, routine ways of thinking, prejudice, ignorance, and inertia also play their part in maintaining entrenched systems of economic, social, and political inequality.

They affirmed that genuine security is based on the following key tenets:

• The environment in which we live must be able to sustain human and natural life;
• People's basic survival needs for food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education must be met;
• People's fundamental human dignity and respect for cultural identities must be honored; and
• People and the natural environment must be protected from avoidable harm.

The analyses in this special issue show the need for understanding connections between neoliberalism and militarism and for addressing this linkage through activist efforts. This means opposing Plan Columbia, for example, as a neoliberal strategy as well as a military intervention into the FARC's struggle for self-determination. It means exposing the fraud of the War on Drugs in the United States, Latin America, and elsewhere, and articulating genuine solutions to the problem of poverty and lack of economic opportunity for small drug producers and users.

Opposing neoliberalism also means seeking effective strategies toward demilitarization, dismantling the permanent war economy, and working for economic justice in a world of limited resources. It means opening up public discourse on the economic reasons for war, the profitability of arms sales, and the costs of militarism in human, environmental, and economic terms. Steps toward demilitarization include:

• Decommissioning weapons of mass destruction and opposing the militarization of space.
• Reducing weapons production and sales, and promoting initiatives for conversion of military-based industries to provide for civilian needs.
• Developing nonmilitary forms of strength to counter military threats, and expanding and disseminating current knowledge and experience of peaceful resolution to conflicts.
• Developing renewable sources of energy.
• Stopping the glorification of war and warriors, supporting initiatives like the Hague Appeal for Peace and UNESCO's culture of peace, and defining adventure and heroism in nonmilitary terms.
• Broadening notions of conventional masculinity and femininity and delinking masculinity and militarism.
• Developing genuinely democratic processes and structures for political and economic decision-making at community, national, and transnational levels.
• Redirecting public spending to meet human and environmental needs and opposing assaults on locally controlled government purchasing and legislation by the WTO.

The increasing integration of the world economy requires and has given rise to new political movements across national and regional boundaries. It is clear to many people around the world that neither capitalism nor militarism can guarantee genuine security for the majority of the world's population or for the planet itself. The thousands of labor activists, environmentalists, human rights activists, indigenous peoples, feminists, and students who came together in November 1999 in Seattle, and in Washington, D.C., Windsor (Ontario), Melbourne, and Prague during 2000 show a growing ability to integrate issues that have been kept separate in the past (Brecher, Costello, and Smith, 2000). Progressive people must articulate our visions of genuine security based on sustainable environmental and economic principles, accountable political systems, and sturdy connections among people that acknowledge and transcend identities and territories. Our focus must be on global security.