We Are Not Your Soldiers looks forward to engaging in dialogue with many students in their classes and organizations during the fall and spring academic semesters of 2026/27. Scheduling is on now for class visits. Where possible we will be there in person but can always speak via remote technology as well. At this moment in our country, these presentations and the discussions around them are more relevant than ever. The forever wars not only continue but accelerate with no end in sight. Horrific destruction and suffering is being unleashed in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and the rest of Palestine along with piracy and further horrific actions in the Caribbean and Pacific. Treatment of the troops themselves has reached new lows. At the same time, conditions in this country worsen for much of the population, especially

Just some short years ago, artificial intelligence (AI) seemed like a promising technology of tomorrow for most people. Mainstream conversations around AI developments were typically met with enthusiasm from lay people and tech professionals alike. Maybe AI can cure cancer! It can at least give me a funny picture to upload to my Instagram story! Only scattered murmurs warning of AI’s potential dangers were reported by conventional media outlets. That’s not true anymore. In September, former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxin appeared on virtually every legacy media broadcast to share a doomsday prediction: there is a 10% chance AI will extinguish the human race by the end of the decade. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reinforced Coxin’s perilous forecast by simultaneously issuing their own calls for caution just days later. Altman published “We Must Pace the Frontier,” an open letter urging for a deliberate pacing of AI development to ensure public safety. Altman declared that AI could go “very badly” if the technology develops too quickly without proper protections.

Military recruitment is often presented as a matter of individual choice, patriotism, and opportunity. Recruiters highlight pathways to education, job training, healthcare benefits, and career advancement. Yet ethnic studies scholars encourage a broader examination of recruitment practices, asking who is most heavily targeted, what social conditions shape enlistment decisions, and how military service fits within larger systems of power. From this perspective, counter-recruitment emerges not simply as an anti-war activity, but as an educational and social justice effort aimed at exposing the racialized, economic, and political structures that sustain militarism.

De los funcionarios que dirigían el Distrito Escolar de Erie, Laurie Quiggle fue la que presentó la solicitud más modesta en 1986. En nombre de la libertad de expresión y de ampliar las opciones educativas de los estudiantes, incluyendo a sus cinco hijos, ¿podría proporcionar información a las cuatro escuelas secundarias públicas de la ciudad para contrarrestar el acceso desmedido de los militares a los jóvenes? ¿Por qué no publicar información sobre la objeción de conciencia al reclutamiento militar y sobre oportunidades profesionales no militares?

The war on terror was not inevitable, nor was the extraordinary violence carried out in its name necessary. In a 2013 Congressional hearing on drone warfare, a young Pakistani boy named Zubair Rehman, aged 13 at the time, talked about the feeling of living under the threat of constant drone strikes. In his powerful testimony, Zubair stated that “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies…The drones do not fly when the skies are gray…When the sky brightens, drones return and we live in fear.”

Militarization today rarely announces itself in the ways previous generations learned to recognize. It no longer arrives through the familiar figure of a recruiter stationed behind a cafeteria table, waiting to make a pitch. Instead, it slips quietly into the digital spaces young people inhabit every day. It appears in the curated ads that follow them across platforms, in STEM programs whose funding sources remain carefully obscured, in video games designed to normalize the reflexes of remote warfare, and in job postings that promise purpose and stability without ever acknowledging the machinery of violence they ultimately support. Young people now live inside a technological environment where militarization is ambient, automated, and largely invisible, and counter‑recruitment must adapt to this new terrain if it hopes to remain relevant.