Peace and Nonviolence — The Metta Center for Nonviolence

Lesson 3: Peace & Nonviolence

Objectives:

Better understand the importance and meaning of ‘nonviolence’
Explore case studies of organizations and individuals working on peace
Think broadly and strategically about principled nonviolence

Introduction

People have a hard time believing nonviolence can be a natural capacity (not to mention the natural capacity) because our educational system, our mass media— indeed, our whole culture—upholds a picture of reality that came to predominate around the time of the Industrial Revolution: namely, that the world consists of material particles that collide randomly, and that evolution is, or was (they tend to think it’s over now) a grim struggle for survival of the fittest, so inevitably competition and violence are just how life works.

As pointed out before, the old story is a story of violence and destruction and it is driving our species to extinction. The new story is based on nonviolence and peace. But, the old story of materialism and separateness makes that we rarely have been in contact with the idea of nonviolence, its mechanisms and principles. However, in the second lesson we’ve seen that the old story is crumbling, because of several new scientific discoveries and the rising awareness that it will be impossible to continue living the way we do. New research has shown that humans have depended on cooperation to survive and are predisposed to be empathic (we have something called “mirror neurons”). These new insights open the way to reconsider the idea that humans are ‘violent by nature’ and instead start to explore the possibilities of nonviolence.

Nonviolence and the New Story are Interdependent

First, we want to explain why nonviolence is so important for the new story. There are two main reasons why nonviolence is central to the new story: it completes the story, and it’s the right tool for the job.

In The Third Harmony Michael Nagler writes:

To review the two main principles of the structure of the Roadmap:

You begin by working on yourself (personal empowerment), then with your colleagues ('constructive program’), and finally against injustice (‘obstructive program’, or resistance). Note that resistance is against injustice, never against the person causing it: it is not in their best interest to continue that behavior, or structure.
Do constructive work wherever possible (which is almost always) and nonviolent resistance when necessary. Sometimes building alternatives and other constructive action is enough! The problem (sometimes) will take care of itself.

To clarify these terms: Obstructive resistance includes actions that stop harm from being done. It can also be called, in most cases, confrontational nonviolence. Think of the many protests, sit-ins, strikes, petitions, etc. that have been done around the world. Obstructive nonviolence can be very effective in achieving short term goals, and it also has a positive effect on long-term developments, as Chenoweth and Stephan showed with a statistical comparison of nonviolent and violent movements. The movements they studied were aiming at regime change and thus predominantly obstructive, often confrontational in nature. The nonviolent examples led to long term changes for greater democracy -- even when they failed to change the regime! But they were more successful in achieving regime change (in 56% of the cases) compared to violent movements (23%). Traditionally, people think of “nonviolence” only in terms of resistance, obstruction, and there are many such movements, nonviolent or other, like the “People Power Revolution” in the Philippines in (1986), Chile (1988 -- won by constitutional means) and entire regions, like “Arab Spring” in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere (2011). Gandhi, however, came to believe that building peace and justice, the “beloved community,” was if anything more important, more true to the spirit of nonviolence, and ultimately more effective than tearing down the structures of injustice. He called it Constructive Program.

With constructive program (CP) we mean actions that create alternatives to existing ways of doing things. They are largely non-confrontational, like the spinning campaign (khadi), but can also be quite confrontational, like the Salt Satyagraha of 1930. The power of a constructive approach was illustrated by a group called “everyday gandhis“ in Liberia. They had a chance encounter with a man named Christian, who has been one of the leaders of the Rebels during the civil war. After the war, without any skills to make a living, he became depressed and started drinking. When his wife threw him out of the house, telling him to come back when he can provide again for his family, he decided to offer his fighting skills to the neighboring country, where a war was starting, as that was the only thing he knew how to do. There at the border, he heard a group of people talking about peace, and as soon as they noticed him, they involved him in their conversation and welcomed him with hugs. This kind approach made a big impact on Christian and he asked more about their work, sharing that he was broke. They gave him some money and told him to meet them in two weeks time to explore employment with their organisation. Stunned, Christian returned to his village and met them a week later. And so the former rebel became the coordinator of the Peace Hut Alliance, building peace huts for former child-soldiers, providing help in those huts to reintegrate into society again and heal from their war traumas.

In The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action, Michael Nagler writes:

“Nonviolence is not a moral or philosophical abstraction. It also is not just a set of tactics, a mere method. People fighting for their freedom have brought about impressive changes simply by not taking up weapons.[...] [But] whatever the merits of this [obstructive] approach [...] I hope I’ve made it clear that we can go much further when we hold nonviolence as a principle, a way of being in the world.”

Nonviolence, Gandhi said, is “a method of carrying conviction and converting by appealing to the sympathetic chord in human beings. It relies upon the ultimate good in every human being” and, we might add, helps to strengthen that core of goodness in so doing. Nonviolence works on the fact that human beings are naturally empathic and have a natural capacity to be nonviolent. It’s success gives the lie to the “old story” perspective, that we are ‘naturally’ aggressive and violent. Rather, we can understand violence as a maladaptive behaviour that can be unlearned.

So, while obstructive action may be an effective and sometimes necessary way to achieve your goals. It’s important that both obstructive and constructive work are done in the spirit of remembering the humanity of the ‘opponent’ and cooperating to achieve mutual well-being: it is not in the oppressor’s long-term best interests to go on oppressing. How far this can go was brought out in the Civil Rights movement. Bernard Lafayette recounts that after many lunch-counter sit-ins, a manager of a prominent department store in the South agreed to desegregate his lunch counters. The activists, however, responded by telling him that what they needed him to do was not desegregate his counters only (which would have caused him a great deal of social ostracism), but go to the Chamber of Commerce, the country club, to people who manage other lunch counters, and persuade them to take the same position. Even more, when Lafayette proposed that they go on to do the same in other locations, the movement’s great strategist Jim Lawson said to Lafayette: “No, Bernard. Let them do it. Only then we know that we have succeeded and we have accomplished our goal. The goal was not changing the lunch counters or other structures of segregation, it was “changing the hearts of the people who were sustaining and maintaining segregation.”

Peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding

Johan Galtung, a founder of peace studies, explained that the mere absence of war can be called Negative Peace, while Positive Peace must include the attitudes, institutions, and structures that can sustain peaceful societies. Positive Peace can be built by three strategies:

These three kinds of efforts correspond to Galtung’s classification of three kinds of violence: peacekeeping can end direct violence, ranging from physical or verbal violence between people to war between states or other entities. Peacekeeping can be done by armed actors, as with the UN peacekeeping missions. Peacemaking is usually done by diplomacy, to bring a specific conflict to an end, but it can also address structural violence, defined as the violence of a social structure or institution that harms people by preventing them from meeting their legitimate needs... And peacebuilding entails the creation of alternatives to cultural violence, those aspects of culture (beliefs, values, and ways of being) that make violence seem like an acceptable means of responding to conflict.

Examples

Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping

Previously known as Third Party Nonviolent Intervention (TPNI) there are some forty groups today that build on Gandhi’s Shanti Sena, or ‘peace army’. Trained individuals are deployed to different conflict areas, within the home country or cross-border, to reduce conflict. The means include rumor abatement, accompanying local activists, or in the extreme interposing themselves between conflicting parties. Organizations like Peace Brigades International, Christian Peacemaker Teams, and Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP), among others, give people basic training in nonviolence and cultural knowledge and send them into some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts (think Sri Lanka, South Sudan, or Syria). When on the ground, working with local organizations, one of the things they commonly do is simple but effective: round-the-clock accompaniment of threatened people, often human rights workers. They also can serve as go-betweens, and provide other good offices. NP for example has helped broker a peace agreement in Mindanao and rescued child soldiers in Sri Lanka.

Below you will find stories from the book and film The Third Harmony:

An experience from Nonviolent Peaceforce volunteers in South Sudan

Derek Oakley and his team leader, Andres Gutierrez, were having an average day at the UN camp for refugees from the war. It was April 2015, Bor State, South Sudan, a region with over two million internally displaced refugees. The attack came without warning. First stones, then gunshots; a heavily armed militia broke through the defense perimeter. The two internationals wore conspicuous khaki vests and the logo of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, emblems of their training and mission: to protect civilian lives. Derek and Andres started to run for cover. Then they remembered what they’d been taught: you can’t outrun bullets. They herded some women and children into the nearest tent. Before long, the flaps flew open and men armed with axes, AK-47s, and sharpened sticks poured in. Momentarily startled to see two non-Sudanese, they soon recovered from the shock and ordered the two men out. But they were in for a bigger shock. “I’m sorry,” said Derek, showing their badges. “We’re international protection officers. We’re not leaving.” Astoundingly (if you don’t know nonviolence), the would-be killers looked at each other in consternation and backed out. A fluke? Hardly. Two other groups broke in, and each time again Derek and Andres “flipped the script” on them, and they backed out.

Outside the hut, fifty-nine people were massacred and three hundred injured in the space of twenty minutes. But inside, the women and children were safe. Once again, as with the story of Antoinette Tuff, a conventional protection system was in place—in this case, UN troops—that proved useless (they are ordered to not fire in those situations), while an unarmed nonviolent presence saved the day. As Andres pointed out, “If we had had a weapon, we would have been killed.” And Derek sagely added, “We had another weapon.” The motto of Nonviolent Peaceforce: “what you can say yes to when you say no to war.”

See Nonviolent Peaceforce’s Website

From The Third Harmony, by Michael Nagler, 2020

An experience from Peace Brigades International volunteers in El Salvador

In 1989, Karen Ridd and four other international volunteers were working with a group called Peace Brigades International (PBI) when they were suddenly arrested by the Salvadoran military. Three of the five were Spanish nationals and they were promptly deported from El Salvador, leaving Karen, who was Canadian, and her friend Marcela Rodriguez, who was from Colombia, to face whatever was coming. Fortunately, Karen had time to call the Canadian consul and alert another PBI volunteer who happened to call in at the right moment. This was some comfort, as was the civility—at first—of the soldiers. But no one from the team had faced arrest before (to date, no international volunteer has been killed in Central America

despite enormous violence all around them) and from another room Marcela heard the soldiers describing them as “terrorists from the Episcopal Church.” Their spirits did not improve when the two women, along with other detainees, were loaded onto a truck, taken to an army barracks, blindfolded, and subjected to five hours of interrogation about their alleged connection with the guerrilla Frente Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) while sounds of torture and the sobbing of victims came from nearby rooms.

Karen knew that PBI would quickly alert their worldwide network about the arrests, but she also knew that time was short—there was no telling what would happen in that barracks if someone didn’t get them out before nightfall. PBI had, in fact, activated its worldwide network, and before long hundreds of people were sending faxes to the Canadian and Colombian embassies, calling and sending e-mails to their representatives to urge Karen and Marcela’s immediate release. All of this got no response at all from the Colombian embassy, but Canada brought official pressure on the Salvadoran government, no doubt hinting that their extensive trade relations with El Salvador could be compromised if Karen was not released immediately. Whatever it was that got through to whoever was in charge, Karen found herself walking across the barracks grounds toward a waiting embassy official a few hours later, a free woman. But when the soldiers removed her blindfold inside the barracks, she had caught a glimpse of Marcela, face to the wall, “a perfect image of dehumanization.” Glad as Karen was to be alive, something tugged at her. Feeling terrible, she made some excuses to the exasperated Canadian embassy official who had come all the way from San Salvador to get her, turned and walked back into the barracks. She didn’t know what would happen to her in there, but knew it could not be worse than walking out on a friend. The soldiers were startled, almost exasperated. They handcuffed her again. In the next room, a soldier banged Marcela’s head into the wall and said that some “white bitch” was stupid enough to walk back in there, and, “Now you’re going to see the treatment a terrorist deserves!” No more mister nice guy. But Karen’s gesture was having a strange effect on the men. They talked to Karen despite themselves, and she tried to explain why she had returned. Pointedly she said: “You know what it’s like to be separated from a compañero.” That got to them. They released Karen and Marcela and the two women walked out together under the stars, hand in hand.

From The Search for a Nonviolent Future by Michael Nagler (2001), Berkeley Hill Books.

Peacemaking

Peacemaking can happen on a formal level, through diplomacy, or on more informal levels, by people using various methods of conflict resolution. Making peace most often involves getting different parties together to reach some kind of agreement.

Peacemaking can be practised as prevention of conflict or resolution once it has occurred, with respectively appropriate methods. Let’s examine a dramatic example of women’s movement in Liberia where the women used a mixture of obstructive and constructive nonviolence to get warring parties together, sign a peace agreement and hold democratic elections.

The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace

A civil war broke out in Liberia in 2001, in which villages were looted and burned, women raped, and young boys recruited to fight. As a result, thousands of individuals fled to the capital and lived in camps without much food or drinking water. Social worker Leymah Gbowee brought women from her church together to protest the war and pray for peace. Slowly more churches joined, as well as mosques. The united group of Christian and Muslim women staged a joint protest on the first of April using radio to spread the Word.

Over 2,500 women gathered at the fish market, visible from President Taylor’s residence, every day for a week, wearing white clothing. They agreed to go on a sex strike, denying their partners intimacy until the war had ended. They urged Taylor and the rebels to negotiate, but both refused. With their message, “The women of Liberia say peace is our goal, peace is what matters, peace is what we need,” the women marched through the streets. The march concluded at Monrovia’s Municipal Office where they demanded a meeting with Taylor, to which he finally agreed.

On April 23, the meeting happened and Gbowee presented their position statement on stage while the rest of the women sat in the audience, holding hands and praying. Taylor agreed that he would attend peace talks. The group then heard that the rebels would have a meeting in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and some women traveled there, located the hotel, lined up in the streets and sat in front of the hotel, refusing to leave until they were given a meeting with the warlords. They met the leaders of two rebel groups and convinced them to attend the peace talks in Accra, Ghana. On June 4, the peace talks began. The women who had traveled from Liberia gathered on the lawn of the building where the talks were held, singing and holding signs. During the course of the Accra negotiations, Taylor fled back to Liberia after being formally accused of war crimes by an international court in Sierra Leone. A full-scale war broke out in the capital, Monrovia, even while the peace talks continued in Ghana. After many displaced Liberians had died in an attack on the American embassy compound, the women in Ghana made a human chain around the negotiation building, refusing to let delegates leave until they reached a settlement. The chief mediator agreed to meet with the women, provided they would leave the building. Three weeks later President Taylor resigned and was exiled to Nigeria. A transitional government was put in place to begin the process of democratic elections. The women remained involved to ensure they would keep the peace agreement. International troops entered Liberia, and started a disarmament process, urging ex-combatants to surrender their weapons for cash. The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace group registered voters and set up polling stations to help the government bring about democratic elections. On November 23, 2005, the Liberian people elected their country’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and the Liberian women for peace officially concluded their mass action campaign. In 2011 Sirleaf and Gbowee were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

(See Swarthmore Global Nonviolent Action Database, Navarro, 2010.)

Some Constructive Conflict Resolution methods

Nonviolent Communication

Marshall B. Rosenberg (1934–2015) was an American psychologist who was involved in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, mediating between students and college administration and helping to desegregate schools. He developed a method based on his insight that conflict does not arise from meeting needs but the strategies parties use to meet them. The Nonviolent Communication (NVC) process has four steps: observation, feeling, need, and request. He wrote several books that are now used all over the world, such as A Language of Life (2003). The Center for Nonviolent Communication certifies trainers worldwide. From their website:

“Through the practice of NVC, we can learn to clarify what we are observing, what emotions we are feeling, what values we want to live by, and what we want to ask of ourselves and others. We will no longer need to use the language of blame, judgment, or domination. We can experience the deep pleasure of contributing to each other’s well-being.”

For conflicts at the first stage of the Escalation Curve, i.e. where parties are listening to each other at least to some extent, NVC is an effective tool that millions of people have been trained in or in which they’ve participated

Mediation

Mediation employs a third party, usually with a legal background, and is often used as a way to reach an agreement without going to court, where they often have no say in the final solution. In the mediation process, facilitated by a trained mediator, people reach their own solution. This is not a legally binding solution -- that is called arbitration or binding arbitration -- but one that is mutually agreed upon, which of course leaves both parties on more friendly terms. It is a form of Conflict Resolution, which we will have more to say about in the next sector.

There are numerous community centers and community organisations that offer training for mediators, as well as several higher education institutions that offer certificates in the skill.

A special form of mediation worth mentioning is peer mediation. This is practised mostly in schools, where students of the same age group are trained and supported to aid their peers by providing a safe and structured process to help heal their conflicts. Mediators practice. listening, empathising, facilitating safe communication, confidentiality, and being impartial and fair. The existence of such a program can create a more relaxed, inclusive and positive school environment where much fighting can be avoided. It’s a way to empower students to address bullying, gossip, harassment and exclusion by themselves, giving them agency and needed skills while of course taking much pressure off the school administration.

Other Skills and Tools

Another useful tool is the Thomas-Killman Conflict Style: confronting, avoiding, accommodating, compromising and joint-problem solving. The United States Institute for Peace has developed a test to see what’s your most frequently used style.

A very helpful concept for any application of nonviolence is the Two Hands of Nonviolence (frequently mentioned in the film, “The Third Harmony”). It was first introduced by feminist writer and activist Barbara Deming n her book Revolution and Equilibrium:

“With one hand we say to one who is angry, or to an oppressor, or to an unjust system, “Stop what you are doing. I refuse to honor the role you are choosing to play, I refuse to obey you. I refuse to cooperate with your demands. I refuse to build the walls and the bombs. I refuse to pay for the guns. With this hand I will even interfere with the wrong you are doing. I want to disrupt the easy pattern of your life. But then the advocate of nonviolence lowers the other hand. It is lowered outstretched —maybe with love and sympathy, maybe not—but always outstretched. . . . With this hand we say, “I won’t let go of you or cast you out of the human race. I have faith that you can make a better choice than you are making now, and I’ll be here when you are ready. Like it or not, we are part of one another.”

Finally, it may be useful to consider these useful skills:

Active Listening
Patience
Willingness to compromise or collaborate
Prioritising resolving the conflict over “being right” (valuing the importance of the relationship versus the issue)
Focusing on the conflict at hand and not past/other ones/issues
Expressing "I statements,” e.g. “I feel a bit hurt when you act this way” rather than blaming, and finally:
Not taking things personally

Peacebuilding

To reduce the risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict, we often need to adjust structural injustices and/or create alternatives to cultural violence -- beliefs, values, and ways of being that make violence seem acceptable and effective. Peacebuilding is thus the most long-term approach to peace. The new story gives it a context.

Many indigenous cultures still embody robust peace systems, at least within their own communities, with examples of practices and institutions that we can adopt. They have been well documented by anthropologists. One reasonably peaceful culture that has actually reached out to the industrial world is that of the Kogi in Colombia, who invited a filmmaker who was working for Discovery Channel to help them give their message to “younger brother” (us) about how they were destroying the environment. He made two films, “From the Heart of the World - the Elder Brothers' Warning” (2009) and “Aluna” (2012).

The United Nations Resolution for a Culture of Peace identifies eight key-areas:

UNESCO has played a key role in developing this concept

Peacebuilding, in other words, is creating an infrastructure for peace in different areas. A good example is the Nonviolent Cities project of Pace e Bene. It was inspired by Nonviolent Carbondale, Illinois, that had fostered community-driven explorations of peace, compassion and social justice issues since 2011 and worked to promote a nonviolent city, including the city council, police department, school system, library system, health care system, religious communities, and nonprofit organizations. The Nonviolent Cities project now has organizers in over 50 cities across the US. It mandates that cities pursue a more holistic, creative, city-wide vision where everyone practices, promotes, teaches and institutionalizes nonviolence at the local level.

Nonviolent cities work to:

end racism, poverty, homelessness and violence at every level and in every form;
dismantle housing segregation and pursue racial, social and economic nonviolent integration;
end police violence and institutionalize police nonviolence;
organize to end domestic violence and teach nonviolence between spouses, and nonviolence toward all children;
work to end gang violence and teach nonviolence to gang members;
teach nonviolence in every school;
help get rid of guns, gun shows and local weapons manufacturers;
pursue more nonviolent immigration programs and policies;
take steps to oppose every form of structural violence, including sexism and homophobia;
get religious leaders and communities to promote nonviolence and the vision of a new nonviolent city;
reform local jails and prisons so they are more nonviolent and educate guards and prisoners in nonviolence;
put up signs calling for nonviolence everywhere in the community;
address local environmental destruction, climate change, and environmental racism, and pursue clean water, solar and wind power, and a 100% green community; and
in general, do everything possible to help their local community become more disarmed, more reconciled, more just, more welcoming, more inclusive, and more nonviolent.

Another, quite different example is that of the Green Belt movement in Kenya, an interesting combination of sustainable development, women empowerment and democracy.

In the 1970s, Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement (GBM) in Kenya; an environmental non-governmental organization focused on planting trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights. As a response to the lack of water and wood, the Green Belt Movement encouraged women to work together to grow seedlings and plant trees to bind the soil, store rainwater, provide food and firewood in exchange for a small monetary token for their work. Participants came to understand that for years they had been placing their trust in leaders who had betrayed them and that they were sabotaging their lives by not working for the common good and failing to use their natural resources wisely. Consequently, the Green Belt Movement began to advocate greater democratic space and more accountability from national leaders. It fought against land grabbing and the encroachment of agriculture into the forests. It contested the placement of a tower block in Uhuru Park in downtown Nairobi and joined others to call for the release of political prisoners. (See greenbelt movement.org.) The movement remains in the front line of environmental conservation in Kenya and continues to make great progress on reclaiming and restoring forest land.

Maathai became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, and was an elected member of Parliament and served as Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources between 2003 and 2005. (See the film “Taking Root”).

Nonviolent principles

To sum up, keep in mind the following principles as we go on to the other sectors.:

Reflection and discussion questions

How can you contribute to connecting nonviolence to the new story? Did this give you new insights that you find useful in what you already do or want to do?
How can you contribute to Peace-keeping, -making, or - building? Is there a strategy you’ve already used without knowing these terms? Which of the tree appeals to you the most and why?
Which of the stories in this lesson caught your attention the most? What was it that interests you?

Homework

Continue with your “media fast” and exploration of information of nonviolence, as well as your (exploration of) spiritual practice or contemplation, efforts to reach out to others and reflecting on your skills and purpose. Keep track of the changes that this creates in you, as you keep building your personal power.
Ask yourself: what action can I take to create more peace? Perhaps you want to focus on peacemaking, improving the relationships you have. You may want to try out some of the conflict resolution skills we mentioned in this lesson. Or you could even do a bit of peacebuilding with your peace-making efforts as well, as you support gender equality and Human Rights with your actions too. Or do you have to do some ‘peacekeeping’ in your family? Maybe you can help to let things cool down, as a preparation for people to engage in conflict resolution.