A Call for a Nonviolent Strategy of the Global Peace & Justice Movement (original) (raw)
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/15691497-12341429 This article interprets the globalization of nonviolence and nonviolent resistance through the lens of Manfred B. Steger’s concept of the “global imaginary.” It argues that the globalization of nonviolence and the global imaginary are mutually reinforcing processes. Nonviolent protests are driven by local issues and are, thus, context specific and local but, as in the case of the Arab uprisings, as they spread through the MENA and beyond, the uprisings provided historically linked examples of a growing global consciousness, a “global” we. Please see the journal web page for full article or email me: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/15691497-12341429.
Strategic Nonviolent Struggle in the Twenty First Century
The Journal of Social Encounters, 2021
The Twenty First Century is on track to become the first significant Century of Nonviolent Struggle in human history. New discoveries about the effectiveness of strategic nonviolent action, a proliferation of unarmed civil resistance movements, and an explosion of research of and development of creative training methods for such movements, transmitted globally via the internet and other means of international communication point toward the increasing prevalence of unarmed methods of struggle as the emerging paradigm for conflict transformation.
Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: Lessons from the Past, Ideas for the Future
This report describes the lessons learned from past nonviolent campaigns and ways in which these lessons might be applied in the future. It is a product of a conference co-sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). Participants included prominent leaders and organizers from past nonviolent struggles in South Africa, Serbia, Mongolia, Kosovo, Chile, Poland, and the U.S. civil rights movement; advocates of nonviolent change in Belarus, Zimbabwe, Burma, and the Kurdish region of Iraq; and a number of analysts and observers with expertise on the subject. They reviewed and compared their experiences with the strategic use of nonviolent conflict to promote human rights and democratic political change in conflicts with unjust authority and repressive regimes. The conference was held from January 9–11, 2002, at Airlie House in Warrenton, Va. The report was written by Institute staff members John T. Crist, program officer in the fellowship program, Harriet Hentges, executive vice president, and Daniel Serwer, director of the Balkans Initiative, with assistance from Samantha Williams, program officer in the Research and Studies Program, and consultation and editing by ICNC chair Peter Ackerman and director Jack DuVall.
Summary of Workshop - Worldwide Protest Movements
ummary of Workshop - Worldwide Protest Movements, 2020
Columbia World Projects, an initiative focused on partnering scholars with practitioners to address fundamental challenges facing humanity, hosted a day-long workshop regarding worldwide protest movements on February 27, 2020. The workshop was undertaken in collaboration with the United Nations (UN) Peacebuilding Support Office to explore ways in which the international community, and in particular the United Nations, might better enable an environment in which nonviolent protest movements are able to pursue positive change, while also mitigating against the instability and violence that protests can sometimes trigger. The experts who took part in the workshop included scholars and practitioners who have studied protest movements in regions around the world including Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East and Europe, as well as experts in technology and mediation. This report summarizes the discussion that took place during the course of the workshop and specific recommendations for the international community put forward by participants.
The Limitations of Strategic Nonviolence
One of the great human achievements of the twentieth century was the refinement of civilian resistance. As generally understood, this means the organization of sustained mass nonviolent actions-protest, noncooperation, disobedience, and intervention-to force political change, usually at the national level. In some remarkable cases, campaigns of noncooperation and civil disobedience ousted entrenched and repressive dictatorships in a matter of days. Other nonviolent resistance movements succeeded after years of struggle, and some failed in their attempts to depose unwanted regimes. The achievement, though, was cumulative, as activists and scholars learned from the successes and failures of previous movements so that, by century's end, a body of knowledge was available to resistance leaders who no longer had to "reinvent the wheel"; nonviolent campaigns now included careful strategizing and training, not simply spontaneous uprisings. The limitations of successful civilian resistance movements are, however, often overlooked.
UNISCI Discussion Papers, 2012
This article examines the pacifist movement from a twofold approach: on the one hand, it discusses the various achievements of the pacifist movement regarding security issues, and, on the other hand, it assesses whether the new protests in Europe, the United States, and the Arab-Muslim world have revitalised pacifism's claims. We are therefore interested in the role citizens' protests play in shaping international relations, especially when it comes to exert democratic control on national governments and raise public awareness of international risks. We conclude that pacifism is not becoming a core demand for the new social protests as they challenge economic-related reforms (Europe and the United States) or attempt to topple dictatorships even by violence (Arab-Muslim world).
International Critical Thought, 2017
Until now, the history of the non-violence movement has been written by commentators who have no intention of hiding their sympathies for the movement. However, Domenico Losurdo’s Non-violence: A History beyond the Myth is one of the first texts to confront this topic with seriousness, using scientific methods and a comparative historiographic approach. Losurdo does not limit himself to a history of the ideas of the movement’s leading figures—from the American Christian abolitionists to Gandhi and Luther King—but instead analyses their theories, political opinions, contradictions, moral dilemmas and concrete behaviours in the context of great historical crises and transformations. Losurdo’s book also dedicates plenty of space to current events, analysing how the West today uses non-violence as a way to discredit its enemies. The delegitimation of the People’s Republic of China and the so-called “colour revolutions” demonstrate that even a noble ideal like non-violence can be easily exploited with a malicious intention. It is preferable, then, according to Losurdo, to fight for a “democratisation of international relations” that will inevitably lead to the strengthening of the front of less developed countries and to battling against the oxymoronic “humanitarian wars” or “wars for peace.”
Social Movements and the Multilateral Arena
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015
Most social movement research privileges the state as the main, if not the sole arena where social movement contestation takes place. By drawing from work in political sociology, international relations, and political economy of the world-system, scholars can improve understandings of the ways political conflicts are embedded in extra-local contexts. This essay clarifies some assumptions embedded in state-centric approaches and explores ideas at the borders of social movement scholarship and related fields about how the world beyond states impacts conflicts at local, national, and global scales. Having engaged the interstate arena in unprecedented ways during the 1990s, many activist groups saw more clearly this system's limited capacities for responding to deepening global crises. The early twenty-first century thus saw a growth in transnational social movement activity outside the interstate arena. This encourages us to rethink relationships between social movements and not just the state, but also the interstate system itself.