The Global Common

Back in the first half of the 1980s, with the new Cold War at its height and relations between the superpowers at an all time low, the eyes of the world focused for a time on a small piece of ancient common land in the county of Berkshire, in England. The Women’s Peace Camp outside the United States Airforce Base at Greenham Common came to symbolize the intense contestation which was being played out in many hundreds of places and in numerous different ways, between the forces of global militarization and movements for peace and nuclear disarmament. Greenham, although located physically and in the public mind in this particular place, was more than its physical manifestation as an encampment of women, and its impact spread far beyond the immediate environment in which it was situated. But the camp was also just the most visible manifestation of a global women’s peace movement, which stretched across several continents and mobilized many hundreds of thousands of women during this period of geopolitical crisis. ¹