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Causes and cures XIV: Nonviolence approaches
Accepted Manuscript Causes and cures XIV: Nonviolence approaches
Bandy X. Lee PII: DOI: Reference:
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Aggression and Violent Behavior
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Please cite this article as: Bandy X. Lee , Causes and cures XIV: Nonviolence approaches, Aggression and Violent Behavior (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.avb.2017.04.002
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Causes and cures XIV: Nonviolence approaches
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Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div. Yale University Law and Psychiatry Division 34 Park Street New Haven, CT 06519 [email protected] (917) 328-2492
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Abstract
The past several years have been a landmark moment for violence prevention, with
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renewed attention on the part of many international agencies, but especially the United Nations,
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with its adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The latter invites the world community to collaborate in an inclusive, long-ranging vision for the future, highlighting our
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interdependence and collective responsibility for humanity‟s future. A growing awareness that preventing violence does not just reduce death and disability but promotes creativity, economic growth, and general well-being is at the heart of this “movement”. An integration not only of the major disciplines but of various practical approaches is timely, and for this to occur, we require a broader overview of our existing societal structures. In this context, this fifteen article series modeled after a Global Health Studies course entitled, “Violence: Causes and Cures,” reviews the mechanisms that society has used in an attempt to stem violence. Continuing the transition
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT from the “law and order” to the health model, this article examines the power of nonviolence. Contrary to current assumptions, far from being passive or ineffective, nonviolent methods have demonstrated to bring down empires, to topple regimes, and to effectuate long-lasting peace—at greater frequency than violent means. Starting with the personal level, and drawing upon the
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various spiritual traditions, nonviolence may cover the depths that are necessary for countering
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our complex tendency for violence. Nonviolence gives us the lesson that peace is possible, not
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just through stemming destructive forces, but by fostering constructive ones.
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Keywords: Violence studies; Homicide; Suicide; Collective violence; Nonviolence
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We are living through a landmark moment for violence prevention. The past few years, especially, have seen growing attention to the problem of violence and the need for multilateral
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collaborations to solve it. In December 2014, for example, the World Health Organization, the
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United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the United Nations Development Programme
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(WHO, UNODC, and UNDP, 2014) joined forces to detail the efforts and successes of 133
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countries to reduce interpersonal violence in The Global Status Report on Violence Prevention 2014. It is the first major report on violence since the influential World Report on Violence and
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Health (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, and Lozano, 2002) consolidated all the existing epidemiology and science on violence. Meanwhile, the 67th World Health Assembly (WHA,
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2014) adopted a resolution addressing violence, bringing particularly to focus women, children,
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and other vulnerable members of the populations subject to systematic structural and institutional
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violence. Furthermore, Global Study on Homicide 2013: Trends, Contexts, Data (UNODC, 2014), Hidden in Plain Sight: A Statistical Analysis of Violence against Children (United
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Nations Children‟s Fund [UNICEF], 2014a), Ending Violence against Children: Six Strategies
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for Action (UNICEF, 2014b), Preventing Suicide: A Global Imperative (WHO, 2014), Preventing Youth Violence: Taking Action and Generating Evidence (WHO, 2015), and School Violence and Bullying: Global Status Report (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 2017) all reflected and added to a global awareness of violence. Most notably, in September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations [UN], 2015), addressing the need to
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT “significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere” (Goal 16), for the aspiration of sustained peace and sustainable development. This set forth other plans of action, such as by the WHO director-general (WHO, 2016a); the 69th World Health Assembly (WHA, 2016); and the Global Partnership to End Violence
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against Children (WHO, 2016b), reflecting the initiative of WHO member states, national and
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international organizations, and civil society actors. In this context, more than ever, violence
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studies need to become a field of its own right, with university-level instruction capable of integrating its enlarging scholarship into common principles for multiple sectors to concertedly
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act upon, at both local and global levels, so as to meet the challenges of our time. Ongoing
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worldwide events only confirm this need to think clearly and cogently, while acting urgently but also effectively in this area of utmost importance to humankind.Over several issues, Aggression
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and Violent Behavior has graciously published a lecture series that has been implemented at Yale
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University through the Global Health Studies course, “Violence: Causes and Cures.” As also a preview to the first comprehensive textbook on violence studies (Lee, in press), it attempts a
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systematic integration of the valuable lessons that a variety of fields have brought to the topic.
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order:
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This article consists of the fourteenth of this fifteen article series, which carries the following
1. Introduction: Toward a New Definition 2. The Biology of Violence 3. The Psychology of Violence 4. The Symbolism of Violence 5. The Sociology and Anthropology of Violence
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 6. The Political Science and Economics of Violence 7. Structural Violence 8. Environmental Violence 9. Consequences of Violence
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10. Criminal Justice Approaches
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11. International Law Approaches
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12. Public Health Approaches
14. Nonviolence Approaches (in this issue)
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15. Synthesis and Integration (in this issue)
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13. Global Medicine Approaches
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1. Introduction
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Nonviolence is a weapon of the strong. Mohandas Gandhi, Words of Gandhi (1982)
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This article represents the culmination of the interventions that we will cover in the “Causes and Cures of Violence” series. If criminal justice established that we can organize and centralize the use of violence, law showed that we can regulate society around a civilized order, even internationally. If public health demonstrated that we can prevent the problem of violence from arising in the first place, medicine underscored that we can bring our focus back to caring for intimate, human needs, even globally. Nonviolence, then, might represent a growing
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT revelation that we can employ our essential humanity to cure our violent tendencies, both personally and socially. In the previous article (Lee, 2017), we showed that a global medicine approach derives from close contact with the person and from proximity to the local when caring for that person. However, respect for the full, inextinguishable dignity of the person should not
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end there; it begins with the caregiver-receiver relationship but ends only when any hierarchy
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disappears. Empowerment occurs when the person recovers, rises, and recreates the situation so
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that the affliction or oppression not only does not recur in the person, but results in a newfound power to be able to help heal the world. To get to the core of preventing violence means to
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arrive not just at peacekeeping but peacebuilding that encompasses everything from the stability
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of wholeness to the energy of creativity. How, then, can we envision empowering the person, what would it look like, and how can personal empowerment translate into popular
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empowerment? The analogy of personal transformation can also give us clues as to the
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possibilities for a seemingly daunting change in humanity to reverse its tendency for violence against itself. Just as a shift has been happening in our way of dealing with violence from the
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“law and order” approach (meeting violence with more violence) to the “health and medicine”
might be possible.
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approach (meeting violence with healing), a shift in consciousness from violence to nonviolence
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Nonviolence derives from the Sanskrit word ahimsa, or “lack of desire to harm or kill,” and refers to: (a) the principle or practice of abstaining from the use of violence (Simpson & Weiner, 1989); or (b) the use of peaceful means, not force, to bring about political or social change (Simpson & Weiner, 1993). The importance of the negative or the absence of something, however, does not imply much significance in the English language, since the materialism of Western culture does not deem absence to be as meaningful as presence, as in the more spiritual
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Eastern traditions. Mohandas Gandhi, leader of the Indian independence movement and pioneer of nonviolence in the twentieth century, preferred the expression satyagraha, which is Sanskrit for “holding firmly to” (agraha) “truth” (satya), but this term is foreign to many Englishspeakers.
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More importantly, the relative weakness of the concept of nonviolence is due to the
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prevailing paradigm (in Late Latin, paradigma or “pattern, example,” from the Greek
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paradeigma or “pattern, model, precedent”). History abounds with examples of nonviolence as a way of ending violence, and in many instances far more successful in achieving social and
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political ends than violence, but it is still far from entering our consciousness because of the
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prevalent paradigm of violence. In other words, our general framework of how the world works revolves around violence, and therefore we are more likely to persist and to insist on violent
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methods, no matter how little success they demonstrate (Lee, 2016b) and even in the face of
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great failure (Lee, 2016c). However, just as the prevention of violence has turned out to be not only possible but effective and cost-effective (Gilligan, 2001), nonviolence has proven to be not
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only utopian but also powerful and enduring (Gregg, 1934). A discerning discussion of
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approaches to preventing violence, as well as how to think about the opposite, violence, must
article.
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thus include nonviolence, whose history, application, and basic tenets we will review in this
2. Historical basis
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Nonviolence history is not as easy to find as violence history, primarily because of the paradigm of violence that recognizes violent “episodes” more readily than more enduring examples of nonviolence. However, scholars of nonviolence are beginning to document better the power of nonviolence, especially in the past two hundred years. The seeds of nonviolent
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practices trace back to prehistory and humanity‟s first civilizations, which include individual
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actions as well as the influences of the major world religions (Adolf, 2009). For example,
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Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have influenced and impacted adherents for millennia. While Hinduism pioneered and perfected the principles of ahimsa, the
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concept reached extraordinary status when Mahavira (599 B.C. to 527 B.C.), the twenty-fourth
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spiritual teacher of Jainism, introduced the word to the world. Buddhism‟s founder, Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563/480 B.C. to c. 483/400 B.C.), put forth the Noble Eightfold Path: right
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understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right
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mindfulness, and right concentration (Gelsey, 2014), which commit one to nonviolence and the pursuit of enlightenment, based on unity and universality. Tikkun olam, which in Hebrew means
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“repairing the world,” is a key aspect of nonviolence in Judaism that considers individual
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kindness to be a foundation for fixing what is wrong with the world: “As it is written, „Who is the greatest hero?‟ „The one who turns an enemy into a friend‟” (Gottlieb, 2011). Christianity
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arose out of predictions of a Messiah who would begin an eternal, peaceful reign embodied in the birth of Jesus (c. 4 B.C. to c. A.D. 30/33): the nonviolent seeds in Christianity are believed to have started with Jesus himself and his example of meeting violence with nonviolent love (Anders, 2016). Roots of nonviolence also appear in the beginnings of Islam: the word itself means “peace” and, beginning with the revelations to its founder Muhammad (c. 570 to 632), the result and the reward of submission to God, or Allah (“the Lord”) (Esposito, 1994). The Arabic
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT term for nonviolence as a life decision is islam, for nonviolence as a method jihad (“struggle for justice”), and for the principle underlying both aspects tawhid (“affirmation of the unity of God”) (Harris, 2010); the fifth pillar of Islam, Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, provides an example where the principle of nonviolence comes alive and profoundly impacts adherents of Islam.
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While successful nonviolent campaigns are plentiful in history, from the plebeians who
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withdrew from Rome in the fifth century B.C. to the major workers‟ strikes of the early twentieth
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century, perhaps the best known of nonviolent struggles is the Indian independence movement. Gandhi drew from his Hindu background “the greatest force in the world,” or “the one
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constructive process of Nature in the midst of incessant destruction going on about us” (Gandhi,
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1993b, p. 240). Its power dawned on him in 1906 at a meeting on migrant Indian community rights in Durban, South Africa. The community had gathered in a theater and were about to vote
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on whether to refuse to register themselves, as the government was requiring them to do in order
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to gain control over them. At that point, someone stood up and suggested that they not only vote on the issue but take an oath not to be registered. This greatly impressed Gandhi, who saw an
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enormous difference in binding force between a majority vote and a personal oath. They were
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calling on a much deeper personal commitment—to abide by no matter what came, unto death. Gandhi then returned to India in 1915 and led a movement that eventually brought down the
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British Raj, which was in turn a central event that led to the downfall of imperialism, which at the time claimed most of the world. Most famous among his campaigns is the 26-day Salt March in 1930 in resistance to the British-imposed salt tax. When he and 4,000 followers arrived at the sea, Gandhi took a brief swim, scooped up salt and saltwater in his hands, and 83 volunteers dug and carried off salt deposits in bags (Sharp, 2005). This broke the Salt Act, eventually leading to Great Britain‟s grant of Indian independence in 1947.
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT In the United States, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950‟s and 1960‟s, also known as the Black Freedom Struggle, is one of the most successful, protracted periods calling upon nonviolent action in the country. At a time when, according to the law in Alabama, AfricanAmericans had to pay their fare and then sit in the back of the bus, Rosa Parks‟ refusal to yield
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her seat to a white man sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, whereby people refused
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to take the bus until the law changed. Baptist minister Martin Luther King Junior, who drew
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directly from Gandhi‟s philosophy alongside Christian inspiration, and educator Septima Clark, who backed the movement through literacy and citizenship workshops, emerged among the
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primary leaders. Nonviolent protests and civil disobedience gave rise to the Civil Rights Act of
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1957 (desegregation of public schools), the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (penalties for voter obstruction), the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing of discrimination based on race, color,
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religion, sex, or national origin), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (prohibition of racial
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discrimination in voting), and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (equal housing opportunities regardless of race, creed, or national origin). Other struggles for justice soon followed, including
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the Women‟s Liberation Movement, the American Indian Movement, anti-nuclear protests, anti-
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Vietnam War protests, and rallies for gay rights, environmental protection, and continued workers‟ rights. Campaigns of the latter category included the California grape workers‟ strike
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and boycott in 1965, as they suffered from abject poverty, displacement, homelessness, and economic exploitation, working without union representation (Merriman, 2005). The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) joined with a young Chicano leader, Cesar Chavez and his Mexican-based National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) to lead a nonviolent movement, and the Delano growers finally agreed to a pay increase in 1970. These movements inspired many regions of the world to similarly pursue desegregation and greater
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT justice. These examples show that nonviolence is good not only for dissolving oppressive regimes but also for reforming democratic ones, as have happened numerous times throughout American history. Meanwhile, the same kind of dramatic result was happening with the Solidarity
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Movement in Poland 1977 and in Czekoslovakia from the 1960‟s to the 1980‟s—movements that
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eventually led the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The Polish Solidarity Movement began with a
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nongovernmental trade union in the early 1980‟s, soon giving rise to a broad, nonviolent, antiCommunist social movement that is thought to have contributed greatly to the fall of
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Communism around half the world. Lech Wałęsa, a former shipyard worker and electrician,
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together with other workers‟ representatives, formed Solidarity, the first independent labor union in a Soviet-bloc country. Over time, 9 to10 million workers, intellectuals, and students joined,
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and soon 80 percent of the total Polish work force voluntarily belonged to a single organization,
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for the first time in history (Cirtautas, 1997). Poland‟s Communist government instituted martial law, but the movement went underground and generated the disintegrative force that drove the
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Soviet Union and its Empire, as with the British Empire, into oblivion. After several years of
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political repression the government was forced to negotiate, leading to semi-free elections in 1989. A Solidarity-coalition government had formed, and Wałęsa was elected president. A
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dismantling of the communist governmental system and Poland‟s transformation into a modern democratic state led to a spread of anti-Communist ideas and movements throughout the Eastern Bloc, weakening Communist strongholds and culminating in the Revolutions of 1989. These were not small events in history but involved the great empires of their day. Nonviolence did not remain in the margins of history but became a source of movements that shook the world. An enormous wave of nonviolent, democratic movements at the end of the twentieth century then
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT followed, in the Philippines, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Chile, and Argentina—and in about two dozen more countries around the world. Concurrent with that, the cruder, territorial types of imperialism that hurled the globe in the early twentieth century and onward had universally disappeared. Although there were violent movements as well, nonviolence was at the center of
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this progress.
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More recent successes include the nonviolent campaigns of Leymah Gbowee and the
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women of Liberia, who were able to end peacefully a 14-year civil war and to bring to power the country‟s first female president (Fuest, 2009). Others are the 2003 Rose Revolution of Georgia,
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the 2004 Orange Revolution of Ukraine, and the 2011 Jasmine Revolution of Tunisia.
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Nonviolent movements have played a critical role in 50 of 67 transitions from authoritarianism from 1966 to 1999 (Ackerman & DuVall, 2000), and looking at all known campaigns for self-
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determination between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent actions were twice as likely to succeed as
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violent ones (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011). Nonviolent movements also increased the chances that peace and democratic rule would succeed the overthrow of the authoritarian regime, and this
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applied even to highly authoritarian and repressive countries, where nonviolent resistance is
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usually expected to fail. Movements that opt for violence, on the other hand, often unleash terrible destruction and bloodshed, often without realizing their end goals. Nonviolent resistance
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has been shown to succeed, not because it melts the hearts of dictators and secret police, but because it is better at attracting mass participation and diverse tactics, and to impose unsustainable costs on a regime than armed struggle. It is important to note here the role of women in nonviolent movements. Legend and history tell of their facing off violence with the power of spirit: Saiksawa* of Morocco subdued a Muslim army of 6000 men, Saint Geneviève saved Paris from the Huns, and Saint Claire
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT protected Assisi from the Sarrasins, to give just a few examples. Contemporary accounts are not lacking: a study of 40 peace processes over the last three decades showed that when women were allowed to influence a peace process, an agreement was almost always reached, and the peace was more likely to endure (O‟Reilly, Súilleabháin, & Paffenholz, 2015). They go further:
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women‟s empowerment in general is overwhelmingly associated with peace in a society
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(Caprioli, 2000; Gizelis, 2011; Hudson, Ballif-Spanvill, Caprioli, & Emmett, 2012; Regan &
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Paskeviciute, 2003), and higher female participation in parliament reduces the risks of war (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001) as well as human rights abuses (Melander, 2005). They are more
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effective at defying terrorism, being among the first targets of fundamentalism (Bennoune, 2014)
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and preventing violent extremism in the first place through cooperation, dialogue, and trust (Disney & Reticker, 2015). When women serve in police forces—which are more effective at
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combating terrorism than militaries (O‟Neill & Vary, 2010)—while other women more readily
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report gender-based violence (Peters, 2014). Meanwhile, women are more likely than their male counterparts to deescalate tensions and to refrain from using excessive force. Conflict parties
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may see women as less threatening because they are typically acting outside of formal power
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structures and are not commonly assumed to be mobilizing fighting forces. They frequently elicit broader societal participation, mobilizing across ethnic, religious, political, and cultural
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divides, building coalitions and political legitimacy. Women are less likely to take up arms but die in higher numbers from war‟s indirect effects—the breakdown in social order, human rights abuses, the spread of infectious diseases, and economic devastation—and thus raise different priorities during peace negotiations. Having suffered subordination through much of history, it would not be surprising if women—as well as other disadvantaged groups—had special access to “the power of the powerless” (Havel, 1985).
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3. Basic Tenets
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Nonviolence must first start from within the individual person. Gandhi likened the
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preparation and the ongoing practice of this discipline as similar to the type of training a soldier
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undergoes (Gandhi, 1993a). He cautioned that those who embraced a life of nonviolence could not pick which aspects of their lives they would approach in this manner, and continue to be
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violent in others: that would be a policy, not a life force. Nonviolence, in fact, is one step above
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violence (as the renunciation of one‟s capacity for violence), while violence is one step above
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cowardice (which is the capacity for neither). He offered several simple axioms for nonviolence:
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a) Nonviolence implies as complete self-purification as is humanly possible. b) The strength of nonviolence is in exact proportion to the ability, not the will, of the
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nonviolent person to inflict violence.
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c) Nonviolence is without exception superior to violence; i.e., the power at the disposal of a nonviolent person is always greater than he would have if he were violent.
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d) There is no such thing as defeat in nonviolence; the end of violence is the surest defeat.
e) The ultimate end of non-violence is the surest victory, if such a term may be used of nonviolence (in reality, where there is no sense of defeat, there is no sense of victory).
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Nonviolent action starts with individual transformation, but communal nonviolent campaigns manifest in groups. King (1995) gave four basic steps to nonviolence: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. American political scientist Gene Sharp (2005) defines three general types of action: protest,
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noncooperation, and intervention. In all of these, the resisters engage by first renouncing the
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means of physical violence, which then allows for a different power source to emerge.
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Many find the term nonviolence to be unsatisfactory because it is not a positive definition: it only describes what it is not. For those persuaded by violence, it does not seem as
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powerful as violence; for those who comprehend nonviolence, it does not describe the greater
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power that emerges from giving up violence. It can be misleading: one can mistakenly adopt the mere absence of violence and thus mimic the surface but not access the source of power.
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However, the term originates from a culture that accepts that some concepts are indescribable:
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ahimsa in Sanskrit follows a tradition that sometimes names concepts obliquely, such as according to the next highest order (nonviolence is considered a step above violence, which in
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turn is a step above passivity). Other traditions believe that eternal concepts are categorically
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unnamable (Laozi, 1853), which does not imply nonexistence but hyperexistence. Nonviolence as the opposite of violence has the opposite source of power, and when violence diminishes, its
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opposite can arise: the source for the powerful. For now, however, this minimal characterization may illustrate our evolution in understanding, or our transition point of renouncing destructive tendencies but still learning to embrace constructive ones. We know, for example, that symbolism in human behavior and interaction is strong enough to give rise to violence even when no tangible benefit exists (Lee, 2016a); this principle in human beings can also render physical violence powerless in the face of greater meaning. Where violence is life energy gone
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT awry, nonviolence can be a form of positive, healthy energy that affirms life and refuses to promote death. Since violence and power are opposites (Arendt, 1970), and violence a reaction against powerlessness (Lee, 2015), those moved less by the guise of power are more likely to be impressed by true power. We have come as far as to define what this power is not; perhaps,
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when we have evolved enough, we will be able to name what it is, such as truth power—and
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know that it not only precludes violence but involves love, creativity, and deep-seated
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spirituality.
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4. Applications
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Once a group has decided to move forward with nonviolent action, a myriad of strategies
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are available; Sharp (2005) identified as many as 198. Apart from nonviolent protest, as a show of disapproval of a policy, group, or government, four classes of action may be important:
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noncooperation, nonviolent intervention, constructive programming, and voluntary association
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(Schell, 2003). Noncooperation or civil resistance is the purposeful withholding of one‟s own physical or practical support, one‟s activity, time, finances, and verbal allegiance to authorities in
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order to halt or hinder their acts of oppression. One may practice civil disobedience, stop paying taxes, sit-in, boycott, break laws that are unjust, and resign from posts in that administration. Through an act of conscience, one is stating that, while one cannot actively fight against all of injustices of the world, at the very least one can withdraw the resources and might given one by the unjust system. As it turns out, this is also a powerful political act: as Gandhi noted, if the government does not receive the active support of its officials, its soldiers, its police, and its
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT citizens, it cannot endure. Of course, this does not happen easily, as each citizen must withstand the risk of being jailed, being killed, or in another way being tortured. However, the simple act of ceasing to participate in that government, with everybody doing that, the government is just left barking orders, and that would be the end of the regime. As Gandhi conceived, the support
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that people give states and institutions generates power, and when the support is withdrawn,
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institutions collapse.
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Nonviolent intervention or disruption is a more direct method of nonviolent action. Its strategies actively disrupt the normal operation of policies or systems by deliberate physical,
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psychological, social, economic, or political interference. These are often more immediate and
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effective than noncooperation, but more difficult for the resisters to sustain and harder on the opponents. They encompass fasting or hunger strikes, occupations, blockades, exposure to the
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elements, sit-ins, pray-ins, nonviolent raids, truck cavalcades, alternative markets, and other
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parallel systems. Tactics have to take into account political and cultural circumstances with a strategic larger plan, with knowledge that it can bring speedier and more severe repression than
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either protest or noncooperation. A powerful method of nonviolent intervention is to invoke
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public or international scrutiny of the oppressors as a result of meeting violent repression with nonviolence: if the police or military attempts to repress nonviolent resisters with violence,
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power shifts from the oppressors to the resisters. The lack of fear and the willingness to suffer on the part of resisters has a profound effect on those acting on behalf of the oppressor, and the police or military will have to accept that they no longer have authority over them (Sharp, 1973). Sharp (2005) notes that participants in a nonviolent struggle often suffer harsh penalties for their defiance, but victories by nonviolent struggle generally have fewer casualties, and sometimes none, compared to violent struggles with similar objectives.
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Constructive programming is what Gandhi called “silent plotting.” He counseled, instead of directing fire at the “wicked” regime, to just go out above all and do the things that one believes needs doing: if the environment is dirty, to clean it up; if people do not have enough income, to give them some of one‟s money; if people are not participating in politics, then to
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organize the village. In other words, rather than waiting to seize power and then to pass some
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legislation, one starts in one‟s own community and does the things that one can. With action on
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behalf of what one believes in, and above all when acting together with others, one also generates power. The Solidarity Movement in Poland acted in this way, engaging in what they
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called “social work”; they began to organize universities, environmental groups, and social
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justice groups—an explosion of civil society. Meanwhile, they called themselves “the selflimiting revolution,” meaning that they were not going to seek state power but let the
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government remain in its formal apparatus. However, they discovered, much to their own
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amazement, that if they were running society, then power itself eventually fell into their hands. In 1989, this is exactly what happened: while they were doing their social work and helping out
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workers who were in trouble, they were generating political power—and soon they had to be
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prime minister, minister of justice, and then to take over government. It was because the government realized at a certain point that it was unable to govern Poland without the support of
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Solidarity. They had the seeming power but not actual power, and they had to turn to Solidarity to help them, until they simply disintegrated, along with the whole Soviet Union. Voluntary association, or at a larger scale nonviolent revolution, is the phenomenon of spontaneous organization that seems to arise out of nowhere and suddenly springs into existence in revolutionary situations. It happened with the American Revolution: even before 1776, socalled “committees of correspondence,” or parallel forms of government, simultaneously came
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT into existence in all the towns, the cities, and the states. John Adams referred to this as the Revolution, rather than the war afterward, which was merely to defend what came before; the real Revolution came when the colonists took over their own lives and their own political structure. It happened even more rapidly with the Solidarity Movement: the association began
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with one shipyard, then all the shipyards, and three days later, all of Poland was on strike and in
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touch with one another, organizing and developing into a ten-year movement. The Soviet Union
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ended at that moment, and the rest was just playing out the inevitable. Very much the same happened at the beginning of the Arab Spring, in Tunisia and Egypt, especially, when suddenly
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people emerged as if from nowhere in Tahrir Square and organized: they had medical centers,
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food delivery, wound care, communication with one another, and social media. Hannah Arendt (1963) describes similar “counsel systems” in the early days of the Russian, the German, the
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American, and the French Revolutions, when counsels, or workers and other ordinary people
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who just got together in their factories or wherever they were, sat down to deliberate, to decide what actions to take, and to act on those decisions. They are closely related to constructive
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programming, but there is an additional aspect of embryonic institution-building. A similar
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principle appears in de Tocqueville‟s (1835) concept of civil society: he observed that, as soon as there was a need for something, Americans would organize to form a temperance league or to fix
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the roads, or whatever they wanted. Voluntary association is thus unique to nonviolent action, and when it evolves into parallel government, revolution ensues.
5. Conclusion
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT The span of recent history refutes the argument that violence is inevitable. Nonviolence, rather, might prove to be an essential element of our humanity that can also be a powerful antidote to violence at all levels, including the social and the political. If we considered what is the main recourse of our current civilization for maintaining order, for operating the economy,
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and for its overall structure, it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is violence: we
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organize everything through violence, or the threat of violence. It is about time that we
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recognize that a vast portion of the world‟s population now enjoys the benefits of nonviolent action, even if we are yet uncertain how to characterize this power and to apply it systematically
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to future situations. Nonviolence is, therefore, a natural progression in our pursuit of how to
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think about violence as we move away from merely meeting violence with more violence to considering underlying causes and prevention. However, if humanity is to overcome violence,
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we need first to identify it as a problem and not a given; we must recognize the alternative
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possibilities of nonviolence. While the truth of nonviolence has been in existence since the dawn of humankind, a change of consciousness is necessary for a new paradigm to form and for its
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methods to bear substantial fruit. A strategy as well as a way of life, nonviolence is beginning to
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offer convincing ways of countering the violence of our contemporary world that we cannot ignore. Successful campaigns of the last two centuries provide the foundation and the
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justification for further experimentation in the twenty-first, so that nonviolent action in the future not only contributes to the reduction of violence but to the expansion of democratic practices, political freedom, and social justice (Sharp, 2005). Characteristics of this state might include connection to self, to others, and to the natural world; deep spiritual roots; the art of really listening to each other; and a rising global, spiritual consciousness (Perpetual Peace Initiative, 2016). Perhaps then we will have achieved what seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Spinoza understood when he stated that peace is not an absence of war but a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, and justice (1670). As the world continues into the twenty-first century, will humanity continue its course of violence, or will it seize upon this
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opportunity? A viable, powerful, and productive choice seems to lie in nonviolence.
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Acknowledgment
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The author would like to gratefully acknowledge Grace Lee, who is the inspiration and the
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originating scholar for this article series.
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Bandy X. Lee PII: DOI: Reference:
S1359-1789(17)30117-9 doi: 10.1016/j.avb.2017.04.002 AVB 1104
To appear in:
Aggression and Violent Behavior
Received date: Revised date: Accepted date:
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Please cite this article as: Bandy X. Lee , Causes and cures XIV: Nonviolence approaches, Aggression and Violent Behavior (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.avb.2017.04.002
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Causes and cures XIV: Nonviolence approaches
Author:
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Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div. Yale University Law and Psychiatry Division 34 Park Street New Haven, CT 06519 [email protected] (917) 328-2492
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Abstract
The past several years have been a landmark moment for violence prevention, with
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renewed attention on the part of many international agencies, but especially the United Nations,
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with its adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The latter invites the world community to collaborate in an inclusive, long-ranging vision for the future, highlighting our
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interdependence and collective responsibility for humanity‟s future. A growing awareness that preventing violence does not just reduce death and disability but promotes creativity, economic growth, and general well-being is at the heart of this “movement”. An integration not only of the major disciplines but of various practical approaches is timely, and for this to occur, we require a broader overview of our existing societal structures. In this context, this fifteen article series modeled after a Global Health Studies course entitled, “Violence: Causes and Cures,” reviews the mechanisms that society has used in an attempt to stem violence. Continuing the transition
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT from the “law and order” to the health model, this article examines the power of nonviolence. Contrary to current assumptions, far from being passive or ineffective, nonviolent methods have demonstrated to bring down empires, to topple regimes, and to effectuate long-lasting peace—at greater frequency than violent means. Starting with the personal level, and drawing upon the
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various spiritual traditions, nonviolence may cover the depths that are necessary for countering
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our complex tendency for violence. Nonviolence gives us the lesson that peace is possible, not
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just through stemming destructive forces, but by fostering constructive ones.
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Keywords: Violence studies; Homicide; Suicide; Collective violence; Nonviolence
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We are living through a landmark moment for violence prevention. The past few years, especially, have seen growing attention to the problem of violence and the need for multilateral
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collaborations to solve it. In December 2014, for example, the World Health Organization, the
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United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the United Nations Development Programme
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(WHO, UNODC, and UNDP, 2014) joined forces to detail the efforts and successes of 133
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countries to reduce interpersonal violence in The Global Status Report on Violence Prevention 2014. It is the first major report on violence since the influential World Report on Violence and
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Health (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, and Lozano, 2002) consolidated all the existing epidemiology and science on violence. Meanwhile, the 67th World Health Assembly (WHA,
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2014) adopted a resolution addressing violence, bringing particularly to focus women, children,
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and other vulnerable members of the populations subject to systematic structural and institutional
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violence. Furthermore, Global Study on Homicide 2013: Trends, Contexts, Data (UNODC, 2014), Hidden in Plain Sight: A Statistical Analysis of Violence against Children (United
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Nations Children‟s Fund [UNICEF], 2014a), Ending Violence against Children: Six Strategies
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for Action (UNICEF, 2014b), Preventing Suicide: A Global Imperative (WHO, 2014), Preventing Youth Violence: Taking Action and Generating Evidence (WHO, 2015), and School Violence and Bullying: Global Status Report (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 2017) all reflected and added to a global awareness of violence. Most notably, in September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations [UN], 2015), addressing the need to
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT “significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere” (Goal 16), for the aspiration of sustained peace and sustainable development. This set forth other plans of action, such as by the WHO director-general (WHO, 2016a); the 69th World Health Assembly (WHA, 2016); and the Global Partnership to End Violence
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against Children (WHO, 2016b), reflecting the initiative of WHO member states, national and
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international organizations, and civil society actors. In this context, more than ever, violence
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studies need to become a field of its own right, with university-level instruction capable of integrating its enlarging scholarship into common principles for multiple sectors to concertedly
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act upon, at both local and global levels, so as to meet the challenges of our time. Ongoing
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worldwide events only confirm this need to think clearly and cogently, while acting urgently but also effectively in this area of utmost importance to humankind.Over several issues, Aggression
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and Violent Behavior has graciously published a lecture series that has been implemented at Yale
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University through the Global Health Studies course, “Violence: Causes and Cures.” As also a preview to the first comprehensive textbook on violence studies (Lee, in press), it attempts a
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systematic integration of the valuable lessons that a variety of fields have brought to the topic.
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order:
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This article consists of the fourteenth of this fifteen article series, which carries the following
1. Introduction: Toward a New Definition 2. The Biology of Violence 3. The Psychology of Violence 4. The Symbolism of Violence 5. The Sociology and Anthropology of Violence
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 6. The Political Science and Economics of Violence 7. Structural Violence 8. Environmental Violence 9. Consequences of Violence
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10. Criminal Justice Approaches
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11. International Law Approaches
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12. Public Health Approaches
14. Nonviolence Approaches (in this issue)
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15. Synthesis and Integration (in this issue)
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13. Global Medicine Approaches
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1. Introduction
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Nonviolence is a weapon of the strong. Mohandas Gandhi, Words of Gandhi (1982)
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This article represents the culmination of the interventions that we will cover in the “Causes and Cures of Violence” series. If criminal justice established that we can organize and centralize the use of violence, law showed that we can regulate society around a civilized order, even internationally. If public health demonstrated that we can prevent the problem of violence from arising in the first place, medicine underscored that we can bring our focus back to caring for intimate, human needs, even globally. Nonviolence, then, might represent a growing
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT revelation that we can employ our essential humanity to cure our violent tendencies, both personally and socially. In the previous article (Lee, 2017), we showed that a global medicine approach derives from close contact with the person and from proximity to the local when caring for that person. However, respect for the full, inextinguishable dignity of the person should not
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end there; it begins with the caregiver-receiver relationship but ends only when any hierarchy
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disappears. Empowerment occurs when the person recovers, rises, and recreates the situation so
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that the affliction or oppression not only does not recur in the person, but results in a newfound power to be able to help heal the world. To get to the core of preventing violence means to
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arrive not just at peacekeeping but peacebuilding that encompasses everything from the stability
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of wholeness to the energy of creativity. How, then, can we envision empowering the person, what would it look like, and how can personal empowerment translate into popular
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empowerment? The analogy of personal transformation can also give us clues as to the
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possibilities for a seemingly daunting change in humanity to reverse its tendency for violence against itself. Just as a shift has been happening in our way of dealing with violence from the
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“law and order” approach (meeting violence with more violence) to the “health and medicine”
might be possible.
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approach (meeting violence with healing), a shift in consciousness from violence to nonviolence
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Nonviolence derives from the Sanskrit word ahimsa, or “lack of desire to harm or kill,” and refers to: (a) the principle or practice of abstaining from the use of violence (Simpson & Weiner, 1989); or (b) the use of peaceful means, not force, to bring about political or social change (Simpson & Weiner, 1993). The importance of the negative or the absence of something, however, does not imply much significance in the English language, since the materialism of Western culture does not deem absence to be as meaningful as presence, as in the more spiritual
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Eastern traditions. Mohandas Gandhi, leader of the Indian independence movement and pioneer of nonviolence in the twentieth century, preferred the expression satyagraha, which is Sanskrit for “holding firmly to” (agraha) “truth” (satya), but this term is foreign to many Englishspeakers.
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More importantly, the relative weakness of the concept of nonviolence is due to the
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prevailing paradigm (in Late Latin, paradigma or “pattern, example,” from the Greek
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paradeigma or “pattern, model, precedent”). History abounds with examples of nonviolence as a way of ending violence, and in many instances far more successful in achieving social and
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political ends than violence, but it is still far from entering our consciousness because of the
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prevalent paradigm of violence. In other words, our general framework of how the world works revolves around violence, and therefore we are more likely to persist and to insist on violent
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methods, no matter how little success they demonstrate (Lee, 2016b) and even in the face of
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great failure (Lee, 2016c). However, just as the prevention of violence has turned out to be not only possible but effective and cost-effective (Gilligan, 2001), nonviolence has proven to be not
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only utopian but also powerful and enduring (Gregg, 1934). A discerning discussion of
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approaches to preventing violence, as well as how to think about the opposite, violence, must
article.
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thus include nonviolence, whose history, application, and basic tenets we will review in this
2. Historical basis
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Nonviolence history is not as easy to find as violence history, primarily because of the paradigm of violence that recognizes violent “episodes” more readily than more enduring examples of nonviolence. However, scholars of nonviolence are beginning to document better the power of nonviolence, especially in the past two hundred years. The seeds of nonviolent
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practices trace back to prehistory and humanity‟s first civilizations, which include individual
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actions as well as the influences of the major world religions (Adolf, 2009). For example,
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Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have influenced and impacted adherents for millennia. While Hinduism pioneered and perfected the principles of ahimsa, the
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concept reached extraordinary status when Mahavira (599 B.C. to 527 B.C.), the twenty-fourth
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spiritual teacher of Jainism, introduced the word to the world. Buddhism‟s founder, Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563/480 B.C. to c. 483/400 B.C.), put forth the Noble Eightfold Path: right
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understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right
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mindfulness, and right concentration (Gelsey, 2014), which commit one to nonviolence and the pursuit of enlightenment, based on unity and universality. Tikkun olam, which in Hebrew means
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“repairing the world,” is a key aspect of nonviolence in Judaism that considers individual
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kindness to be a foundation for fixing what is wrong with the world: “As it is written, „Who is the greatest hero?‟ „The one who turns an enemy into a friend‟” (Gottlieb, 2011). Christianity
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arose out of predictions of a Messiah who would begin an eternal, peaceful reign embodied in the birth of Jesus (c. 4 B.C. to c. A.D. 30/33): the nonviolent seeds in Christianity are believed to have started with Jesus himself and his example of meeting violence with nonviolent love (Anders, 2016). Roots of nonviolence also appear in the beginnings of Islam: the word itself means “peace” and, beginning with the revelations to its founder Muhammad (c. 570 to 632), the result and the reward of submission to God, or Allah (“the Lord”) (Esposito, 1994). The Arabic
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT term for nonviolence as a life decision is islam, for nonviolence as a method jihad (“struggle for justice”), and for the principle underlying both aspects tawhid (“affirmation of the unity of God”) (Harris, 2010); the fifth pillar of Islam, Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, provides an example where the principle of nonviolence comes alive and profoundly impacts adherents of Islam.
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While successful nonviolent campaigns are plentiful in history, from the plebeians who
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withdrew from Rome in the fifth century B.C. to the major workers‟ strikes of the early twentieth
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century, perhaps the best known of nonviolent struggles is the Indian independence movement. Gandhi drew from his Hindu background “the greatest force in the world,” or “the one
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constructive process of Nature in the midst of incessant destruction going on about us” (Gandhi,
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1993b, p. 240). Its power dawned on him in 1906 at a meeting on migrant Indian community rights in Durban, South Africa. The community had gathered in a theater and were about to vote
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on whether to refuse to register themselves, as the government was requiring them to do in order
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to gain control over them. At that point, someone stood up and suggested that they not only vote on the issue but take an oath not to be registered. This greatly impressed Gandhi, who saw an
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enormous difference in binding force between a majority vote and a personal oath. They were
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calling on a much deeper personal commitment—to abide by no matter what came, unto death. Gandhi then returned to India in 1915 and led a movement that eventually brought down the
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British Raj, which was in turn a central event that led to the downfall of imperialism, which at the time claimed most of the world. Most famous among his campaigns is the 26-day Salt March in 1930 in resistance to the British-imposed salt tax. When he and 4,000 followers arrived at the sea, Gandhi took a brief swim, scooped up salt and saltwater in his hands, and 83 volunteers dug and carried off salt deposits in bags (Sharp, 2005). This broke the Salt Act, eventually leading to Great Britain‟s grant of Indian independence in 1947.
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT In the United States, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950‟s and 1960‟s, also known as the Black Freedom Struggle, is one of the most successful, protracted periods calling upon nonviolent action in the country. At a time when, according to the law in Alabama, AfricanAmericans had to pay their fare and then sit in the back of the bus, Rosa Parks‟ refusal to yield
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her seat to a white man sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, whereby people refused
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to take the bus until the law changed. Baptist minister Martin Luther King Junior, who drew
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directly from Gandhi‟s philosophy alongside Christian inspiration, and educator Septima Clark, who backed the movement through literacy and citizenship workshops, emerged among the
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primary leaders. Nonviolent protests and civil disobedience gave rise to the Civil Rights Act of
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1957 (desegregation of public schools), the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (penalties for voter obstruction), the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing of discrimination based on race, color,
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religion, sex, or national origin), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (prohibition of racial
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discrimination in voting), and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (equal housing opportunities regardless of race, creed, or national origin). Other struggles for justice soon followed, including
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the Women‟s Liberation Movement, the American Indian Movement, anti-nuclear protests, anti-
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Vietnam War protests, and rallies for gay rights, environmental protection, and continued workers‟ rights. Campaigns of the latter category included the California grape workers‟ strike
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and boycott in 1965, as they suffered from abject poverty, displacement, homelessness, and economic exploitation, working without union representation (Merriman, 2005). The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) joined with a young Chicano leader, Cesar Chavez and his Mexican-based National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) to lead a nonviolent movement, and the Delano growers finally agreed to a pay increase in 1970. These movements inspired many regions of the world to similarly pursue desegregation and greater
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT justice. These examples show that nonviolence is good not only for dissolving oppressive regimes but also for reforming democratic ones, as have happened numerous times throughout American history. Meanwhile, the same kind of dramatic result was happening with the Solidarity
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Movement in Poland 1977 and in Czekoslovakia from the 1960‟s to the 1980‟s—movements that
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eventually led the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The Polish Solidarity Movement began with a
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nongovernmental trade union in the early 1980‟s, soon giving rise to a broad, nonviolent, antiCommunist social movement that is thought to have contributed greatly to the fall of
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Communism around half the world. Lech Wałęsa, a former shipyard worker and electrician,
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together with other workers‟ representatives, formed Solidarity, the first independent labor union in a Soviet-bloc country. Over time, 9 to10 million workers, intellectuals, and students joined,
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and soon 80 percent of the total Polish work force voluntarily belonged to a single organization,
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for the first time in history (Cirtautas, 1997). Poland‟s Communist government instituted martial law, but the movement went underground and generated the disintegrative force that drove the
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Soviet Union and its Empire, as with the British Empire, into oblivion. After several years of
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political repression the government was forced to negotiate, leading to semi-free elections in 1989. A Solidarity-coalition government had formed, and Wałęsa was elected president. A
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dismantling of the communist governmental system and Poland‟s transformation into a modern democratic state led to a spread of anti-Communist ideas and movements throughout the Eastern Bloc, weakening Communist strongholds and culminating in the Revolutions of 1989. These were not small events in history but involved the great empires of their day. Nonviolence did not remain in the margins of history but became a source of movements that shook the world. An enormous wave of nonviolent, democratic movements at the end of the twentieth century then
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT followed, in the Philippines, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Chile, and Argentina—and in about two dozen more countries around the world. Concurrent with that, the cruder, territorial types of imperialism that hurled the globe in the early twentieth century and onward had universally disappeared. Although there were violent movements as well, nonviolence was at the center of
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this progress.
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More recent successes include the nonviolent campaigns of Leymah Gbowee and the
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women of Liberia, who were able to end peacefully a 14-year civil war and to bring to power the country‟s first female president (Fuest, 2009). Others are the 2003 Rose Revolution of Georgia,
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the 2004 Orange Revolution of Ukraine, and the 2011 Jasmine Revolution of Tunisia.
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Nonviolent movements have played a critical role in 50 of 67 transitions from authoritarianism from 1966 to 1999 (Ackerman & DuVall, 2000), and looking at all known campaigns for self-
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determination between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent actions were twice as likely to succeed as
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violent ones (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011). Nonviolent movements also increased the chances that peace and democratic rule would succeed the overthrow of the authoritarian regime, and this
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applied even to highly authoritarian and repressive countries, where nonviolent resistance is
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usually expected to fail. Movements that opt for violence, on the other hand, often unleash terrible destruction and bloodshed, often without realizing their end goals. Nonviolent resistance
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has been shown to succeed, not because it melts the hearts of dictators and secret police, but because it is better at attracting mass participation and diverse tactics, and to impose unsustainable costs on a regime than armed struggle. It is important to note here the role of women in nonviolent movements. Legend and history tell of their facing off violence with the power of spirit: Saiksawa* of Morocco subdued a Muslim army of 6000 men, Saint Geneviève saved Paris from the Huns, and Saint Claire
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT protected Assisi from the Sarrasins, to give just a few examples. Contemporary accounts are not lacking: a study of 40 peace processes over the last three decades showed that when women were allowed to influence a peace process, an agreement was almost always reached, and the peace was more likely to endure (O‟Reilly, Súilleabháin, & Paffenholz, 2015). They go further:
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women‟s empowerment in general is overwhelmingly associated with peace in a society
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(Caprioli, 2000; Gizelis, 2011; Hudson, Ballif-Spanvill, Caprioli, & Emmett, 2012; Regan &
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Paskeviciute, 2003), and higher female participation in parliament reduces the risks of war (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001) as well as human rights abuses (Melander, 2005). They are more
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effective at defying terrorism, being among the first targets of fundamentalism (Bennoune, 2014)
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and preventing violent extremism in the first place through cooperation, dialogue, and trust (Disney & Reticker, 2015). When women serve in police forces—which are more effective at
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combating terrorism than militaries (O‟Neill & Vary, 2010)—while other women more readily
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report gender-based violence (Peters, 2014). Meanwhile, women are more likely than their male counterparts to deescalate tensions and to refrain from using excessive force. Conflict parties
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may see women as less threatening because they are typically acting outside of formal power
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structures and are not commonly assumed to be mobilizing fighting forces. They frequently elicit broader societal participation, mobilizing across ethnic, religious, political, and cultural
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divides, building coalitions and political legitimacy. Women are less likely to take up arms but die in higher numbers from war‟s indirect effects—the breakdown in social order, human rights abuses, the spread of infectious diseases, and economic devastation—and thus raise different priorities during peace negotiations. Having suffered subordination through much of history, it would not be surprising if women—as well as other disadvantaged groups—had special access to “the power of the powerless” (Havel, 1985).
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3. Basic Tenets
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Nonviolence must first start from within the individual person. Gandhi likened the
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preparation and the ongoing practice of this discipline as similar to the type of training a soldier
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undergoes (Gandhi, 1993a). He cautioned that those who embraced a life of nonviolence could not pick which aspects of their lives they would approach in this manner, and continue to be
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violent in others: that would be a policy, not a life force. Nonviolence, in fact, is one step above
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violence (as the renunciation of one‟s capacity for violence), while violence is one step above
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cowardice (which is the capacity for neither). He offered several simple axioms for nonviolence:
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a) Nonviolence implies as complete self-purification as is humanly possible. b) The strength of nonviolence is in exact proportion to the ability, not the will, of the
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nonviolent person to inflict violence.
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c) Nonviolence is without exception superior to violence; i.e., the power at the disposal of a nonviolent person is always greater than he would have if he were violent.
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d) There is no such thing as defeat in nonviolence; the end of violence is the surest defeat.
e) The ultimate end of non-violence is the surest victory, if such a term may be used of nonviolence (in reality, where there is no sense of defeat, there is no sense of victory).
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Nonviolent action starts with individual transformation, but communal nonviolent campaigns manifest in groups. King (1995) gave four basic steps to nonviolence: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. American political scientist Gene Sharp (2005) defines three general types of action: protest,
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noncooperation, and intervention. In all of these, the resisters engage by first renouncing the
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means of physical violence, which then allows for a different power source to emerge.
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Many find the term nonviolence to be unsatisfactory because it is not a positive definition: it only describes what it is not. For those persuaded by violence, it does not seem as
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powerful as violence; for those who comprehend nonviolence, it does not describe the greater
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power that emerges from giving up violence. It can be misleading: one can mistakenly adopt the mere absence of violence and thus mimic the surface but not access the source of power.
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However, the term originates from a culture that accepts that some concepts are indescribable:
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ahimsa in Sanskrit follows a tradition that sometimes names concepts obliquely, such as according to the next highest order (nonviolence is considered a step above violence, which in
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turn is a step above passivity). Other traditions believe that eternal concepts are categorically
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unnamable (Laozi, 1853), which does not imply nonexistence but hyperexistence. Nonviolence as the opposite of violence has the opposite source of power, and when violence diminishes, its
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opposite can arise: the source for the powerful. For now, however, this minimal characterization may illustrate our evolution in understanding, or our transition point of renouncing destructive tendencies but still learning to embrace constructive ones. We know, for example, that symbolism in human behavior and interaction is strong enough to give rise to violence even when no tangible benefit exists (Lee, 2016a); this principle in human beings can also render physical violence powerless in the face of greater meaning. Where violence is life energy gone
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT awry, nonviolence can be a form of positive, healthy energy that affirms life and refuses to promote death. Since violence and power are opposites (Arendt, 1970), and violence a reaction against powerlessness (Lee, 2015), those moved less by the guise of power are more likely to be impressed by true power. We have come as far as to define what this power is not; perhaps,
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when we have evolved enough, we will be able to name what it is, such as truth power—and
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know that it not only precludes violence but involves love, creativity, and deep-seated
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spirituality.
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4. Applications
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Once a group has decided to move forward with nonviolent action, a myriad of strategies
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are available; Sharp (2005) identified as many as 198. Apart from nonviolent protest, as a show of disapproval of a policy, group, or government, four classes of action may be important:
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noncooperation, nonviolent intervention, constructive programming, and voluntary association
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(Schell, 2003). Noncooperation or civil resistance is the purposeful withholding of one‟s own physical or practical support, one‟s activity, time, finances, and verbal allegiance to authorities in
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order to halt or hinder their acts of oppression. One may practice civil disobedience, stop paying taxes, sit-in, boycott, break laws that are unjust, and resign from posts in that administration. Through an act of conscience, one is stating that, while one cannot actively fight against all of injustices of the world, at the very least one can withdraw the resources and might given one by the unjust system. As it turns out, this is also a powerful political act: as Gandhi noted, if the government does not receive the active support of its officials, its soldiers, its police, and its
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT citizens, it cannot endure. Of course, this does not happen easily, as each citizen must withstand the risk of being jailed, being killed, or in another way being tortured. However, the simple act of ceasing to participate in that government, with everybody doing that, the government is just left barking orders, and that would be the end of the regime. As Gandhi conceived, the support
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that people give states and institutions generates power, and when the support is withdrawn,
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institutions collapse.
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Nonviolent intervention or disruption is a more direct method of nonviolent action. Its strategies actively disrupt the normal operation of policies or systems by deliberate physical,
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psychological, social, economic, or political interference. These are often more immediate and
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effective than noncooperation, but more difficult for the resisters to sustain and harder on the opponents. They encompass fasting or hunger strikes, occupations, blockades, exposure to the
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elements, sit-ins, pray-ins, nonviolent raids, truck cavalcades, alternative markets, and other
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parallel systems. Tactics have to take into account political and cultural circumstances with a strategic larger plan, with knowledge that it can bring speedier and more severe repression than
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either protest or noncooperation. A powerful method of nonviolent intervention is to invoke
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public or international scrutiny of the oppressors as a result of meeting violent repression with nonviolence: if the police or military attempts to repress nonviolent resisters with violence,
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power shifts from the oppressors to the resisters. The lack of fear and the willingness to suffer on the part of resisters has a profound effect on those acting on behalf of the oppressor, and the police or military will have to accept that they no longer have authority over them (Sharp, 1973). Sharp (2005) notes that participants in a nonviolent struggle often suffer harsh penalties for their defiance, but victories by nonviolent struggle generally have fewer casualties, and sometimes none, compared to violent struggles with similar objectives.
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Constructive programming is what Gandhi called “silent plotting.” He counseled, instead of directing fire at the “wicked” regime, to just go out above all and do the things that one believes needs doing: if the environment is dirty, to clean it up; if people do not have enough income, to give them some of one‟s money; if people are not participating in politics, then to
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organize the village. In other words, rather than waiting to seize power and then to pass some
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legislation, one starts in one‟s own community and does the things that one can. With action on
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behalf of what one believes in, and above all when acting together with others, one also generates power. The Solidarity Movement in Poland acted in this way, engaging in what they
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called “social work”; they began to organize universities, environmental groups, and social
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justice groups—an explosion of civil society. Meanwhile, they called themselves “the selflimiting revolution,” meaning that they were not going to seek state power but let the
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government remain in its formal apparatus. However, they discovered, much to their own
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amazement, that if they were running society, then power itself eventually fell into their hands. In 1989, this is exactly what happened: while they were doing their social work and helping out
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workers who were in trouble, they were generating political power—and soon they had to be
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prime minister, minister of justice, and then to take over government. It was because the government realized at a certain point that it was unable to govern Poland without the support of
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Solidarity. They had the seeming power but not actual power, and they had to turn to Solidarity to help them, until they simply disintegrated, along with the whole Soviet Union. Voluntary association, or at a larger scale nonviolent revolution, is the phenomenon of spontaneous organization that seems to arise out of nowhere and suddenly springs into existence in revolutionary situations. It happened with the American Revolution: even before 1776, socalled “committees of correspondence,” or parallel forms of government, simultaneously came
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT into existence in all the towns, the cities, and the states. John Adams referred to this as the Revolution, rather than the war afterward, which was merely to defend what came before; the real Revolution came when the colonists took over their own lives and their own political structure. It happened even more rapidly with the Solidarity Movement: the association began
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with one shipyard, then all the shipyards, and three days later, all of Poland was on strike and in
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touch with one another, organizing and developing into a ten-year movement. The Soviet Union
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ended at that moment, and the rest was just playing out the inevitable. Very much the same happened at the beginning of the Arab Spring, in Tunisia and Egypt, especially, when suddenly
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people emerged as if from nowhere in Tahrir Square and organized: they had medical centers,
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food delivery, wound care, communication with one another, and social media. Hannah Arendt (1963) describes similar “counsel systems” in the early days of the Russian, the German, the
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American, and the French Revolutions, when counsels, or workers and other ordinary people
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who just got together in their factories or wherever they were, sat down to deliberate, to decide what actions to take, and to act on those decisions. They are closely related to constructive
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programming, but there is an additional aspect of embryonic institution-building. A similar
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principle appears in de Tocqueville‟s (1835) concept of civil society: he observed that, as soon as there was a need for something, Americans would organize to form a temperance league or to fix
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the roads, or whatever they wanted. Voluntary association is thus unique to nonviolent action, and when it evolves into parallel government, revolution ensues.
5. Conclusion
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT The span of recent history refutes the argument that violence is inevitable. Nonviolence, rather, might prove to be an essential element of our humanity that can also be a powerful antidote to violence at all levels, including the social and the political. If we considered what is the main recourse of our current civilization for maintaining order, for operating the economy,
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and for its overall structure, it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is violence: we
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organize everything through violence, or the threat of violence. It is about time that we
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recognize that a vast portion of the world‟s population now enjoys the benefits of nonviolent action, even if we are yet uncertain how to characterize this power and to apply it systematically
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to future situations. Nonviolence is, therefore, a natural progression in our pursuit of how to
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think about violence as we move away from merely meeting violence with more violence to considering underlying causes and prevention. However, if humanity is to overcome violence,
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we need first to identify it as a problem and not a given; we must recognize the alternative
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possibilities of nonviolence. While the truth of nonviolence has been in existence since the dawn of humankind, a change of consciousness is necessary for a new paradigm to form and for its
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methods to bear substantial fruit. A strategy as well as a way of life, nonviolence is beginning to
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offer convincing ways of countering the violence of our contemporary world that we cannot ignore. Successful campaigns of the last two centuries provide the foundation and the
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justification for further experimentation in the twenty-first, so that nonviolent action in the future not only contributes to the reduction of violence but to the expansion of democratic practices, political freedom, and social justice (Sharp, 2005). Characteristics of this state might include connection to self, to others, and to the natural world; deep spiritual roots; the art of really listening to each other; and a rising global, spiritual consciousness (Perpetual Peace Initiative, 2016). Perhaps then we will have achieved what seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch
ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT Spinoza understood when he stated that peace is not an absence of war but a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, and justice (1670). As the world continues into the twenty-first century, will humanity continue its course of violence, or will it seize upon this
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opportunity? A viable, powerful, and productive choice seems to lie in nonviolence.
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Acknowledgment
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The author would like to gratefully acknowledge Grace Lee, who is the inspiration and the
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originating scholar for this article series.
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