Guidelines on how to pitch the Editorial Committee

Image description: Text says "War Resisters League Pitching Guidelines." The background is a pale yellow, and there are black and golden abstract shapes on the left-hand corners. The are a pair of pencils with flames on the lower right hand corner.

 

Monday March 29th, 2021

War Resisters League’s Editorial Committee regularly puts out calls for submissions to foster conversation on a variety of antiwar/antimilitarist topics. We want to hear from people directly impacted by war: grassroots activists, academics, our membership, and freelance journalists and writers from around the world who are committed to resisting the root causes of war: racism, sexism, and all forms of exploitation. Your art, your voice, your documentation, your research, and your analysis are all forms of that resistance.

The Editorial Committee puts out calls for submissions on our Movement Updates email list, which you can join here. Accepted submissions are published on our War Resisters community page on Waging Nonviolence.

We regularly receive questions on how to write a successful pitch. Here are some tips:

  1. First paragraph: Introduce yourself. Tell us about your expertise and your writing/organizing/activism experience. Link to examples of your writing if you have any.
  2. Second and third paragraphs: Pitch us your idea. Start with a news hook, emphasizing a connection to a current/ongoing/acute event. For example, if you are writing about white supremacy in the military, do a quick news search to see what the latest headlines are: perhaps a new report was just released or there was a protest near the Pentagon on the topic. Connect the news hook to your idea, for example: “Last Sunday, a group protested the increasing Pentagon budget and demanded it be reinvested into healthcare and education. This is a good idea on its own, but it's even more important when you realize the United States outspends the rest of the world on defense— by a long shot. There are many reasons why we do this, chief among them being the relationship between militarized defense and white supremacy. In this piece, I will analyze the connections between white supremacy and the U.S. military and take the reader through fifty years of history of grassroots efforts to resist militarized white supremacy.”
  3. We accept the following types of pieces, and you can indicate which category you are pitching in your piece:
    1. Analyze connections between root causes of war, like Kinjo Kiema's piece about the bi-partisan nature of border imperialism
    2. Give our readers a piece of “lost history” or history in general that can illuminate something about resisting war today, like Rohini Hensman's piece on borders in South Asia.
    3. Speculative essays that help our readers imagine a different world that has made gains against the root causes of war, like Kathleen Farmillo's piece imagining a world beyond policing.
    4. First-person vignettes or perspectives that are systemically or historically marginalized and would be impactful and eye-opening to our readers, like Marcy Angeles' piece providing an Indigenous view of American borders.
  4. Make sure your pitch demonstrates your writing ability and is a representation of the piece you will submit. Do not send us fully written pieces.
  5. All pitches should be emailed to pitches [at] warresisters.org. We only accept pitches in response to calls for submissions and pay writers $200 per piece. Regretfully, we receive more pitches than we are able to publish during a given call period.