Welcome to the newly redesigned Peacework! We're still cheerfully bringing you news of creative, courageous organizing initiatives for non-violent social justice from around the US and the world. We're still amplifying the voices of the survivors, leaders, and teachers among us who have testimonies to share and strategies to offer for making our world a saner, safer place. We're still drawing on a profound commitment to exploring nonviolent solutions, based in the Quaker belief in the divine light in every person and in other traditions of pacifism as well. And we're still bringing you tools and perspectives you can use in your own activism. But now, both in print and online, look for brighter colors, new features, and a cleaner layout. Let us know how you like it!

As peacemakers, we can not afford either to believe in our country's elections or to ignore them. So with this special issue of Peacework on organizing for peace and justice in an election year, we have tried to follow Mandy Carter's advice in her opening essay, remembering to focus on that important word, "and": working to end the war and fight for equality and social services here at home; working within and outside the two-party system; taking nonviolent direct action and doing electoral organizing.

The electoral system in this country is as compromised as it has been at any time since long, hard struggles brought the extension of the vote to women and citizens of color. Even those reforms have yet to be truly completed, as the same racist, sexist, and classist ideologies that once barred all but white property-owning men from the polls are still exerting strong influences on our voting system. Who is really excluded by laws that prohibit ex-prisoners from voting? What drives the mainstream press's gleeful pronouncements of "unelectable" about candidates who challenge political or demographic expectations? And how are young voters to be persuaded to continue increasing their participation if the appalling tricks used to make their votes meaningless continue to be tolerated?

The work that occurs outside of this system, by activists who critique it wholeheartedly and with no sense of obligation to any candidate or party, is valuable and necessary. And although we sometimes forget it, that work exists on a continuum that also includes involvement in electoral campaign work and within political parties. Race-based disempowerment, corporate greed, co-opted media - these are the problems our movements address everywhere, every year. As Brian Corr points out in his agenda for organizing to reclaim our civil liberties, this is a bad time - but it's not the first bad time. Each right we have must be continually protected, not just because of the particular weaknesses of US politics and politicians, but because that's how rights work.

Election years present certain distractions, and certain opportunities - but we need not be divided by the perennial question of which kind of activism is more important. Sometimes, the urgency of our work can corrode our solidarity instead of strengthening it. Fortunately, there are many sources of sustenance and inspiration, too - we hope you will find some of them in these pages. The power of greed, and the greed for power, are rampant in our government and in many other places as well. So whatever truth we come to about electoral organizing, let's fight the power - not each other.

Sara Burke, Co-Editor