Ray Acheson

Ray Acheson (@achesonray) is Director of Reaching Critical Will (@RCW_ ), the disarmament program of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  @WILPF is the world’s oldest women’s peace organization. It was founded in 1915 with the goal of challenging militarism, patriarchy, and capitalism as the roots of war and violence.

Ray leads disarmament advocacy, monitors international discussions and negotiations on arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation and promotes a feminist perspective about weapons and war. Ray uses the pronouns they/them.

Ray is the author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy, the inside story of the antinuclear movement and its success.  Published in 2021. From scrappy organizing to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 and achieving a landmark UN treaty banning nuclear weapons, the book is a chronicle of the journey of ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons  (@nuclearban), and developments in feminist disarmament activism. Ray’s book Abolishing State Violence,  A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages, was published in 2022.

Representative of WILPF  on ICAN’s International Steering Group, Ray was involved in developing ICAN’s strategy and advocacy for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, was an active civil society advocate and analyst during Treaty negotiations and continues to campaign for more countries to sign on. The Treaty entered into force in January 2021. Ray also represents WILPF in the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots @BanKillerRobots and the International Network on Explosive Weapons.

Ray has an Honours BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Toronto and an MA in Politics from The New School for Social Research.