Waging Nonviolence

By India Stoughton In late 2011 four Arab women, inspired by the success of the Arab Spring demonstrations but horrified by the backlash against the women who had protested side-by-side with men in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Syria, decided to…

By Nadine Bloch. Last month, black hoods and orange jumpsuits stood out in stark contrast to the marbled pillars of the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s a jarring image — shackled prisoners framed by stately columns more accustomed to suited lawyers…

by Kelsey Alford-Jones.  The original article on Waging Nonviolence can ge found here. Residents of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc, about an hour north of Guatemala City, have been steadfast in their rejection of a gold mine…

by Kazu Haga “Now, Bernard, the next movement we’re going to have is to institutionalize and internationalize nonviolence.” It was a comment made almost in passing. Dr. Bernard Lafayette, Jr., then the national coordinator for the Poor People’s Campaign, was…

by Ken Butigan I raise my hand in peace I never bow to the laws of the thought police I take a holy vow To never kill again
 To never kill again. –Neil Young, “Living with War” How can we…

Some of Spain’s hospitals and clinics have recently begun offering a new kind of public service. In an effort to defend the threatened health care system, thousands of doctors and their supporters have chosen to add civil disobedience to their…

We are seeing increasing social protests all over the world, with hundreds of thousands on the streets from Santiago to Montreal, from Moscow to Tokyo and everywhere in between. Sudan, after having recently divorced its southern neighbour is a country not know for its human rights and police leniency, so it is encouraging that even here things are moving, even if carefully.

by Ter Garcia

The 15M movement in Spain has faced repression from the very beginning: 24 young people were arrested and beaten by police in the demonstrations organized by Democracia Real Ya on May 15 last year, which is a large part of why several dozen people decided to camp that night in Sol square, turning the demonstration into an encampment.

Nonviolence is a beautiful theory but it doesn’t work in the real world, critics have long argued. It is—they maintain—passive, weak, utopian, naïve, unpatriotic, marginal, simplistic, and impractical. In spite of these widely-held assumptions, however, people around the planet go on building one nonviolent people-power movement after another.

Article written by Nathan Schneider

It’s a foregone conclusion that revenge ties itself in a logical knot. It’s a cycle that churns until everyone bound up in it is dead. With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in mind, philosopher Simon Critchley rehearses this fact eloquently in his latest at his New York Times forum, The Stone.