Reed Elsevier

On the 29th of May Clarion Events announced the acquisition of Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEi), Latin American Aerospace and Defence Exhibition (LAAD) and ITEC.

DSEi - The largest arms fair in the world takes place in London every two years. The previous owners of DSEi and the other two exhibitions, Reed Elsevier,which is a major publisher of scientific publications, had to sell DSEi after a high profile campaign against it.

These last months have come with many new developments around campaigns against war profiteers. We have already announced some of them in previous issues of the WPN - for example that Reed Elsevier will not organise the DSEi arms fair any longer. Now this month comes with news from the UK and the closure of the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO). Also we learnt that AXA who was our War Profiteer of the Month in April, has started to disinvest partly from landmines and cluster munitions.

It was announced on Friday 1st June that Reed Elsevier will pull out of the arms trade and will no longer organise arms fairs around the world. The decision follows a high-profile campaign, coordinated by CAAT, which highlighted the incompatibility of Reed's involvement in the arms trade and their position as the number one publisher of medical and science journals and other publications.

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust in the UK ditched nearly £2 million worth of shares in the company in protest at the continued involvement of the company in the arms trade. Reeds are the organisers of DSEi the biggest arms fare in the world that is taking place in the month of September in London.

More information:

www.caat.org.uk

With this issue we continue with our section on resources for developing your campaigns against war profiteers. In our last issue we presented a list of useful links for doing your research on the companies you want to campaign against. Now we move into developing your campaign. First looking at how to describe and analyse what you are campaigning against and for. And what is the change that you want to bring. The article in this newsletter is a shorter version of an article that will be included in the Handbook for Nonviolent Action that the WRI's Nonviolence Programme is working on.