Violence & nonviolence

Violence & nonviolence

Violence & nonviolence

1 November 2013Comment

PN co-editors Milan Rai and Emily Johns examine some of the precedents for the Campaign Nonviolence initiative

We remember the lunch counter sit-ins that electrified the civil rights movement in the US in 1960. We remember the dignity and persistence of the hundreds of young African-American who asserted their right to be served as equals, day after day, despite repeated beatings and arrests.

The direct action of these Black students achieved desegregation of many businesses within weeks, and dramatically escalated the confrontation with institutional white racism. Many of the students…

1 October 2013Feature

A glimpse at a grassroots nonviolent revolutionary movement in South Africa, as the country approaches the 20th anniversary of the end of political apartheid


Press, supporters and passers-by stop to hear South African president Jacob Zuma at the Hector Pieterson Memorial in Soweto.photo: Marcela Teran

With Nelson Mandela’s illness earlier this year, the eyes of the world’s media looked to South Africa. More specifically they looked to a single building in South Africa – Pretoria’s Mediclinic Heart Hospital, host to a man who more than…

1 October 2013Feature

PN talks to Syrian activists inside the outside the country


A demonstration in the city of Banyas, Syria on the 'day of rage' on 29 April 2011. Photo: Syria Frames of Freedom

Despite the civil war and the threat of US military intervention, the nonviolent movements that began the Syrian uprising continue to struggle for social change – and for a ceasefire.

‘Nonviolent civil resistance started this’, Mohja Kahf of the…

1 September 2013News in Brief

On 19 August, an African-American school bookkeeper became nationally known in the US after she talked a heavily-armed man with a history of mental illness out of a school shooting. Antoinette Tuff was working in the front office at the Ronald E McNair Discovery Learning Academy just  outside Atlanta, Georgia,when Michael Brandon Hill entered carrying an assault rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition.

Over the next hour, with compassion and empathy, Tuff calmly talked Hill into putting…

12 March 2013Review

South End Press, 2011; 325pp; £10.49

Patrolling the pavement of one of Mexico City’s “red-light” districts, a group of heavily made-up women wearing short skirts and high heels hold placards up to potential clients. These placards read – in words daubed on in menstrual blood – “I am your mirror”. Intermingling with clients and other passers-by, they reflect back their responses, whether puzzled facial expressions or cries of surprise.

This performance piece — put on in…

1 December 2012Feature

Nonviolent opposition voices oppose militarisation of the revolution.

Daily reports of carnage in Syria make the early months of nonviolent popular uprising there seem like distant dreams of another land. Yet the broad-based Syrian movement began determined to follow a strategy of nonviolent resistance.

Haytham Manna is external spokesperson for the Syrian National Coordination Body for Democratic Change (NCC), itself a coalition of some 15 Syrian leftist political groups. In the second week of then-peaceful protests, back in March 2011, he launched ‘…

17 October 2012Comment

There are converging agendas for different movements - anti-cuts, climate, disarmament, labour movement...

It is not enough for the anti-cuts movement to be a defensive, responsive movement. It is not enough to point out the flaws in the arguments for austerity (as the False Economy website does so brilliantly).
If we are going to have a world worth living in, we are going to have to merge together the agendas of the anti-cuts movement, the green movement, the labour movement and the peace movement.

We are already arguing for…

17 October 2012Feature

Eye witness: holding Neptuno Square for hours despite a police riot 

15M

Since 15 May 2011, Spain has witnessed the emergence of a massive protest movement demanding a democratic revolution. 

Organised through the internet and through social media, a series of protests has taken place occupying the main squares of every major city in Spain as well as those of many small towns, demanding a radical change in the Spanish political system. 

Between six-and-a-half and eight million Spaniards have taken part in what has been called 'the 15M…

26 September 2012Comment

Soon after PN first regularly added the subtitle 'for nonviolent revolution' to its masthead, Bob Overy (who'd worked on the paper not long before) wrote a two-part article analysing the many different takes on the subject. This is part of his setting the scene for the two pieces.

I've come to the conclusion that there are two basically different ways of looking at nonviolent revolution, and several different positions which might be accommodated to this label. This has not eased a sense I have that a great big rag-bag of a concept is being held out as a goal for pacifists, which will certainly be taken up because it sounds right and, as a slogan, has flair.

The danger, I fear, is that we'll begin to speak and act as if nonviolent revolution is the agreed…

26 September 2012Feature

The practical advantages of nonviolent strategies in mobilising for revolution. 

In July, I participated in a Peace News Summer Camp workshop which discussed 'diversity of tactics' — the idea of including violent tactics in our actions and strategies for change. I was a little surprised when my fellow panellists wanted to turn it into a conversation about pacifism and whether violence can ever be justified.

Although I'm a pacifist, I didn't get their point. Most people who participate in nonviolent campaigns aren't pacifists; they choose nonviolent action…

28 August 2012Letter

The May 2012 Peace News editorial on Syria (PN 2545) argued ‘western movements... should look to the massive internet-based group Avaaz, which has channelled hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of satellite phones and other communications equipment into Syria.’

On 21 July 2012, under the headline ‘Stymied at UN, US Refines Plan to Remove Assad’, the New York Times reported: ‘The United States would provide more communications training and equipment to help improve the combat…

2 July 2012Review

OR Books, 2012; 100pp; £6

Mohandas Gandhi ‘fostered a death cult’ in which courage, not nonviolence, was the supreme virtue, headed an authoritarian movement in which ‘to doubt Gandhi was to doubt God’, and ‘had a party line, not just on sexual abstinence and vegetarianism, but also on “idle jokes” (opposed), “innocent pleasantries” (perhaps)... and pencils and fountain pens (opposed).’

Moreover, though he denounced both property damage and trespass as ‘pure violence’, he was not a pacifist in the…

2 July 2012Review

Columbia University Press, 2011; 296pp; £20.50

This study charts the success and failure of over 300 nonviolent and violent campaigns – aimed principally at regime change, self-determination/anti-occupation, or secession – between 1900 and 2006.

Overall during this period nonviolent campaigns proved twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as those that resorted to armed insurgency. This was the case regardless of the nature of the regime and its readiness to resort to repression. Moreover, whereas nonviolent campaigns…

2 July 2012Feature

April’s Symposium on Nonviolent Movements & the Barrier of Fear brought dozens of activists and researchers from around the world to Coventry.

The first thing that really struck me about the ‘International Symposium on Nonviolent Movements and the Barrier of Fear’ was that it was really international. It brought together activists and academics from Zimbabwe, Uganda, Sweden, South Korea, Palestine, Kenya, Israel, India, Hercegovina, Germany, the UK and the US – and that was just in my first small-group discussion! Apart from the World Social Forum and the War Resisters’ International Triennial, it was the most international event I…

31 May 2012Letter

Sergeant Musgrave continues to dance

John Arden well deserved Michael Randle’s excellent obituary (PN 2544). I have a particularly soft spot for JA as I inherited his Personal Comment column for PN when he left for Ireland in the early ’70s.

His comments on his difficulties with absolute pacifism are illuminated in his challenging and contrary play Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959). I’ve seen several performances and if the director and actors are not sympathetic to its politics and don’t…