Introduction

Dissenters is a youth-led, antimilitarist, abolitionist movement that launched at the start of 2020 in Chicago. Our organization was founded in response to the ever-expanding military-industrial complex that has gone largely unchallenged by the activist Left both materially and discursively. We are composed of twenty-seven chapters and counting on college campuses, national teams with focuses on storytelling, training, and strategy, and a three-person codirector team that guides the organization’s growth and assesses our impact on the antimilitarist movement. We are working to divest resources from destructive systems: from militarism and imperialism, from walls, wars, weapons, borders, prisons, and police. We imagine and cultivate a world in which those resources—which are our resources—are instead invested in life-affirming and life-giving services: in health care, housing, education, in a Green New Deal and environmental protection, in communities and creation, not destruction. By centering humanity over profit and collaboration over individualism, we know that our communities will become more livable, sustainable, and safer.

Our movement centers directly affected people. We are Black and Indigenous communities, queer and trans folks, undocumented and immigrant communities, Iraqis, Yemenis, Palestinians, Hawaiians, Haitians, and so many more. We are building a better world for the young and for all of us. So far, this has meant launching disruptive direct-action campaigns across the country and calling on universities and elected officials to side with the life and health of communities over investments in death and destruction. At the same time, we are taking control of the narrative around militarism. We engage in broad popular education, rejecting the mythologies spun by elites that scarcity, fear, and force are immutable. By exposing the violence and lies of those who profit from destruction, we make room for communities to imagine the world we want to build instead.

Here, we offer two Dissenters documents. The first, the “DNA” of Dissenters, establishes our vision, story, principles, and theory of change. In sharing this document, we hope to illustrate the importance of an organization establishing its DNA so that movement organizations can scale up and make increasingly consequential demands without sacrificing alignment with their principles. We also detail where our DNA comes from and what it means to our growing movement. The second document is a political education zine made by organizers in the Dissenters #BoeingArmsGenocide campaign, a campaign started in Chicago to cut ties between the weapons manufacturer Boeing and its city and state subsidizers that grant it enormous tax breaks. The wins and lessons learned by this campaign are both concrete accomplishments of its organizers and a demonstration of our DNA in motion: hard-hitting campaigns organized from the grassroots by tenacious and creative youth.

While reading, we encourage you to think about who, in your community, is stealing and profiting off your resources, which local grassroots groups exist to disrupt this extraction, and what kind of community structure you would build in its place. If you are a young person searching for a voice in the antimilitarist movement, a Dissenters chapter is either near or ready to be founded, by you. Reach out to us at https://wearedissenters.org, info@wearedissenters.org, or @wearedissenters on Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), and Facebook.