Voices of Conscience

Ann Wright grew up in Bentonville, Arkansas, and attended the University of Arkansas, where she received a master’s and a law degree. She also has a master’s degree in national security affairs from the U.S. Naval War College. After college, she spent thirteen years in the U.S. Army and sixteen additional years in the Army Reserves, retiring as a Colonel. She is airborne-qualified.

In 1987, Col.Wright joined the Foreign Service and served as U.S. Deputy Ambassador in Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. She received the State Department’s Award for Heroism for her actions during the evacuation of 2,500 people from the civil war in Sierra Leone, the largest evacuation since Saigon. She was on the first State Department team to go to Afghanistan and helped reopen the Embassy there in December 2001. Her other overseas assignments include Somalia, Kyrgyzstan, Grenada, Micronesia, and Nicaragua. On March 19, 2003, the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Ann Wright cabled a letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, stating that without the authorization of the UN Security Council, the invasion and occupation of a Muslim, Arab, oil-rich country would be a disaster. Since then, she has been writing and speaking out for peace. She fasted for a month, picketed at Guantánamo, served as a juror in impeachment hearings, traveled to Iran as a citizen diplomat, and has been arrested numerous times for peaceful, nonviolent protest of Bush’s policies, particularly the war on Iraq. In the last year, she has been on delegations to Iran and Gaza. She lives in Honolulu.

Susan Dixon grew up in Connecticut and received a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies from Trinity College in Hartford. She earned a master’s degree in geography from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, where she is a doctoral candidate. She teaches on the geography of peace and war as well as on political activism and nonviolence. She has won a three-year fellowship from the National Science Foundation and the Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Hawai‘i. She spent her senior year in college on a yearlong academic study abroad program focusing on “The World Politics of Peace and Conflict.” This International Honors Program was led by Johan Galtung, who is widely considered the founder of peace studies as a science. Dixon has also taught English in a Japanese junior high school and raised a German shepherd puppy to be a seeing eye dog. She has lived, studied, and traveled in thirty-eight countries on six continents, speaks Japanese and Spanish, and lives in Honolulu. She wishes she had more time for scuba diving.