Violence & nonviolence

Violence & nonviolence

Violence & nonviolence

1 June 2019Review

Yale University Press, 2016; 432pp; £30

Think of Adolf Hitler and invariably an image is conjured up of an all-powerful leader, the most evil individual in modern history, using extreme barbarity to crush his opponents at home and abroad.

The latest study from Nathan Stoltzfus, professor of Holocaust Studies at Florida State University in the US, challenges this simplistic representation, raising profound questions for historians, citizens and activists alike.

Citing a huge range of German- and English-language…

1 April 2019Comment

'Weapons are supposed to bring security”

I still have a scar on my left hand. It is a reminder of a school fight that took place many long years ago. The street knife violence of today comes out of the same stable.

In my area of north London, criminal violence is far from unknown.

There was a row on a bus some years ago between older boys from two different schools. One boy got off the bus not far from his home. But another boy followed him up the street and stabbed him to death. His companion escaped…

1 April 2019Comment

Workers’ general strike wins eight-hour day

Photo: Auckland Museum [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)]

GOAL: To have a legally enforced eight-hour workday for all workers, and, in the case of the textile workers, a 30–50 percent wage increase.
SUCCESS IN ACHIEVING SPECIFIC DEMANDS: 2 out of 6 points
SURVIVAL: 1 / 1
GROWTH: 3 / 3

Male textile factory workers at El Inca factory in Lima, Peru, walked off the job in December…

1 February 2019Comment

We need to break the huge visions that we have into smaller, winnable struggles, argues PN editor Milan Rai

There is a farmworkers union in Oregon in the US called Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN). The union campaigned for a year to get Kraemer Farms to be the first growers in the area to accept collective bargaining.

After that failed, PCUN got student groups to put pressure on NORPAC, which purchased vegetables from Kraemer Farms.

After seven years of failure, PCUN changed focus again. They chose to pressure the veggie burger firm, Gardenburger,…

1 February 2019Comment

Coffee farmers win a living wage

GOAL: To increase government subsidies on coffee in order to receive a minimum of $360 per 125kg sack of coffee beans.
SUCCESS IN ACHIEVING SPECIFIC GOALS: 6 points / 6
SURVIVAL: 1 / 1
GROWTH: 2 / 3

In 2012, Colombian coffee prices fell 35 percent on the international market while the Colombian peso appreciated 10 percent. A combination of crop disease, bad weather, and unfavourable currency rates forced growers in Colombia to sell their coffee at a loss. Many…

1 December 2018Feature

Eric Stoner, co-founder of the US radical nonviolence website Waging Nonviolence, spoke recently to PN staffer Gabriel Carlyle

Eric Stoner

Waging Nonviolence (WNV) has been publishing must-read reporting and analysis on nonviolent action around the world since 2009.

It started out as a blog, the brainchild of three young people: Eric Stoner, Bryan Farrell and Nathan Schneider, who all shared an interest in nonviolence and civil resistance, though each approached the topic from a slightly…

1 December 2018Feature

Seeing the humanity in her enemies enabled one German activist to derail an attack by a motorcycle gang. In this piece, originally published on the Waging Nonviolence website, Antje Mattheus teases out some of the lessons for activists.

Connecticut Ave Biker Gang, 23 May 2008. Photo: Peachy Weasel (CC BY 2.0)

I grew up in a small West German village, Hamm an der Sieg. Without television or computers, my friends and I played outside and acted out adventure and survival stories. This daily practice taught me not to be afraid of physical encounters, and I developed a capacity for quick thinking and action. I didn’t know how useful that would turn out to be.

At 16, my mother and I moved to the large city of…

1 October 2018Feature

Faith-based campaigners from around the world share stories of effective action

Building on the 2016 gathering in Rome (see article), Pax Christi International created the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, invited by the pope to ‘revitalise the tools of nonviolence, and active nonviolence in particular.’ The project has been organised around five international round tables, to pull together and document experiences of the theory, thinking, theology and practice of…

1 October 2018Feature

In 2016, 80 Catholics from 35 countries gathered in Rome to discuss peace & nonviolence. Pat Gaffney explains what happened next.

Peace News readers will be familiar with the names of Gene Sharp, Jean Paul Ledarch, George Lakey, Martin Luther King and Gandhi, as among those who have lived, taught and supported nonviolent peacemaking through the decades. For some of those named, the Christian Gospels and the life and witness of Jesus will have been a source of motivation and inspired their thinking and practice of nonviolence.

In 2016, Catholic peace practitioners, academics, theologians and members…

1 October 2018Review

Orbis Books, 2018; 272pp; $25

This collection, expertly edited by Marie Dennis, guides us through the complex discussions that took place at the 2016 Rome conference ‘Nonviolence and Just Peace’ organised by a host of Catholic organisations including Pax Christi International. Its delegates wrote a statement, appealing to the Catholic Church to ‘re-commit to the centrality of gospel nonviolence’.

Most inspiring are the testimonies of those working on the ground in conflict zones. We learn of their efforts to…

1 October 2018Comment

Black women defeat pass laws

Goal: For non-white women in urban areas to no longer be required to carry documents proving formal employment.
SUCCESS IN ACHIEVING SPECIFIC GOALS: 4 points / 6
SURVIVAL: 1 / 1
GROWTH: 1 / 3

The anti-pass campaign took place in the Orange Free State in South Africa to protest against non-white South African women being required to carry documentation of formal employment. ‘Non-white’ is a term that was often used in South Africa to classify non-European ethnicities…

1 August 2018Comment

Students force university reforms

Goals: University autonomy, the right of all university parties to elect university professors, modernisation of the curriculum, university education to be available and affordable for all, and secularisation of universities
SUCCESS IN ACHIEVING SPECIFIC GOALS: 6 points out of 6
SURVIVAL: 1 / 1
GROWTH: 3 / 3

Increased prosperity and the expansion of electoral rights at the turn of the century in Argentina precipitated significant growth of the middle class and…

1 June 2018Feature

Reflections from inside Camden County detention centre by three of the Kings Bay Ploughshares prisoners

Kings Bay Ploughshares activist Clare Grady at the admin building on 5 April, with blood and banner. Photo: Kings Bay Ploughshares


Elizabeth McAlister:

Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes is the title of one of the more than 50 books by my late brother-in-law Daniel Berrigan (RIP and Presente!). It might be fair to say that we came to Kings Bay submarine base animated by the absurd conviction that we could make some impact on slowing, if not ending, the mad…

1 June 2018Feature

Did Martin Luther King really do 'more harm to the progress of non-violence than any single person connected with it'?

Martin Luther King, Jr, 8 June 1964. Photo: Walter Albertin [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

In the aftermath of the assassination of US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr on 4 April 1968, Peace News published moving tributes from Devi Prasad (‘His name will be remembered with Gandhi’s’) and PN co-editor Nigel Young (‘Notes on an Assassination’) among others. Then PN decided to also publish a fierce attack on King by US anarcho-pacifist Robert…

1 June 2018Review

Penguin Press, 2017; 800pp; £10.99

Do you want to base your views about aggression, violence, war and peace on the available biological/psychological evidence? Do you have the stamina for 700 very challenging pages? Yes and yes? Here’s the book for you.

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst looks at first sight like just another popular psychology book. I expected brain scans, hormones and genes, and there is a lot about those topics.

What I didn’t expect was a…