6,078 articles
Voluntary association
Voluntary association: a group people join by choice to pursue shared interests, also called a normative organization in Etzioni's typology. Covers Tocqueville's account, legal meaning, social capital research, and modern sector statistics.
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), pronounced "vehement," is an environmental movement urging people to stop reproducing so Earth's biosphere can recover, named by Les Knight in the late 1980s.
Volunteering
Volunteering is unpaid, freely chosen work for others, formal or informal; global scale about one billion volunteers (2.4% of global GDP), with research on motivations, barriers, participation trends, and retention.
Voronezh UFO incident
Voronezh UFO incident: reported September 27, 1989 landing of a UFO with tall three-eyed humanoids and a robot in a Voronezh park, publicized worldwide by a TASS dispatch of October 9, 1989 and later heavily doubted.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability: susceptibility to harm or a specific exploitable weakness. From Latin vulnus (wound); technical senses in information security (NIST/CVE), disaster management, and psychology (diathesis-stress model), paired with resilience.
Vulnerable world hypothesis
Vulnerable world hypothesis (VWH), Nick Bostrom's 2019 Global Policy conjecture: continued technological development will likely devastate civilization unless preventive policing or global governance exits the semi-anarchic default condition; includes black-ball urn metaphor and vulnerability typology.
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), American sociologist, historian, and civil-rights activist; author of The Souls of Black Folk and double consciousness, NAACP and Crisis founder-editor, later Pan-Africanist who moved to Ghana in 1961.
Wabanaki Confederacy
The Wabanaki Confederacy, also called Wabenaki, was an alliance of Algonquian-speaking Indigenous nations, including the Mi'kmaq, Penobscot, and Abenaki, in Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Quebec.
WAGs
WAGs, short for "wives and girlfriends", is a term for the partners of high-profile footballers and athletes in other sports, made famous by tabloid coverage of England's 2006 World Cup squad.
Waif
Waif: a homeless, neglected person, especially a thin child, and in old English law unclaimed property or stray animals; from Anglo-French and Old Norse veif, the source of 'waifs and strays'.
Wakhi people
Wakhi people: an Indo-Iranian, East Iranian-speaking ethnic group of the Pamirs, living in Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor, Tajikistan, Pakistan's Hunza, and Xinjiang; traditionally Ismaili agropastoralists with transhumance to high pastures.
Walima (وليمة)
Walima (وليمة, walimat al-'urs) is the Islamic wedding banquet, a sunnah feast hosted after marriage to announce it publicly. Root walam means to gather; best held after consummation, kept simple, with rich and poor invited.
Walk for Peace
Walk for Peace names several peace walks, chiefly the 2025-26 Buddhist pilgrimage of 19 monks led by Bhikkhu Pannakara, 2,300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., ending at the Lincoln Memorial.
Walkabout
Walkabout is an Australian English term from 1828 for Aboriginal movement into the bush, used pejoratively by settlers for aimless wandering while carrying Indigenous meanings of purposeful travel through Country for food, ceremony, and renewal.
WalkAway campaign
WalkAway (#WalkAway) is a 2018 American social media campaign founded by Brandon Straka urging Democrats and liberals to leave the Democratic Party via video testimonials; boosted by suspected Russian bots, it later became a PAC and survived his January 6 pardon.
Walloons
Walloons: French-speaking people of southern Belgium (Wallonia, ~3.5 million, 55% of Belgian territory), distinct from the Flemish by language and history; name from Frankish "Walha"; former industrial heartland.
Walser people
Walser, who are a group of Alemannic-speaking Alpine people, originated in Switzerland's Upper Valais. They colonized high mountain valleys across the Alps starting in the 12th century.
Wampanoag
Wampanoag (Wôpanâak): Indigenous people of southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island, led historically by Massasoit Ousamequin, parties to the 1621 Plymouth harvest event and King Philip's War (1675–1676), with the Mashpee and Aquinnah tribes federally recognized today.
WAR (newspaper)
WAR, later The Insurgent, was the neo-Nazi tabloid of Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance, published from Fallbrook, California from the 1980s; it billed itself as the most racist newspaper on earth and promoted Third Position politics.
War bride
War bride: foreign women who married deployed or occupying soldiers and migrated to their husbands' countries, chiefly after WWI and WWII. Regulated from 1919 (Pershing Bulletin No. 26); the US War Brides Act of 1945 admitted nearly 300,000 spouses and dependents; a 1947 amendment lifted racial bars.
Waris Dirie
Waris Dirie (Waris Diiriye), Somali-born model, author and anti-FGM activist; UN special ambassador 1997–2003; author of Desert Flower; founder of the Desert Flower Foundation in Vienna.
Wariʼ
The Wariʼ, also called the Pakaa Nova after the Pacaas Novos river, are an indigenous people of Rondônia, Brazil, first recorded in 1798 and known for funerary cannibalism.
Warren Farrell
Warren Farrell, also known as Warren Thomas Farrell, is an American author on gender issues who moved from 1970s men's liberation to become the men's rights movement's intellectual father.
Warren Jeffs
Warren Jeffs, born Warren Steed Jeffs in 1955, is the imprisoned leader of the FLDS, a polygamous sect in Utah and Arizona, serving a life sentence for sexual assault.
Washingtonian movement
Washingtonian movement: American temperance movement founded in Baltimore in April 1840 by six reformed drinkers who formed the Washington Temperance Society, pledged total abstinence, held experience meetings, and grew to about half a million members before declining by the late 1840s.
Washoe people
The Washoe people (Waší·šiw, 'people from here'), also called Washo, are an Indigenous people of the Lake Tahoe Basin in California and Nevada, speaking the isolate Washo language; organized as the federally recognized Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California.
WaterAid
WaterAid is an international WASH charity and federation founded in the UK on 21 July 1981 by water industry figures led by David Kinnersley; it works in 22 countries, has reached 28.9 million people with clean water, and co-led the 2025 $40 million #TeamWater campaign.
Watermelon stereotype
The watermelon stereotype is a post-emancipation American racist trope falsely linking African Americans to excessive watermelon eating, built to ridicule Black freedom, spread through prints, ads, and films, and historically distinct from the watermelon as a Palestinian solidarity symbol.
Wave Hill walk-off
The Wave Hill walk-off, also called the Gurindji strike, began in August 1966 when about 200 Aboriginal workers led by Vincent Lingiari left Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory, over pay and conditions.
Wayne Dyer
Wayne Dyer (Wayne Walter Dyer, 1940-2015), American self-help author and motivational speaker; wrote Your Erroneous Zones (1976), 35 million copies sold, 40+ books, PBS fixture, Hay House author, died in Maui.