Call for Mobilisation – Stop ReArm Europe – Days of Action
Welfare, not Warfare: Take the Streets Before the Tanks Take Them
Around 20 November 2026, we call on you to take action. That day, students across Europe will go on an International Youth Strike, rallying behind Fight For Our Future, Not Their Wars. In the days before and after, mobilisations, demonstrations and actions are being organised in cities across the continent. Together we are mobilising for Welfare, not Warfare.
Army adverts on every screen. Officers in our classrooms. Jobseekers steered towards the barracks. Mounting pressure on women and girls to enlist. Young men and boys offered a rifle instead of a future. Refugees, deserters and conscientious objectors threatened with being sent back to the front. Hospitals and schools cut to pay for tanks. Billions of our money poured into militarising our borders, our universities and our economies.
We reject the militarisation of our societies and support the young people who are refusing it. Thousands of high school and university students across Europe are rising up to refuse militarisation and the return of conscription. On 20 November, they will embark on the first international youth strike and mobilisation.
We call on you to join this resistance.
We mobilise because:
- Wars are multiplying and deepening. Genocide is being normalised, civilian infrastructure has become a routine target, and international institutions stand paralysed. Long-standing taboos are unravelling: European governments are withdrawing from the Mine Ban Treaty and ignoring the Arms Trade Treaty. The rule of law is giving way to the rule of force.
- Wars deepen the cost-of-living crisis, as the US–Israeli attack on Iran made painfully clear. Our governments back that war, even as it hurts people across the world, Europe included.
- Nearly 20 million children in the EU – one in four – live at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Meanwhile, governments have committed to military spending that the EU’s own Defence Commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, puts at €7 trillion by 2035.
- Housing, healthcare, diplomacy and the reindustrialisation needed for a just transition are all being deprioritised. Governments have no plan to deal with worsening heatwaves, floods and wildfires – and show no interest in pathways to peace and climate justice.
- Militarisation curtails freedom. It criminalises those who dare to criticise the rush to war, war crimes and complicity in genocides. Dissent is being punished through EU sanctions imposed without trial.
- The public is made to fear migrants and foreign enemies, pitting working people against each other. Yet those on opposite sides of a front line have more in common with one another than with the governments that send them to the battlefield, or the companies that profit from war, borders and surveillance.
Welfare, not Warfare: The Case for a Just Transition
The trillions earmarked for militarised security will leave us staring down the barrel of a gun and indebted to global financiers. What we need instead is a democratic plan for a just transition in Europe, built on global solidarity and centred on care: a reindustrialisation programme that creates secure jobs with good working conditions, and an economy directed towards the common good and the protection of nature.
This must go hand in hand with a non-aligned foreign policy that resolves conflicts through diplomacy, upholds international law and human rights, and builds common security for all: security with our neighbours, not against them.
This is why we are calling on social movements, trade unions, civil society organisations, independent media, political forces and parliamentarians to endorse this call, mobilise their members, and join us in the streets in the days around 20 November demanding Welfare, not Warfare.
For additional information, please contact: [email protected]
To endorse the call, please fill in this short form: https://tally.so/r/kdLMBo
To add your mobilisation to the Europe-wide calendar, please visit: https://calendar.stoprearm.org/events/insert.php
To view mobilisations around 20 November, navigate to: https://calendar.stoprearm.org/events/