Take Action to Stop Explosive Investments

1. Take Action!

Organise an action on disinvestment in your country. These are some actions that you can take:

Lobby your government and parliamentarians:

Write letters to parliamentarians or your government and meet with them to ask that they:

  • Support an inclusion in national implementing legislation or otherwise standalone legislation prohibiting investment in cluster munition producers.
  • Urge the government to declare that it considers investment in cluster munition producers prohibited.

Pressure financial institutions:

  • Organise a creative action targeting financial institutions in your country that are investing in cluster munitions producers.
  • Write letters to the financial institutions based in your country that are investing in cluster munitions producers and ask that they:
    • Disinvest from cluster munition producers
    • Implement a comprehensive policy banning all types of investment and financial services to cluster munition producers
  • Organise meetings with financial institutions to discuss their policies and practices with regard to investments in cluster munition producers.
  • What if your bank, insurer or pension fund is not in our report?
    • Check the Hall of Shame table if we found investments below the ‘threshold’ and if not:
    • That’s good news! Your financial institution is not investing in producers of cluster munitions.
    • To make it better: let’s see if your bank, insurer or pension can serve as an example to others and be included in the Hall of Fame or Runners-Up: does it have policies in place to warrant this? Contact the institution to find out and do inform us if we can add it to the Hall of Fame or Runners-Up.

Reach out to media and relay your calls to the government and financial institutions:

  • Hold a press conference or issue a press release (template press releases are available in advance of the Global Days of Action).
  • Contact journalists that you have good contacts with to tell them that a new report on the Global Day of Action has been released.

Campaign online to promote disinvestment:

  • Link with the CMC’s social media networks, either from your own page or your organisations’ page or both.
  • Facebook: comment on the CMC’s Facebook wall about your activities, respond to other people’s comments or pictures, discuss news stories – take part in the conversation! Make sure you “like” the CMC’s facebook page. Update your Facebook profile photo with the campaign logo.
  • Twitter: Always use the hashtags #banclusterbombs and #disinvest in your tweets as well as your message. Update your Twitter photo with the campaign logo.
  • Flickr: Upload photos of your action to your Flickr account and send them to info@icblcmc.org so that we can post them on the CMC Flickr gallery.
  • YouTube upload videos of your action to your YouTube account and share videos posted by the CMC on your Facebook and Twitter pages.

2. Campaign resources

  • A number of campaign resources for the CMC’s disinvestment campaign are available on the campaign toolkit page.
  • A template press release will be available in advance of the Global Day of Action that campaigners can adapt for their national purposes.

3. Tell us about your actions

Please share information on your campaigning plans with info@stopexplosiveinvestments.org.  Please also get in touch if you would like to be added to the disinvestment email list.

4. Related Links

For more information and campaign materials on cluster bombs, and to encourage countries to join the Convention on Cluster Munitions, visit the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) website.

Click to see media coverage around the report launches.