GDAMS 2022 Report

Our GDAMS 2022 final report is ready!
Check out all actions carried out from April 13 to May 12.
We’ve listed over 120 activities from at 28 different countries from all 5 continents.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released data on global military spending for 2021, which is up for the seventh consecutive year to $2.11 trillion: $132 billion more than the previous year. This 0.7% increase in real terms reflects increases in military budgets approved by many governments throughout the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This year’s Global Days of Action on Military Spending were very influenced by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which shook the international security architecture and increased tensions and conflictivity. Militaristic discourses had a boost in this context of war and soon military spending increases were announced by many countries, especially those part of NATO, following suit to its demand to member states of allocating 2% of their GDP to military spending. Our message was once again urgent and necessary and with this in mind we chose a new slogan: “Give Peace A Budget”. With it, we wanted to emphasize that militarism is what has brought us to this point, and that increasing military expenditures is the exact opposite of what these times require: giving a budget to peacebuilding, funding common & human security, investing in the needs of the people and the planet.

The 11th edition of the Global Days of Action on Military Spending took place from April 13 to May 12, including:
– April 13: GDAMS Launch Event (online)
– April 18: Tax Day in the U.S.
– April 21: Launching of the Common Security Agenda 2022
– April 25: GDAMS press conferences and social media storm on the occasion of SIPRI’s release of new data on military spending
– May 9: Europe’s Day of Peace · Actions against the militarization of the European Union
– May 10 to 12: Actions against the militarization of the Asia-Pacific region

 The GCOMS twitter account earned thousands of impressions over the GDAMS period, with people from all across the world engaging with the campaign and its members on social media.

On the 25th of April, to coincide with the release of the new SIPRI data on global military spending, we took to the net to alert the world that military spending had exceeded $2trillion for the first time through a social media storm:

“It is time for us to join together and call on governments around the world to cut military spending, and to instead invest in common and human security. We need to give peace a budget”

We created a Shared Folder, where partners and friends could find a pad (instructions), posting examples and other materials to use in their social media (Twitter, Facebook and/or Instagram) to spread the word and draw attention to the issue.We used these hashtags: #GDAMS2022 #GivePeaceABudget #WelfareNotWarfareAccording to Hashtagify, the #GivePeaceABudget hashtag reached almost 4 million impressions on the day of our Social Media Storm on Twitter alone.

You can download the report as a pdf here.