April Carter was a political lecturer at the universities of Lancaster, Oxford and Queensland, and was a Fellow at the from 1985 to 1987. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies, Coventry University, and a 'senior editor' on the international editorial board for the International Encyclopedia of Peace to be published by Oxford University Press (New York).
April Carter was active in the nuclear disarmament movement in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, becoming Secretary of the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War in May 1958 (just after it had organised the first Aldermaston March), and was involved in early civil disobedience at nuclear missile bases. In 1961 she was European coordinator for the San Francisco to Moscow March organised by the US Committee for Nonviolent Action, and 1961-62 was an assistant editor at the international pacifist weekly Peace News. During the revived nuclear disarmament movement of the 1980s she was a member of the Alternative Defence Commission, which published an analysis of non-nuclear defence options for Britain in Defence Without the Bomb (Taylor and Francis, 1983)