Violence & nonviolence

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…

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 domination of one person by another. We must resist whatever gives encouragement to the will to dominate.

‘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 the…

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…

Have you heard the story about the woman who realised she was being followed on a dark, deserted city street? It was the night before trash collection. She went to the nearest trash can, lifted the lid, and had a brief, animated conversation with the contents. Cheerfully replacing the lid, she continued to the next trash can, lifted the lid, and chattered away as if with a long-lost friend.

She also noticed that her stalker turned around and left.

This is one of the…

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…

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 any…

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 Syrian Non…

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…

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…

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 ‘…