6 Billion Ways featured a wide range of international and UK-based speakers. Details of most of them are below.
Saamah Abdallah
Saamah works on quality of life and people’s well-being the new economics foundation.
Daud Abdullah
Dr Abdullah currently lectures in Islamic Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. His most recent book is ‘A history of Palestinian resistance’ and he is deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain.
Gilbert Achcar
Gilbert is professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS and an expert on the Middle East. His most recent book, ‘Perilous Power’, was co-authored with Noam Chomsky.
Taysir Arabasi
Taysir Arabasi is a olive farmer from Palestine and project director of Zaytoun, which supports Palestinian farmers in getting their produce onto international markets. He has also been involved in non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Moazzem Begg
Moazzem was one of nine British muslims who were held in extrajudicial detention in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp by the US govenment. Released without charge in 2005, Moazzem has become a well-known commentator on ‘anti-terror’ measures and is a spokesperson for the prisoner rights organisation, Cageprisoners.
James Blair and Hannah Schling
James and Hannah are both climate change campaigners at People & Planet, one of the organisers of 6 Billion Ways.
Gaynor Brown
Gaynor is a local campaigner with Tescopoly, an alliance of civil society groups and activists that campaign against the negative impacts of global supermarket power and facilitate grassroots campaigns against the expansion of Tesco in the UK.
John Christensen
John Christensen is a long-time campaigner against tax havens, and a founder member of the Tax Justice Network.
Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy has been Labour MP for Islington North since 1983 and a well-known radical voice in parliament. He is vice-chair of CND and the current Labour MP who has rebelled against his party’s whip the most times.
Alastair Crooke
Alastair was advisor to EU High Representative in the Middle East, 1997-2003. He was involved in facilitating a series of de-escalations of violence and military withdrawals in Palestine with Islamist movements from 2000-2003 and the end to the Bethlehem Church of the Nativity seige. He is director and founder of Conflicts Forum and has just published a new book 'Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution'.
Nick Dearden
Nick is the Director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, one of the organisers of 6 Billion Ways
Tarek El Diwany
Tarek is a consultant and researcher in the field of Islamic finance, and the senior member at Zest Advisory LLP, an advisory group on Islamic banking and finance. He is the author of The Problem With Interest, a work on Islamic monetary economics and has appeared frequently in the broadcast and print media as a commentator on the origins of the current financial crisis.
Nora Fernández Mora
Nora is the Coordinator of Economic and Social Policy at Ecuador’s National Debt Group (CDES). She has also served on Ecuador’s Debt Commission (CAIC), established by President Rafael Correa in 2007 to audit Ecuador’s external debt. In 2008 the Commission reported that much of Ecuador’s debt was illegitimate and had done ‘irreparable damage’ to Ecuador’s people and environment.
Susan George
Susan is a leading figure in the global justice movement, and has written influential books on poor country debt and world hunger. She is a fellow of the Transnational Institute.
Christine Haigh
Christine is one of the co-ordinators of the Children's Food Campaign at Sustain, and also works with the Women's Environmental Network to support community food-growing initiatives.
Usama Hassan
Dr Usama Hassan is Director of the City Circle, one of the organisers of 6 Billion Ways.
Ben Hayes
Ben is Director of the Statewatch European Monitoring and Documenting Centre on Justice and Home Affairs in the EU (SEMDOC). He also works as researcher for the Transnational Institute on their militarism and globalisation programme.
Tom Hayes
Tom is a campaigner with the Boycott Israeli Goods (BIG) campaign, leading actions against Carmel-Agrexco importing and selling fruit and vegetables from illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land.
John Hilary
John is Executive Director of War on Want and a policy expert on the impact of trade deals on the global South.
Nick Hildyard
Nick works at The Cornerhouse, an organisation supporting democratic and community movements for environmental and social justice, from locally-based struggles for land or water rights to campaigns against destructive mining projects, or struggles against racial discrimination.
Bianca Jagger
Bianca Jagger is a prominent international human rights advocate. She is a Council of Europe goodwill ambassador, chair of the World Future Council and founder and president of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation.
Arun Kundnani
Arun is a writer and activist at the Insititute of Race Relations. Arun has recently published a critically acclaimed book 'The End of Tolerance - Racism in 21st Century Britain' which documents how racism has become integral to British political discourse.
Tony Juniper
Tony was director of Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland until 2008. He is one of the authors of the Green New Deal report and was recently selected as Green party prospective parliamentary candidate for Cambridge.
Jean Lambert MEP
Jean has been Green party MEP for the London region since 1999. She works on a variety of human rights and diversity issues, and is spokesperson for the Green group in the European parliament on asylum and refugee issues.
Neal Lawson
Neal is chair of the centre-left pressure group Compass. He appears regularly in the Guardian and the New Statesman as a political commentator on equality, democracy and the future of the left, and will be publishing a book on consumerism called All Consuming in May 2009.
Ken Livingstone
Ken was Mayor of London from 2000 to 2008 and has been a high-profile and controversial figure in progressive London politics for more than 25 years.
Hannah Lownsborough
Hannah is a freelance campaigner experienced in web campaigning. Her experience includes working for Avaaz.org, Friends of the Earth and Stop Climate Chaos.
Moshe Machover
Moshe Machover is a Professor of Philosophy at Kings College London. He was born in Tel-Aviv, and in 1962 he was one of the founders of the radical left Matzpen ("Compass") group. He is regarded as one of the most powerful voices in Jewish left politics and has written extensively on Palestine, Zionism and the Occupation.
Finn Mackay
Finn is chair of the London Feminist Network and was key to bringing the women-only Reclaim the Night marches back to the streets of London for the first time since the 1980s. Nominated as a world-changing woman in a 2006 Guardian poll, Mackay identifies herself as a radical lesbian feminist.
Anjum Mouj
Anjum is the former director of the Newham Asian Women’s Project and currently works with the Imkaan project, which works to provide strategic direction for the asian women’s refuge movement.
Barry Mussenden
Barry is a former Chair of Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), the UK's oldest grassroots community based anti-racist organisation. For nearly 3 decades it has provided casework support to those affected by racism and led the campaigns against racist violence, police harassment and the rise of the far-right particularly in East London.
Greg Muttitt
Greg is an expert and researcher on Iraqi Oil and is former director of PLATFORM, a London based organisation working across disciplines for social and ecological justice.
Karma Nabulsi
Karma is an Oxford University academic specialising in international relations, and was previously a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Trevor Ngwane
Trevor is an activist in the Anti-Privatisation Forum in South Africa, a coalition of community organisations campaigning for universal access to basic services and against various forms of privatisation. He is employed as organiser of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, an APF affiliate.
Sargon Nissan
Sargon is a researcher at the new economics foundation.
Rachel North
Rachel North, a survivor of the 7th July bombings at Kings Cross station, and went on to become the leading voice in the families campaign for an independent Public Inquiry into the bombings. She has written extensively on human rights and civil liberties, including in her book 'Out of the tunnel'. Rachel is now an activist with Women without Borders.
John Pandit
John (also known as Pandit G) is a community worker, musician, anti-racist activist and member of the award winning band Asian Dub Foundation. John has been involved in many of the anti-racist struggles in the streets of East London and that experience was reflected in the political stand of ADF and their music. Known for giving a voice to those fighting for justice, John continues to be involved in supporting the next generation of cultural activists and musicians.
Veronica Pasteur
Veronica Pasteur is head of campaigns at the Fairtrade Foundation where she supports the grassroots movement promoting Fairtrade in communities across the UK.
Pragna Patel
Pragna is a founding member of the Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism. Southall Black Sisters was established in 1979 and has been at the forefront of campaigns to combat violence against women.
Gareth Pierce
Gareth Peirce is the UK’s leading civil liberties and human rights lawyer. In over 30 years she has represented a who's who of those fighting against injustice from striking miners to the Birmingham 6, to black anti-racists arrested for defending their communities from racial violence.
Tariq Ramadan
Tariq is a scholar of Islamic theology and a major thinker on the development of a European Islam.
Meena Raman
Meena is General Secretary of Sahabat Alam Malaysia / Friends of the Earth Malaysia and a leading campaigner for climate justice. From 2006-2008 she was chair of Friends of the Earth International.
Asad Rehman
Asad campaigns on trade and corporate power for Friends of the Earth, one of the organisers of 6 Billion Ways. He is also chair of the Newham Monitoring Project and is an activist on human rights and civil liberties issues including the Justice for Jean Charles de Menezes campaign.
Richard Rieser
Richard travels the world using film to look at the disempowerment and engagement of disabled people. He has been instrumental in the development of disability arts as a key tool for equality and legislation.
Kevin Smith
Kevin is a researcher/activist with Carbon Trade Watch, a project of the Transnational Institute and the author of The Carbon Neutral Myth - Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins.
Benedict Southworth
Benedict is the Director of the World Development Movement, one of the organisers of 6 Billion Ways.
Amit Srivastava
Amit is coordinator of the India Resource Center and plays a leading role in the international movement against Coca-Cola. The Wall Street Journal called him "a central figure in a burgeoning global campaign that has cost Coca-Cola millions of dollars in lost sales and legal fees in India, and growing damage to its reputation elsewhere."
Yash Tandon
Yash is executive director of the South Center, an intergovernmental think tank of developing countries. A Ugandan national, he was deeply involved in the struggle against the dictatorship of Idi Amin, and has written books on African politics, trade, economics and human rights.
Ruth Tanner
Ruth is director of campaigns and policy at War on Want, one of the organisers of 6 Billion Ways.
Mark Thomas
Mark is an activist-comedian and star of Channel 4’s The Mark Thomas Comedy Product. His latest book, Belching out the Devil, investigates links between Coca Cola and human rights abuses around the world.
Graham Turner
Graham is an economist and author of The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the Worldwide Economic Crisis
Frederic Viale
Frederic is a campaigner with Attac France. Attac campaigns for citizens to have more power over the financial sector, including through taxation on currency transactions (the Tobin Tax). It plays a leading role in the anti-globalisation movement in Europe.
Salma Yaqoob
Salma is a Birmingham city councillor and chair of Birmingham Stop the War coalition. She is national vice-chair of Respect and a campaigner on issues of injustice, inner city deprivation and women’s rights. She is a regular commentator in the media and has been described as one of the UK's most powerful advocates of Islamic feminism.
Baroness Lola Young
Margaret Omolola Young has been Professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University and head of culture at the Greater London Authority. She now sits in the House of Lords as a crossbench peer.
