Violence & nonviolence

Violence & nonviolence

Violence & nonviolence

28 April 2012Blog

Extended text by Diana Francis on nonviolent revolution

The ‘Arab Spring’ revived and broadened interest in the power of nonviolent popular action to challenge tyranny. However, the level of positive outcome promised by events in Tunisia has not been replicated elsewhere, and the slide of nonviolence into unequal violence in the face of violent repression, or civil war backed by foreign military intervention, has led to disillusion and soul-searching.

27 April 2012Letter

At the risk of creating conflict, I must take issue with George Lakey in his mainly-excellent interview (PN 2544). He implies that the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR) is about ‘only harmony’ and that means ‘death’; in fact, he argues, we need conflict.

But FoR was was born out of the violent conflict of the First World War so it’s natural that to work for ‘reconciliation’ was seen as a better way to solve differences. Ever since,…

27 April 2012Comment

Sometimes I try – like many PN readers I guess – to imagine myself in the position of a bereaved family in a civil war and know that revenge would be uppermost in my mind.

The intention to make somebody pay and suffer the same terrible loss and pain as yourself is near-irresistible and, maybe, even human nature.

Throughout my life, state gangsterism and political perfidy have sent me…

27 April 2012Feature

The second part of our interview with nonviolent revolutionary George Lakey, in which he charts the story of the pioneering Movement for a New Society


George Lakey photo: john Meyer

Nearly 200 years ago, revolutionary English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that poets were the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. The poet ‘not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered’, Shelley argued, she also ‘beholds the future in the present’, and her thoughts are ‘the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time’.

27 April 2012News

Rare image of symposium co-organiser Andrew Rigby, 10 April. photo: Milan Rai

Over 50 activists and peace researchers from around the world assembled at Coventry University’s Technopark in mid-April for a highly-successful ‘International Symposium on Nonviolent Movements and the Barrier of Fear’.

22 April 2012Resource

Extracts from an interview with Noam Chomsky recorded in London in Oct 2011. Chomsky was keynote speaker at the Rebellious Media Conference organised by Peace News and others. Thanks to Toaster Productions for filming.

19 April 2012Blog

Peace News' co-editor Milan Rai photographed some of the participants at the "International Symposium on Nonviolence Movements and the Barrier of Fear", held 10-12 April at Coventry University.

Who can you spot?

19 April 2012Blog

Text to follow soon!

31 March 2012Letter

I respond to the March editorial on Libya. It hints that the rebels had a choice of nonviolent resistance. Do we withdraw our support when that tactic is postponed, however temporarily?

The rebels were accompanied by NATO forces and defectors from Gaddafi, who a present hold some power. What choices did the rebels have?

To hope for an effective, nonviolent struggle without intervention from such people is looking for perfect answers in a highly-complex situation.

31 March 2012Letter

I was pleased to see in the last issue of Peace News the interview with Gene Sharp who has done much to promote an understanding of nonviolent action as a strategy for political and social change and even revolution.

However, even allowing for the fact that this was an interview, and that his answers were of necessity somewhat off the cuff, I find the reasons he gives for no longer considering himself a pacifist unconvincing.

He says that ‘maybe unjustly, or maybe not,…

31 March 2012Feature

A Peace News interview with the man who persuaded us to go ‘for nonviolent revolution’.

We began with laughter, as George Lakey expressed his disbelief at the technology we were using. It was his first-ever internet video call: Skype had been installed on his computer only the day before, specifically for our interview.

Two hours later, with many questions still unasked, we were both on the verge of tears, as George haltingly recalled a transformational moment in his political and personal development, a process that stretches unbroken from the 1960s to his continuing…

31 March 2012Feature

A dedicated nonviolent activist asks some hard questions

The ‘Arab Spring’ has revived and broadened interest in the power of nonviolent popular action to challenge tyranny. However, the positive outcome promised by events in Tunisia has not been replicated elsewhere, and the slide of nonviolence into unequal violence in the face of violent repression, or civil war backed by foreign military intervention, has led to disillusionment and soul-searching.

Here in the UK at least, I believe we should stop insisting on ‘nonviolent revolution…

1 March 2012Comment

PN responds to Chris Hedges' attack on the "black bloc"

Progressive circles in the US have been furiously debating violence recently, after a forceful attack on the Black Bloc by radical journalist Chris Hedges. Hedges described ‘Black Bloc anarchists’ as ‘the cancer of the Occupy movement’: ‘obstructionist’ and ‘deeply intolerant but stupid’.

This brought an equally fierce riposte from radical anthropologist David Graeber, a long-time anarchist and Black Bloc participant, a co-founder of Occupy Wall Street and coauthor of what he…

1 March 2012Review

2011; 87 minutes; available for £11.99 + p&p from TVF: tvinternational.com

A common argument in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein could only be toppled by a foreign invasion, that it was impossible for Iraqis themselves to remove such a brutal dictator.

An insightful and stirring look at the life and work of Gene Sharp, How To Start A Revolution demolishes this argument. Countering the widely accepted view of nonviolence as hopelessly naïve, the 84-year-old professor of political science has spent his life documenting the…

1 March 2012Feature

George Lakey ponders the lessons from Scandanavia's epic history of nonviolent struggle


George Lakey

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They ‘fired’ the top 1% of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something…