I read in ARA a very good interview by David Miró with a politician who, without me agreeing with him at all, I find brilliant. Alejandro Fernández, a man who I think loves music and cooking. Talking about the frigate that Pedro Sánchez has sent to Cyprus, he says: “It doesn’t matter, John Lennon isn’t there singing Imagine

The pacifist movement has been nonexistent for years, neither in Catalonia, nor in Spain, nor in Europe. There are people who are pacifists or who call themselves pacifists, but each in their own way. Wanting peace, in the abstract or in general terms, is a moral stance, not a political program. It has to do with values, with empathy for those who suffer violence, and with the will to change violent structures. From there, there may be organizations that work in this direction, conducting research, denouncing injustices, and sometimes proposing solutions. There is a type of pacifist who is not naive, who usually doesn't even label themselves as such. They simply work: they participate or collaborate in some way in negotiations with armed groups or in contexts of political violence; they make proposals before a war breaks out; with inclusive criteria, they help negotiators when they are in crisis, they thoroughly study the situation and look for alternatives; they appear before parliamentary defense committees with proposals to demilitarize defense policies; They network with other people and study groups to develop new approaches that will be useful in the future, in the post-conflict era; they talk to people on "the other side" to find points of consensus; they give lectures to arms companies in crisis, proposing ways to transform them into companies that produce things of social utility, not weapons of death; they watch the speeches of the world's most important leaders, such as Trump and Putin, daily to see how they think, understand their underlying culture, and see if they make any proposals that can be adapted and improved; they design roadmaps for exiting conflict; they talk to the actors involved, even if their hands are stained with blood; they get their boots dirty treading on muddy ground; they conduct discourse analysis to see if there are any advances in the thinking of people who believe in violence as a means; they are alert to ideologies that normalize the discourse of violence; they create counter-narratives to the fear-mongering discourses created by those who profit from the arms trade; They practice citizen or parallel diplomacy (with governments or institutions), and, above all, they make proposal after proposal, even though no one listens. I could make a four-page list of things that can be done and are being done.

This week marks four years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues; the internal war in Myanmar has been ongoing since 2021, and so on with at least a dozen other conflicts. And amidst so much bitterness, a scientific article published this year in the International Political Science Review In which Giuditta Fontana, from the University of Birmingham, and colleagues from the same university and the University of Hamburg conclude that, when women participate in peace processes, the probability of the conflict reigniting is reduced by at least 11%, reaching up to 37% when the UN intervenes.

"When one man kills another, we call it murder; when millions are killed, we call it war." These were the words of Joan Mascaró Fornés, an exile from the Franco regime, professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge, and translator of Bhagavad Gita and other great texts of Hinduism (the Upanishad, he Dhammapada) into English (and later, with the help of Elisabet Abeyà and Francesc de Borja Moll, into Catalan). Mascaró Fornés was a committed pacifist who dedicated his life to the study of languages ​​and religions as tools for knowledge, and also as tools for humankind's civilizing capacity. The pinnacle of this civilizing capacity, its highest level, would be the absence of war.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US withdrawal from European defense under Donald Trump have forced political parties to take a stand on defense policy. In Catalonia, as in the rest of Spain, left-wing parties oppose increasing the defense budget or reinstating mandatory military service. But what is the position of each party in the Catalan parliament on the main challenges facing the continent?

Just as for centuries, if not millennia, humans have carried the burden of myths about honor and war, in contemporary times (19th and 20th centuries) this began to change. The greater our destructive capacity, the more alarms were raised. The Kantian philosophical-political idea of Perpetual peace (1795) has been slowly making its way into our minds and hearts. A winding road, with dead ends, whose end we will still have to wait to see, if there is an end at all. It's so hard to believe in happy endings, isn't it? Today, almost no fiction has one. Neither happy nor unhappy. Everything is open, uncertain. Series don't really end... We are in a to be continued Infinite. War resists disappearing tooth and nail. It's ingrained in us.

2026 began with a harsh and persistent winter. Gray days, thick fog, incessant rain, flood warnings, snow in the Pyrenees, and severe weather in the Empordà region. This cold is not merely meteorological. It is also a moral chill that seeps into the streets and hearts as wars once again dominate the headlines and Europe accepts increasing militarization as an inevitable horizon in a context of democratic fragility and a crisis of the rule of law. As Timothy Garton Ash stated in these pages"We have entered a new era: a post-Western world marked by illiberal international disorder." In our house, dozens of people They continue to sleep under the C-31 bridgeVictims of institutional violence and hate speech, exposed to the harshest weather of the year. We are not impervious: the cold penetrates the squares, the neighborhoods, and even the classrooms.

For the past three weeks, since October 23rd, 67-year-old Rudolph Champagnie has set up his Royal British Legion table in the concourse of Liverpool Street Station, London's busiest station, with at least 260,000 people passing through daily. From 6:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., he and the volunteers who accompany him take advantage of the influx of people passing by to sell their product. It is the red poppy (the red poppy) in all sorts of imaginable forms: pine trees, bookmarks, crosses, bracelets, or the more traditional paper poppy. Last year, Rudolph, a former corporal in the British Army, did the same. And the year before that, too. He's been doing it so many times that, in fact, he struggles to remember how many. "More than fifteen, for sure!" he tells ARA.