Violence & nonviolence

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…

At the moment, PN staff are the only listed UK promoters of Campaign Nonviolence, the nonviolence study/action group initiative started by Pace e Bene in the US last year. Milan Rai, Emily Johns and Gabriel Carlyle are in a Campaign Nonviolence study/action group in Hastings (it’s called Burning Gold, after a line in a William Blake poem).

This March and April, Campaign Nonviolence has been running workshops across the US to ‘help build the campaign to mainstream active nonviolence…

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Seven Deadly Sins
or the Seven Vices - Anger. Photo: via wikicommons

I have been asked to talk about the relation between war resistance and resistance to injustice.

There are many points to be made that I need hardly belabour. I don’t have to argue with any of you at this conference that if we resist war we must look to the causes of war; try to end them. And that one finds the causes of war in any society that encourages not fellowship but…

‘Right now, people who are involved in nonviolent activism in Syria are mainly having to do two things: relief work, to deal with the catastrophic levels of humanitarian disaster and then underground civil resistance, like newspapers, news agencies, schools, hospitals and clinics,’ Mohja Kahf told Peace News in March.

Kahf, a member of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement (SNVM), was born in Syria but grew up in the United States, where she is now an associate professor of Comparative…

Thousands protest in London on 16 March against the
Russian invasion of Crimea. Photo: Clare Dimyon

This comment was written on 3 March, before the Russian invasion of Crimea changed the dynamics of the Ukrainian crisis.

Dramatic words or violent acts were not how the Ukrainian people ousted an authoritarian leader and his cronies. Civil resistance shredded the legitimacy of a repressive and corrupt government. The nonviolent movement dissolved…

It’s still unbelievable that he has gone. Howard Clark has been a key figure in Peace News for several decades – as a co-editor, collaborator, contributor, (re-)organiser, trustee, director, defender. His 1971 essay Making Nonviolent Revolution, which we re-published as a pamphlet two years ago – over his modest objections – with a new, very valuable afterword by Howard, remains one of the most important explanations published of the liberatory politics that PN aims to…

Writing in the afterglow of a beautiful day of guerrilla nonviolence at Torness, I’m no longer daunted by the question with which I’ve been shadow-boxing these past few weeks: ‘exactly how do we intend to reverse the nuclear power programme?’

“The anti-nuclear movement already has its equivalents of the charka”

On that site, I saw for myself the achievement of the people who occupied Half Moon Cottage in creating a symbol for us to rally around, and also in…

“My vision of nonviolent revolution isn’t of a united mass movement sweeping away the institutions of the status quo, but of people acting in their own situations to take control of their own lives and asserting different values, values which have been systematically suppressed.” Howard Clark, from the introduction.

For this 2012 edition of Making Nonviolent Revolution, Howard Clark has added an afterword referring to the experience of the Spanish indignad@s (an inspiration…

Effective nonviolence at the Reclaim the Power camp in Balcombe, West Sussex, part of a summer of action against fracking exploration by Caudrilla. PHOTO: Reclaim the Power

Nonviolence study groups underpinned much of the success of the US civil rights movement in the 1960s (see editorial, p12). Campaign Nonviolence, a new year-long project initiated by California-based peace group, Pace e Bene,  aims to promote the formation of such study and action groups. Campaign Nonviolence has been…