A publication of the INTERCOMMUNITY PEACE & JUSTICE CENTER NO. 105 / WINTER 2015 Unlocking a Nonviolent Future by Michael N. Nagler, PhD communal violence and now seems to some (including the present author) to be a nonviolent answer to war. erek Oakley and Andres Gutierrez ducked into a As Derek explains, “If we had had weapons we would not hut where they found five women and nine children be alive today,” and neither would the women and children; also hiding. On April 17, 2014, gunmen invaded and “Andres and I survived unharmed through a combination of Dstarted shooting unarmed men, women and children in the nonviolent training methods focused on strategy in dealing Protection of Civilians (POC) compound of the United Na- with violent conflict and ethnic tensions. tions Mission in South Sudan. They eventually killed at least UCP represents one of five qualitative changes—growth 58 people—most of them internally displaced people (IDPs) points—that have emerged in the development of nonvio- of the Nuer ethnic group who had been staying in the POC lence worldwide in the years since Gandhi and King. They since the civil war in South Sudan erupted in December 2013. are: Soon enough the militia burst into their hut, armed with as- 1. New Institutions. Along with more formal institutions sault weapons, axes and sticks. Somewhat startled to find such as the International Criminal Court (arguably nonvi- two non-Sudanese there, they roughly ordered them out. But olent in that it removes impunity from certain very violent Derek and Andres were well trained. Glancing at one anoth- crimes) and legal protocols like the “Right to Protect,” civil- er, they turned to the gunmen and calmly explained that they society organizations like UCP have come onto the world were humanitarian workers and would not leave without the stage to reduce and forestall conflict by creative, nonviolent others, who were anyhow innocent women and children who means. There are some forty UCP groups operating world- had nothing to do with the war. Apparently unmoved at first, wide, which can be divided into three types: local nonviolent the militia ordered them to leave three times, but Derek and vigilante groups like Chicago’s “Interrupters” or the Orange Andres did not budge. In the end, the militia Women and children residents of a POC camp in South Sudan left and the women and children were all saved. “If we had had weapons we would not be alive today.” Who were these two men, what were they doing in one of the world’s most violent con- flicts, and how did they survive their brush with death? Derek and Andres were respective- ly International Protection Officer and Team Leader for the Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) in South Sudan. NP is the largest of some forty non-governmental organizations worldwide that are carrying out what’s called Unarmed Ci- vilian Peacekeeping (UCP), institutionalizing an ancient practice that Mahatma Gandhi en- visioned as a way to protect communities from JC McIlwaine / UN Photo JC McIlwaine © Berets that patrol New York subways; tion—in sharp contrast to the system- for nonviolence, would be making su- domestic teams like Meta Peace Team atic, diligent learning that goes on in perb use of the “new science” today. that keep the peace at potentially vola- the war system. Today, taking advan- Since this “new” science resoundingly tile events, often more effectively than tage of the increases in global commu- supports the inheritance of human wis- and much appreciated by police forces; nication and travel, activists have been dom, we now have a powerful consen- and international, cross-border peace more concerned to share “best practic- sus about reality, whether we look at the teams like NP. These new institutions es” with those who find themselves in outside or the inside worlds (through also represent the important shift in the similar situations. Student leaders from science or spiritual discovery) that logic of organizations from a top-down, the successful overthrow of President points to nonviolence as not only pos- hierarchical model of the typical for- Milośevič in Serbia, for example, were sible, but the fulfillment of our destiny. profit corporation to more organic and on hand at Tahrir Square. They created 4. New Actors. Gandhi began his democratic forms. This has been beau- The Centre for Applied Nonviolent Ac- work among relatively enfranchised tifully brought out by Ori Brafman and tion and Strategies (CANVAS) to carry “free” Indians, and a critical boost to Rod Beckstrom in The Starfish and the on this vital work. his Satyagraha campaign happened Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Lead- when two new groups were drawn in: erless Organizations. Since the essence laborers and women. Similarly today, of nonviolence is rehumanization as …nonviolence as two traditionally marginalized groups Martin Luther King Jr said—“We must not only possible, are increasingly empowered, organized rapidly begin the shift from a thing-ori- and engaged. Women, probably the ented civilization to a person-oriented but the fulfillment most important, and indigenous peo- civilization”—this shift toward a more of our destiny. ple, who are increasingly threatened human-centered vision of organizing is by corporate attacks on their lifestyles, the key structural feature of a possible have found ways to mount success- nonviolent world. 3. New Science. What is now called ful nonviolent resistance, especially in 2. Learning. The peace movement— “classical science”—the materialist North and South America. At least one or in Kenneth Boulding’s insightful paradigm of life as random, determin- regular organization, Via Campesina, phrase, the worldwide “movement to- istic and essentially meaningless—is an has helped them gain visibility and ef- ward peace”—has traditionally been integral part of the world of violence fectiveness without sacrificing their plagued by discontinuity. Every event, and destruction from which we are try- traditional lifestyle, and we have seen every opportunity that crops up in the ing to emerge. In the last thirty or so unprecedented collaborations among course of events takes participants un- years, an undeniable paradigm shift people who were all but unaware of one awares, and they must “reinvent the has happened across all scientific dis- another’s existence, like Native Ameri- wheel,” with all the weaknesses and ciplines which should have profound cans in the territorial United States and errors incident to that kind of opera- and helpful alternative impacts on the Mayan Indians in southern Mexico. search for a non- 5. Peace Science. Along with the violent future. great shift in “hard” sciences, scholar- “Mirror Neu- ly research has begun to acknowledge rons,” studies on nonviolence as a field, or at least a phe- empathy, a new nomenon. There is now an extremely vision of evolu- influential study, Why Civil Resistance tion—the story Works by Erica Chenoweth and Maria is too rich to be Stephan (2012), showing that “transi- ©Meta Peace Team / Wikimedia Team Peace ©Meta detailed here, tions to democracy” that are free from but every peace violence (not the same as nonviolent actor should in principle, which is still quite rare for be well versed large movements) are twice as effective in it.* Gandhi, as violent ones, in one-third the time. who seized on When Prof. Chenoweth, who at first the work of N.K. did not believe in nonviolence, went Bose on the con- to look up the research on the relative sciousness of effectiveness of violent and nonviolent plants to buttress resistance movements, she found... his arguments 2 NO. 105 / WINTER 2015 Meta Peace Team at the Republican National Convention none. People had been arguing whether David Yan / Flickr Yan David nonviolence “works” since time imme- © morial, but no one thought (dared?) to look at the evidence! Nor is this unusu- al in the world of nonviolence. Frans de Waal, decades earlier, found that no re- search had been done on the resolution of conflict among primates: Fires start, but fires also go out. Obvi- ous as this is, scientists concerned with aggression, a sort of social fire, have totally ignored the means by which the flames of aggression are extinguished. We know a great deal about the causes of hostile behavior in both animals and humans…. Yet we know little of the way A candlelight vigil on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre conflicts are avoided—or how, when they trial age. As Huston Smith said some ■ Learn everything you can about do occur, relationships are afterward re- years ago, “For our culture as a whole, nonviolence (to fill that cultural paired and normalized. As a result, peo- nothing major is going to happen until vacuum) ple tend to believe that violence is more we figure out who we are… we haven’t a ■ Take up a spiritual practice (if you integral to human nature than peace. clue who we are today.” This is because haven’t already done so) we have ignored what Gandhi said was ■ Interact personally wherever pos- nothing less than “the law of our spe- sible (to overcome our isolation, ...wisdom is certainly within cies:” nonviolence. In unearthing our making ourselves invulnerable to capacity for nonviolence—a process oppression, for one thing), and us; and nonviolence... is the that still has far to go—we are finding ■ Tell the story! Never hesitate to way to find it. ourselves as a species, beginning to re- explain that we are body, mind alize the meaning of our existence. and spirit; that security does not This process needs activists who come from defeating “enemies” Some seventy years prior to that are, as Joanna Macy says, “stopping the or fulfillment from buying things epiphany, Gandhi had written in his worst of the damage;” but it also needs (and destroying the planet in the classic Hind Swaraj that what we call all of us.