Violence & nonviolence

In mid-September, Pat Gaffney of Pax Christi was invited to Scotland to share her experience of a conference in Rome in April which called the Christian church to recommit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence. Pat’s visit to Glasgow and Edinburgh was organised by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Scottish Christians against Nuclear Arms and the Scottish Justice and Peace Commission.

The Rome conference looked at all the ways in which Jesus proclaimed nonviolence. In words, he…

Imagine a foreign army were about to invade your town, what would you do? Would you take up arms, run away, surrender – or undertake some form of civil resistance? My unimaginative but honest response is that I would probably run to the hills. This question was posed to us by Dr Maciej…

The most valuable contribution of this book is to remind us of the political significance of remembering and archiving. Although an academic contribution to memory studies, for nonviolent activists its strength is in its detail and convincing examples of how preserving information, stories and culture contributes to movements because of the way in which archives ‘shape collective memory of the past’.

The chapter on the Indian state vs the popular memory of Gandhi’s Salt March in…

On 22 September, 15 peace activists were arrested at the White House in Washington DC at the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance’s ‘Sowing Seeds of Hope’ event calling for policy changes to bring an end to war, poverty, and the climate crisis. This was one of 360 events in the US as part of the 20–27 September ‘Campaign Nonviolence’ week organised by Pace e Bene. 

From the first recorded strike in human history (by Egyptian artisans in 1170 BCE) to a successful sex strike by Colombian women in 2011 (‘No more sex. We want our road’), civil resistance – ‘collective action for political or social ends without any systematic recourse to violence’ – has had a long and varied history.

It also looks set to have a long and varied future. Indeed, according to the authors of these books, there has been a greater tendency in recent decades for popular…

My perspective rests on the assumption that humans can create their surroundings based on pre-existing materials. A social construction of nonviolence requires a practical knowledge, both to be possible and to be effective. In this regard, it demands special knowledge. But instead of practical technical knowledge, it concerns the practical social knowledge required to carry out a specific kind of action, a nonviolent action in a particular context.

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This analysis of Palestinian popular – civil – resistance to the creation and expansion of Israel and its nearly 50-year occupation of Palestinian territory, is essential reading for anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of civil resistance in an occupied country, and the factors making for its success or failure.

“The First Intifada encompassed a range of nonviolent tactics with the strategic aim of regenerating the resistance, increasing the cost to Israel of…

As one member of a popular committee in Silwan [on the outskirts of Jerusalem] observed: ‘A major challenge is the coordination of nonviolent activities. Some focus on the [Israeli Separation] Wall, others on checkpoints and others on settlements. There is no coordination like there was in the first intifada.’

Underpinning the different challenges organisers identified as obstacles was what many observed to be a pervasive lack of trust in leadership at any level, including…

At the first nonviolence training I ever attended, I was given a copy of Gene Sharp's famous list of the '198 methods of nonviolent action' (the 199th method, the trainers opined, was to flypost copies of the list itself). I subsequently purchased a second-hand copy of Sharp's famous three-volume work The Politics of Nonviolent Action but – like many others, I suspect – never did much more than dip into…

Natalie Bennett, Green Party leader, said yesterday: 'Austerity has failed and we need a peaceful political revolution to get rid of it.' Pippa Bartolotti, the leader of the Wales Green Party, said: 'We can have a peaceful revolution in the UK and still reduce…

NB This piece accompanies this article.

Charles Sims, one of the best-known proponents of armed self-defence within the US civil rights movement, was asked in 1965 how activists could best advance the movement without nonviolence.

He responded: ‘I believe nonviolence is the only way.’

In his recent book on the US civil rights movement, This Nonviolence Stuff’ll Get You Killed, Charles Cobb argues that ‘although nonviolence was crucial to the gains made by the freedom struggle of the 1950s and ’60s, those gains could not have been achieved without the complementary – and underappreciated – practice of armed self-defence’. Indeed, the willingness to use deadly force, Cobb asserts, ‘ensured the survival not only of countless brave men and women but also of the…

Co-founder of the Mouvement pour une Alternative Non-Violente, Jean-Marie Müller is one of the leading contemporary thinkers on nonviolence. Despite authoring over 20 books on a wide range of nonviolence-related subjects, he is little known in Britain: so the recent publication in English of The Principle of Non-Violence is particularly welcome.

Originally published in 1995, it represents Jean-Marie’s most comprehensive statement of his view of nonviolence as a…

As Peace News went to press, Campaign Nonviolence (CNV), a US nonviolence study/action initiative, was beginning its first week of action, which had been a year in the making. There were 227 marches, rallies, vigils, festivals, celebrations and other events planned across all 50 states of the continental USA, starting on 21 September.

The purpose of the week of action is to launch a long-term movement to build a culture of peace and nonviolence free from war, poverty,…

Where does nonviolence training for activists come from?

Turning the Tide (TTT), a 20-year-old Quaker programme dedicated to spreading the skills for and understanding of nonviolence for positive social change, draws on the long Quaker history of working for peace and justice as the basis for our approach.

Our approach is experiential. Nonviolence training is a learning experience of the mind and body, both an individual and a collective experience. It’s radically…