Violence & nonviolence
It is January 2004, the sun is shining and it feels like a warm day in Jerusalem. We are starting our journey early in the morning, to meet up with Ghassan Andoni from the Palestinian Centre For Rapprochement Between People, based in Beit Sahour. He has invited us to come to Bir Zeit, a Palestinian University close to Ramal-lah, where he is a professor of physics.
Ramallah is not far away from Jerusalem, just 20 kilometres. The town is located in the occupied territories and can…
The principal focus of non-violent campaigns in Israel-Palestine is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip. However, given the lack of symmetry between the situation of the Israelis (the occupiers), Palestinians (the occupied), and outsiders, actors from these different parties cannot apply similar roles and methods of intervention.
In this article, I will follow the categorisation offered by Amos Gvirtz, founder of Israelis and Palestinians for Nonviolence…
Bernard Shaw once said, “If you break a nation's nationality, it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demands of the nationalist are granted. It will attend to no business, however vital. Except the business of unification and liberation.” 1
Many Palestinians have conducted a non-violent campaign against the Israeli occupation, on the personal, NGO, political party, community…
Non-violence as a strategy has been practised throughout the Israeli women's peace movement since the founding of Women in Black in early 1988, one month after the first Palestinian Intifada broke out.
The Women in Black movement began as a small group of Israeli women carrying out a simple form of protest: once a week at the same hour and in the same location--a major traffic intersection in Jerusalem--they donned black clothing and raised a black sign in the shape of a hand with…
"The periodical graswurzelrevolution is the main voice of grassroots democratic activists." - Ralf Vandamme, social scientist. 1
"The group that has most consistentlytried to build a social rhizome and that comes closest to anarchist ethics is ...Non-violent Action. It is not by coincidence that this group's newspaper, amagazine with a relatively wide distribution, is called graswurzelrevolution…
The most dangerous form of violence in South Asia is arguably the threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan. It colours the statements made by the leaders of both countries and strengthens the extreme right wing in both countries, which feeds off and thrives on the fanaticism of its counterparts next door.
The rhetoric of war, whether it is made by George Bush, Ariel Sharon, Atal Bihari Vajpayee or Pervez Musharraf, gives the cue to these elements to indulge in more violence,…
The recent impasse on re-establishing the institutions of local government in Northern Ireland raises many questions, among them the goodwill of both the republican and unionist communities.
The postponement of elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, until at least the autumn, is a disappointment, particularly as the normally volatile summer period is nearly upon us. It is usual to seek to blame one side for such an impasse, and, while there can be some point in this at times, it…
I was born and raised in Pyong Yang, now the capital city of North Korea. At that time, the early 1930s, the Korean people were under Japanese rule, which brought us great suffering and pain. It created a deep sense of hostility and enmity towards the Japanese. The cooperation between Korea and Japan, as co-hosts of the soccer World Cup, shows that there is always hope of reconciliation between former enemies.
Soon after our liberation from Japanese occupation at the end of the…
The Iraq Pledge of Resistance is a US campaign of nationally coordinated nonviolent civil disobedience to oppose the war in Iraq. To my knowledge it is the only US campaign of coordinated nonviolent resistance in opposition to the war.
To this date the campaign has been sponsored by about a dozen of the country's major peace organisations. It is being actively organised in 53 cities, with new ones coming on every week; over 5000 people have physically signed the pledge, with another…
The Nonviolent Movement (Movimento Nonviolento or NM), founded in the sixties by Aldo Capitini, “father” of Italian nonviolence, works to remove individual and group violence from every aspect of social life at a local, national and international level, and to overcome the power structures which are fed by the spirit of violence. NM aims to create a worldwide community without classes, promoting the free development of everyone in harmony with others.
The NM fundamental guidelines…
As popular support waned in the 1980s, guerrilla groups made various attempts to switch to unarmed political struggle. The FARC itself, seeking to negotiate peace in the period 1984-87, set up a political party, the Patriotic Union. In the next five years, at least 2,000 of its leaders and activists were killed by paramilitaries, security forces and members of the drug cartels.
In the early 1990s there was a new wave of negotiations with the government involving guerrilla groups such…
The term “Peace Community” perhaps evokes an image of utopian pacifist experiments. In Colombia, however, the peace communities have been formed by displaced people and face continued pressure from every armed side. Renouncing the use of arms and collaboration with any armed force, they try to establish demilitarised spaces, neutral to the armed conflict.
Members of each peace community make five commitments:
to participate in community work efforts; to say “No” to injustice and…The wild and warlike - and mostly illiterate - Muslim tribesmen known usually as Pathans, who straddled the barren mountains between Afghanistan and British India, were an unlikely source for a nonviolent movement. The story of the movement's intrepid leader, six-foot-three Badshah Khan (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan) and his redshirted Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) has been told a number of times.
Unlike previous writers Mukulika Banerjee, while recognising the…
The population of Chocó in the north of Colombia is 70 per cent Afro-Colombian, 20 per cent indígena. The zone has attracted the interest of multinationals (because of its reserves of petrol and coal) and of logging companies. And the price of land doubled in one year following president Samper's announcement in 1996 of a new plan for an inter-oceanic link, connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
It was in 1996 that the Colombian government launched a counter-insurgency campaign.…
In the spirit of satyagraha, three survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster began a hunger strike outside the Indian parliament on 28 June.
In July around 100 survivors took to the streets of New Delhi for a nonviolent sit-down. The “indefinite” hunger strike has been taken up by sympathisers in what, according to organisers, is becoming “a mass action, taken up in relay by people all over the world”.
These actions are being taken in protest at the possible…
