Nonviolence

Nonviolence is both an ethical tradition of conflict behavior and a historical method of resistance to coercion. Ethical nonviolence is rooted in the philosophies of Jainism, Buddhism, and Christian pacifists such as Quakers and Anabaptists, all of whom hold human life inviolable. Nonviolence as method, however, has been guided not so much by ethical restraint as by practical necessity. Conscientious and pragmatic nonviolence have often overlapped in their historical development, but are conceptually distinct. In Gandhian nonviolence, they converged in a single movement.

Nonviolence combines numerous principles and techniques of individual and collective action. Civil disobedience, or breaking law on principle ( Thoreau), and conscientious objection to participation in war ( Tolstoy) are perhaps the most influential. A third conceptual pillar is satyagraha or “firmness in truth” ( Gandhi), the seeking of truth through nonviolent conflict. A range of nonviolent methods are commonly used in social conflict: the strike; the boycott; the fast or hunger strike; the sit‐in or other physical obstruction; picketing; and marches. The theoretical foundation of nonviolence is the necessity of mass cooperation for exercising political power. Political scientist Gene Sharp's concept of power as a socially based form of political action has guided numerous theoretical analyses of nonviolence.

The increase in nonviolent action since 1900 has been a response to the growth of the state. As government's control over the individual expanded through taxation, military conscription, colonial occupation, and targeting of civilians, so did nonviolent resistance to it. By the 1980s, when nuclear weapons were threatening the very extinction of life on earth, tens of millions of persons were responding with nonviolent action.

Mohandas K. Gandhi was the first to use nonviolence in mass political action, to win India's independence from Great Britain. In fusing the ethic of nonviolence with the practice of mass noncooperation in the 1930s and 1940s, he created a model of empowerment that has inspired movements throughout the world. In the United States, the labor, civil rights, peace, and environmental movements all drew heavily on the Gandhian experience. Women suffragists were also early users of militant nonviolence. Alice Paul and her Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (later the National Woman's Party) invented techniques of nonviolent action still in use today.

North American social history is replete with leaders and organizations inventing nonviolent action for peaceful change and war prevention: Jane Addams and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; Abraham J. Muste and the War Resisters League; Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers; Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker; Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers of America; Elizabeth McAllister and Daniel and Philip Berrigan of the Plowshares movement; and Greenpeace. Some, such as American folk singer Joan Baez and the German Green Party leader Petra Kelly, transcended national boundaries as icons of a global nonviolence culture.

Latin American nonviolence expanded notably after 1970 in response to three historical forces: (1) militarization of the state to protect entrenched elites; (2) the spread of liberation theology in the Catholic Church; and (3) nonviolence training throughout the continent by Servicio de la Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ). Certain figures symbolized this flowering of nonviolence: the martyrs Archbishop Oscar Romero and the environmentalist Chico Mendes; and three Nobel Peace laureates, Oscar Arias, Rigoberta Menchu, and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.

Nonviolence is supported by training and research programs. One line of inquiry, into disciplined nonviolence as a means to resist military conquest, began with the British Commander Sir Stephen King‐Hall in the late 1950s. The theory of civilian‐based defense emerging from that research proposes nonviolent resistance as an integral part of a nation's security policy. Citizens would be prepared for it with the same planning and discipline used in military training. Nonmilitary defense theory has particularly influenced national governments adopting nonprovocative defense—a security policy with no offensive military capability to threaten neighboring states. Such a policy would deter attack partly through civilian readiness to resist it with mass noncooperation. Theorists prominent in this field include Gene Sharp, Adam Roberts, Anders Boserup, and Theodor Ebert. The governments of Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands have explored the feasibility of nonviolent defense.

The theoretical and practical significance of nonviolence is threefold: (1) it has stimulated the use of extra institutional politics where formal institutions could not respond to the demand for change; (2) it addresses military institutions directly, as both a means to resist the militarization of national governments and an alternative or supplement to military security; (3) as political and economic power becomes more concentrated in governments and corporations, nonviolence offers an effective “weapon of the weak,” providing for democratic empowerment and fuller political participation of low‐power groups. Among those are women, who have been especially prominent users of nonviolence. As armed struggle becomes ever more costly, nonviolence presents itself as an alternative strategy for both social change and national defense.
[See also Aggression and Violence; Militarism and Antimilitarism; Nuclear Protest Movements; Pacifism; Peace and Antiwar Movements.]

Bibliography

Staughton Lynd, ed., Nonviolence in America, 1966.
Gene Sharp , The Politics of Nonviolent Action, 3 vols., 1973.
Joan Bondurant , Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, 1988.
Philip McManus and
Gerald Schlabach, eds., Relentless Persistence: Nonviolent Action in Latin America, 1991.
Paul Wehr, Heidi Burgess, and Guy Burgess, eds., Justice Without Violence, 1994.
Paul Downton, Jr., and and Paul Wehr , The Persistant Activist, 1997.

Paul Wehr