Who We Are

We are a small non-profit organisation, registered in the UK in 1996. Acronym is accredited with the United Nations through ECOSOC.

AIDD’s work focuses primarily on humanitarian disarmament and diplomacy, international treaties and multilateral agreements, women, peace and sustainable security-building, and civil society activism. Our purpose is to draw attention to the interconnected human, environmental and security challenges that have become most urgent for humanity’s survival. Our hope is to provide people all over the world with information, ideas and tools to make our societies safer, fairer and better.

Though AIDD remains small insitutionally, our research, ideas and strategies have informed and inspired actions by diplomats, governments and civil society campaigns to pursue practical steps that reduce proliferation risks and contribute to disarmament initiatives and outcomes. We have served as capacity builders and played our part in bringing about the conclusion and entry-into-force of the TPNW, the CTBT’s conclusion and verification developments, and the successful NPT Review Conferences in 1995 and 2000, notably the Thirteen Steps for Nuclear Disarmament, and in 2010, which launched the humanitarian initiatives that led to the TPNW. 

Today, AIDD works for real human security, to enhance people’s safety here in Britain and around the world through progressive humanitarian disarmament, climate action, and international laws and policies that prioritise women peace and security . 

Why we Keep working on these issues

 Nuclear weapons have constant implications for our everyday lives in ways that many people try to ignore, or perhaps are not aware of. 

From the INF Treaty in 1987 to the 2017 TPNW, the world appeared to be progressing towards fewer WMD and international humanitarian laws to build peaceful relations and greater security. This positive trend was accompanied by initiatives to ban different kinds of inhumane weapons systems, including chemical, biological and toxin weapons, landmines, cluster munitions, and to control the manufacture, sales and trades in ‘small arms and light weapons (SALW)’ and land-based weapons and launchers that cause such misery to civilians around the world, with disproportionate impacts on the safety and security of women and children.  

For forty years we could see international momentum towards halting nuclear proliferation, and abolishing and eliminating all nuclear arsenals under international laws and multilateral monitoring and verification systems. 

 The main problem was nuclear-armed states and a few others that sought power through militarism and nuclear weapons.   In the UK, for example, people are constantly bombarded by political messaging saying that nuclear weapons are ‘deterrents’ that prevent war and keep us all safe. They are treated as a necessary component of our national and international security. This is a false narrative – as made increasingly obvious in the last few years.

Nuclear weapons do not keep us safe in an increasingly unstable world. Maintaining, renewing and increasing arsenals of weapons that would destroy our homes and countries with their indiscriminate and catastrophic impacts if fired deliberately or by accident, is a form of behaviour that does not recognise the realities of the world we live in now.

Climate breakdown is a huge threat to humanity now.  The leaders with nuclear arsenals or share in military-nuclear alliances generally spend more on all types of military hardware and contribute more destructive emissions into the planet’s climate than countries that do not produce, deploy and rely on nuclear arsenals. Because of these misguided countries that pursue military-nuclear-industrial growth as if there’s no tomorrow are threatening the tomorrows of all of humanity, and many other species. 

Weather systems have become unpredictable and dangerous; national and global inequalities and insecurities have resulted in war and terrorism; and mass starvation and migrations are taking place across the world. We are not made safer by weapons that have the power to destroy us all. Why continue bringing the dangerous mistakes of the last century into this one?

The International Committee for the Red Cross has stated that there is no contingency plan in place, and no humanitarian organisation with resources or training to respond to a nuclear detonation. There have been multiple ‘near nuclear war’ scenarios since 1945.

We keep going, because we know that nuclear weapons can – and must – be eliminated, before they eliminate humanity.  The multilateral Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into international legal force in 2021 — See Rebecca Eleanor Johnson’s 2022 publication Nuclear Weapons are Banned: What does this mean for Britain and her working papers on implementing the TPNW published by the United Nations in 2022, 2023, and 2025. 

 We hope our work and information encourage you to participate in campaigning for peace and planetary survival.

As you can see from our various publications from books to articles and pdfs of presentations given over the years to meetings and audiences around the world our issues have ranged from humanitarian and diplomatic efforts to end the testing, production and deployment of various kinds of deadly weapons, from guns and rifles to drones and nuclear weapons, while also encompassing new security thinking, militarism and arms trading, ways to end institutional, personal and political violence against women, and encouraging the growing role of women in ending patriarchal conflicts and promoting alternatives for sustainable peace-building.

For those that want to check out our 20 years of research and publications on the UN, Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), Mine Ban Treaty, and other treaty developments and related political challenges, 91 issues of our journal Disarmament Diplomacy (1996-2009) are archived through our previous websites. Since ceasing to publish our own journal in 2009,  Rebecca became a featured author for openDemocracy, where you can view her contemporaneous articles on the civil society and diplomatic developments that led to the 2017 TPNW Nuclear Ban Treaty, as well as a host of other issues relevant to feminist-humanitarian campaigns and ending violence against women and girls.

Our Team

We have a small Board, chaired by eminent international humanitarian lawyer and scholar, Professor Christine Chinkin, Dr Gari Donn, director of UN House Scotland, and Marie-Lyse Numuhoza MBE.  Rebecca Eleanor Johnson serves as AIDD’s executive director and Secretary to the Board. 

Current projects involve Marie-Claire Faray, who manages our Women Peace and Security project based with the WPS Centre in DRC, and AIDD associate Janet Fenton, who works on TPNW-related issues in Scotland as part of a JRCT-funded collaborative project with UN House Scotland and UNA-UK to inform and coordinate ICAN partners and TPNW-advocates in the UK.   

Dr Natalie Goldring (Washington DC), also is part of AIDD’s UN team, mainly on small arms and light weapons (SALW) with the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA).  Between us, we also engage with the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (CSKR), the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Women in Black, the UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Pugwash, the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), and beyond.

Dr Rebecca Eleanor Johnson FRSA, Founding Executive Director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy (AIDD)

Rebecca became a peace activist and writer while living at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1982-87).  She has worked for many disarmament agreements, including the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  She spent years of campaigning for disarmament through the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and served as senior adviser to Dr. Hans Blix on the International WMD Commission (2004-06).  While living in Rhu, Scotland, Rebecca was a core organiser of the grassroots Faslane365 Campaign (2006-07).  From 2009 she prioritised the establishment of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) in Geneva, to work more closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Geneva-based diplomats to carry forward a practical strategy based on  humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons, which persuaded the majority of UN governments to ban nuclear weapons in 2017.  Rebecca continues to lead AIDD’s team on ICAN’s International Steering Group (ISG) and to coordinate ICAN partners in the UK to work for global nuclear abolition and implementation of the TPNW.  She is a CND Vice President, and campaigns with Women in Black, Million Women Rise, CND, WILPF, AWPC and XRPeace for the safety and security of women and girls, as well as humanitarian disarmament, climate justice, environmental protections and peace-building.  Rebecca has a background in physics, and holds a Ph.D from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) on international relations and nuclear diplomacy, focussing on the CTBT negotiations. 

Professor Christine Chinkin, Chair of AIDD’s Board

Christine Chinkin is a former Professor of International Law, Professorial Research Fellow and Founding Director of the Centre for Women Peace and Security at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).  Her most recent book, Gendered Peace Through International Law, was written with Louise Arimatsu and published in 2025 by Hart Publishing, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 

Marie-Lyse Numuhoza MBE, AIDD Board Member

Marie-Lyse Numuhoza is a social care professional with extensive experience in community organising, advocacy and campaigning for human rights and social justice, with particular emphasis on migrant health, and empowering and advocating for disadvantaged and marginalised groups. Born in Rwanda, Marie-Lyse became a refugee with her family after the 1994 massacres, and subsequently settled in Norwich.  She holds a BA in African Studies and Development Studies from SOAS/London University, and UEA School of Health Sciences, and has been a guest lecturer, including Stanford University, Santa Barbara and Fresno Universities (USA), focussing on African women and UNSC Resolution 1325 (Women, Peace and Security) .  As a member of Norwich Diocese she has engaged with the Mothers Union, the Environmental working group and supported various initiatives with refugees.  In June 2021, Marie-Lyse received the Queen’s Award (MBE) for Human Rights and Community Work.

Dr Gari Donn, AIDD Board Member

Dr Gari Donn is Director of UN House Scotland

Janet Fenton

Janet Fenton is a Scottish Quaker eco-feminist, active on disarmament since she was 13, with ICAN since its inception. A former Peace & Justice Scotland Coordinator, she oversaw Scotland’s for Peace, working with Scottish Faith groups and Trade Unions to engage with the new devolved administration on peace. Her previous background included being a playwright, especially on issue based dramas and community arts in Scotland and Ireland, and setting up an environmental and social justice resource, the Ever Green Trust, which she ran for ten years. Janet is active in Trident Ploughshares, Scottish CND, and WILPF, and is a director of the Nuclear information Service. She is the Secretary of the Scottish Parliament Nuclear Disarmament Cross Party Group and Organiser with Secure Scotland, a small Scottish NGO that challenges prevailing ideas of security, and operates at grassroots, national, transnational and parliamentary levels. She writes briefings opinion pieces and scripts, and has co directed short films.

AIDD’s Origin Story

The Acronym Institute officially began as an ‘Acronym Consortium’ project of the UK Test Ban Action Group (T-Bag), which came together from 1988 to work for a complete ban on nuclear testing.  But the origin story really grew out of Rebecca’s campaigning at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the 1980s, where she – and hundreds of thousands of women – campaigned to stop ground-launched deployments of nuclear-armed cruise and ballistic missiles, weapons designed to be fired from and in Europe, thereby increasing the risks of nuclear war.  Rebecca lived outside the nuclear base from 1982 until the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was signed by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General-Secretary/President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, leading to the removal of land-based medium range missile launchers capable of firing nuclear weapons. 

From 1988, Rebecca took a job with Greenpeace, working with an international team of campaigners to ban nuclear testing and support campaigns to promote ‘nuclear free seas’ and oppose the reprocessing of nuclear materials for plutonium use.  Together with Dr Patricia Lewis (then director of the London-based verification think tank VERTIC), and a handful of other NGOs, she co-founded the UK-based Test Ban Action Group (T-BAG). After her job was axed by Greenpeace at the end of 1992, she continued to campaign with T-BAG and others to ban nuclear testing, while engaging with Women in Black and Women’s Aid to Former Yugoslavia with feminists seeking to build peace. In January 1994, with seed money from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT), four T-Bag members (who jokingly called themselves the  ‘Acronym Consortium’) invited Rebecca to set up a project to monitor CTBT negotiations in the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva. Starting from scratch, she observed as much of the CD negotiations as permitted, and filled in the blanks through interviews with diplomats and scientists from all sides.  Her reports from Geneva and New York on the NPT and UN First Committee on Disarmament and Security meetings, were electronically shared with governments, NGOs and activists around the world, and became an important go-to resource for anyone interested in promoting international peace, security and justice through diplomacy and strengthening humanitarian laws.   

In January 1996, Rebecca established an independent, not-for-profit limited organisation in UK in order to carry on Acronym’s work on UN-connected disarmament and security.  (Anyone who asked what ‘Acronym’ stood for would be pointed towards the acronym-laden names of many NGOs, such as VERTIC and BASIC, and the jargon of militarists and diplomats and, of course, the three voting options in the UN system – Arms Control, Reductions, Or No Yes Maybe!)  Rebecca became Executive Director, with a Board that comprised two former ‘Acronym Consortium’ members, an anti-nuclear General, an academic and a former Test Ban diplomat.  Soon after, we hired Dr Sean Howard, who had founded the journal Disarmament Diplomacy, which became AIDD’s in-house journal until 2009.  From 2008-9, AIDD has focussed primarily on working with ICAN to convince governments and civil society to pursue, conclude and implement the TPNW, as illustrated in the campaign work and publications that can be accessed via this website.

In 2017, Rebecca and AIDD staff member Clare Conboy (who served together on ICAN’s International Steering Group after 2015) participated in the UN General Assembly negotiations that led to the TPNW being adopted on 7 July, and opened for signature. In October we shared in the collective Nobel Peace Prize awarded to ICAN in 2017 for the years of disarmament mobilising that went into achieving the TPNW.  For the 10 December 2017 Nobel ceremony in Oslo, ICAN chose to be represented by Setsuko Thurlow (who suffered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a 13-year-old schoolgirl in 1945 and has spent her life advocating for total nuclear abolition with ICAN, Hibakusha Stories, Japan’s Peace Boat and others) and ICAN’s then staff member, Beatrice Fihn.  The Nobel Peace medal given to AIDD and other Steering Group members at the time, continues to be taken to campaign meetings to inspire activists, elected representatives, governments, and schoolchildren and students to pursue implementation of the TPNW and nuclear abolition in all its aspects.