Nonviolent Research Articles

Contentious politics in the borderlands: How nonviolence and migrant characteristics affect public attitudes

New political issues and opportunities lead new actors into contentious politics. This article studies one such case: transnational migrants making claims and engaging in collective action when traversing state borders. As global migration flows and accompanying political backlash has grown since the mid-2010s, borders have increasingly become sites of contention between groups of migrants seeking entry and state agents attempting to refuse it. Media coverage and elite discourse also has focused on contentious border crossings, with implications for public attitudes toward migration. In this setting, public attitudes toward migrants should vary based on the migrants’ tactics and characteristics. We expect migrants engaging in nonviolent resistance to security forces will win more public support than those engaging in violence. Migrant characteristics – claims or motives for migration and ethnic identity – should also affect support. Survey experiments in the United States and Mexico containing fictionalized vignettes of a contentious event at the countries’ shared land border show strikingly similar results: migrant nonviolent resistance, compared to violent confrontations, reduces support for deportation and increases beliefs that migrants contribute to society. These effects are consistent across party lines and border proximity. Neither migrants’ claims nor migrants’ ethnic identity affect public support in the context of a contentious event.

‘Waiting for the Barbarians’: constructing the visible invisibility of Australia’s ‘boat people’

ABSTRACT The image of the barbarian at the border has long captured the imagination of ‘civilized’ communities. Drawing on C P Cavafy’s 1904 poem, Waiting for the Barbarians, and J M Coetzee’s 1980 novel of the same name, this article explores the Australian polity’s responses to the arrival of ‘boat people’, who embody the ‘barbarian Other’ in the Australian psyche. Examining the response to unauthorised boat arrivals on Australian Federal Election day in 2022, it situates those events as part of Australia’s performance of Waiting for the Barbarians. It then examines how ‘visible invisibility’ of ‘boat people’ is constructed visually, juridically and geographically. It considers how the cultivation of fear, hostility, and forgetting enable the visible invisibility so constructed. Finally, it turns to the possibilities of resistance to the construction and devastating human effects of visible invisibility. To do this, it looks to those who are ‘visibly invisible’ for inspiration, exploring how documentary, literature, art, music, and artificial intelligence can be harnessed as powerful forms of non-violent resistance. As Cavafy and Coetzee do, the article serves as a reminder that the barbarian is within us as it ponders the possibility of ‘boat people’ offering ‘us’ a different kind of solution.

Pansy asses and terrorists: Sensibilities of anti-environmentalist toxic speech against Extinction Rebellion Finland

Hate speech against environmental activists has been on the rise globally, alongside a forceful criminalization of the climate movement in Western Europe. This article analyses anti-environmentalist speech and actions against Extinction Rebellion (XR) Finland, an environmental movement that employs non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade individuals and institutions to address the ongoing ecological emergency. The materials consist of online commenting evoked by the news coverage of XR Finland’s protests in October 2022 and May 2023, and ethnographic data from the protest sites. The data ranges from scorn and stigmatizing insults to fantasies of violence and physical assaults at the demonstration sites. The article discusses this data through the concept of toxic speech and explores the different sensibilities of such speech: (1) the ironic and dismissive sensibility, (2) the emotionally invested sensibility and (3) the punitive, resentful sensibility. This article highlights how these sensibilities and related affective practices are embedded in and compounded by gendered, class-based, ageist and ableist systems of power and argues that anti-environmentalist toxic speech contributes to environmental activism’s delegitimization and stigmatization. It suggests that toxic speech normalizes violence towards activists and can ultimately violate activists’ civil and political rights.

Social Reforms and Political Activism Unpacking the Dual Role of Khudai Khidmatgar Movement

This article examines the Khudai Khidmatgar Movement, led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan popularly known as Fakhr-i-Afghan Bacha khan, which played a pivotal role in social reform and political activism in colonial India. Founded in 1929, the movement adopted non-violent resistance to British rule while also addressing deep-rooted social issues within Pashtun society, such as factionalism, illiteracy, poverty, social and gender discrimination and blood feuds. Implying indegounious values, knowledge and tools, Ghaffar Khan promoted education, unity, and peaceful coexistence among his people, challenging the British narrative of Pashtuns as inherently violent. The article explores how the movement, initially focused on socio-educational reforms, evolved into a powerful force advocating for Indian independence, aligning with other non-violent movements like those led by Gandhi. Despite significant obstacles from the British and local elites, the Khudai Khidmatgar gained mass support, with over 100,000 members at its peak. The article highlights the movement’s transformative impact on Pashtun society and its contributions to the broader anti-colonial struggle, positioning it as a significant yet underappreciated chapter in South Asian history. This articles has relied on both primamry and secondary data for qualitative analysis, with most reliance on primary sorces of data collection. For this purpose, extensive interviews were conducted.

Antisoviet proclamation, letter and writings

The article reviews the non-violent resistance of Lithuanian youth during the Soviet era in the Šiauliai region in the 1960sand 1980s, its expression and forms.

Deconstructing Orientalist Representation of The East in Yasmina Khadra’s Sirens of Baghdad

Because of the blatant, direct persecution, and misrepresentation of all Iraqis, which comes from an Orientalist’s ignorant perception of the Orient (Iraqi), this study will be conducted to show the different misrepresentations of Arabs and Iraqis by the American tropes in a novel entitled The Sirens of Baghdad written by an Algerian novelist, Khadra Yasmina. The current study explores orientalists’ misrepresentation and the Western gaze towards the Middle East, especially the Iraqi character. Khadra portrays the complex life of Iraqis during the invasion of 2003, in the context of us versus them. Drawing on the critical framework of Orientalism theory by the theorist Edward Said, this paper examines how Sirens of Baghdad deconstructs Orientalist representations by giving voice to marginalized perspectives and resisting the erasure of local knowledge and agency. Khadra's narrative subverts simplistic depictions of “Islamic extremism”, highlighting the multifaceted social, political, and psychological factors that shape an individual's path towards violence and, ultimately, the possibility of redemption and nonviolent resistance. The study emphasizes the importance of embracing nonviolent resistance which represents a powerful alternative to the spiral of violence, gesturing towards the possibility of reconciliation and moral progress.

Interview: Reflections on Three Decades of Islamic Nonviolence

Abstract This article comprises a discussion with Prof. Mohammed Abu-Nimer, a trailblazer in the field of Peace Studies focusing on Islam and Muslim communities. It explores Prof. Abu-Nimer's reflections on the development of this field over the past three decades. It focuses in particular on methodological, institutional, and inter-cultural challenges and developments during that time. Like Prof. Abu-Nimer's long career, it is international in scope and explores convergences and divergences in the experiences and discourses surrounding Muslim-led nonviolent resistance, peacemaking and peacebuilding initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. It also includes discussion of the role played by cultural difference and hybridity in translating the distinct peace and nonviolence repertoires of Western and non-Western cultural and political contexts.

Bombs and Banners: Battlefield Dynamics and Armed Groups’ Use of Nonviolent Tactics in Civil War

Under what circumstances do armed insurgents divert scarce resources to nonviolent tactics? Despite extensive research on the causes and consequences of civil wars and resistance campaigns, our understanding of when rebel organizations add nonviolent tactics to their repertoire is limited. Moving beyond traditional explanations of nonviolent resistance campaigns, we hypothesize that rebel organizations use nonviolent tactics–such as strikes and protest–to capitalize on successes on the battlefield. Rebels have many incentives to use nonviolent tactics, but their opportunity to do so typically depends on their ability to mobilize civilians. Military successes help pave the way for mobilization by shifting civilians’ expectations about the prospects for victory and repression. Using cross-national data on rebel nonviolent contention, including original data on nonviolent tactics in struggles for control over the central government, we find robust support for our argument. Probing potential scope conditions, we show that the association is strongest among rebel organizations with civilian wings and for rebels fighting for control over the government. Our findings provide new insight into the full array of tactics that insurgents deploy, beyond variations in armed activity. They contribute to our understanding of the many forms that contentious action can take, even amidst a backdrop of violence.

Jézus törvényértelmezésének hermeneutikai kulcsai a Máté 5 néhány tételében

Jesus did not come to dissolve or abolish (καταλυσαι) the Law but to complete (πληρωσαι) it. This fulfilling process is illustrated by six examples. However, while fulfilling the Law, Jesus did not lower the norm level; instead, he raised it to a much higher level. The analyzed sentences of Jesus set unrealizable expectations. He does not at all provide a more effective method of keeping the Torah but paralyzes the person in order to realize the futility of his efforts and that the only way to God is through the grace of Christ. Through the last three cases, the method of non-violent resistance is introduced. Hostile reactions lead to an escalation of violence, whereas evil can be stopped by wisely applied non-violent opposition. Interpreting the text with appropriate hermeneutic keys, the words of Jesus analyzed here no longer seem very radical, and the feasibility of following him is also much more realistic.

Making Space for Peace in Contexts of ‘Non-war’ Violence: Challenging War-Peace Binaries Through Feminist, Spatio-Temporal, and Decolonial Approaches

ABSTRACT Peace is often represented as a matter of time, as a political state that happens after war. This special issue contests this linear and binary view by giving an account of being and thinking between the boundaries of peace and war. It challenges mainstream ideas, political discourses, and collective imaginaries about the location of violence, peace, and peacebuilding. It does so by providing empirical and theoretical arguments as to why Peace and Conflict Studies and Geographies of Peace should widen their scope of empirical sites to include contexts of non-war violence, such as military urbanism, counterterrorism, police violence, migration, environmental struggles, and continued everyday violence and peacebuilding in different locations such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. To do so, the special issue presents four theoretical lines of inquiry: 1) spatiality; 2) temporality; 3) feminist phenomenology and; 4) decolonial thought. Collectively, the articles make a strong case, epistemologically, theoretically, and methodologically, about peace as a complex embodied experience that should be analysed in time and space. The special issue concludes by calling for ‘making space for peace’ through in-betweenness, care, and non-violent resistance.

Forging Alternative Resistance Through Empathy in Sahar Khalifeh's Wild Thorns

Until recently, Palestinian nonviolent resistance has historically been overshadowed by the narrative of armed and violent resistance. This article contends that the reality of Palestinian resistance is relatively nonviolent and explores alternative nonviolent approaches drawing on Sahar Khalifeh's novel Wild Thorns. Originally published in 1976 and translated into English in 1985, Khalifeh's novel serves as a blueprint for nonviolent resistance, emphasizing empathy. This research demonstrates how interethnic connections between antagonistic groups, particularly in workplace settings, can mitigate violence by humanizing the face of the perceived enemy. Through documenting the violence of imperial imposition and scrutinizing the means by which a nation can resist its occupier nonviolently, Khalifeh creates a readership that is ready to empathize by acknowledging the trauma experienced by the Other.

Dictators and Dissidents: Nonviolent Resistance in Authoritarian Regimes

Dictators and Dissidents: Nonviolent Resistance in Authoritarian Regimes

Resistance in Mahmoud Darwish’s “I Come From There”: A Discourse Analysis

Postcolonial studies have dealt with the protest literature since they consider it as the voice of the oppressed people. In the same aspect, resistance literature begins in Palestine with Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish after 1948. Protest literature aims not only at freeing the oppressed from dominating powers and overturning the authority but also at liberating the humans from oppression. “The term resistance "Moqawamah" was first applied in a description of Palestinian Literature in 1966 by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanfani in his study "Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine" (Harlow, 1987). Mahmoud Darwish has been involved in Palestine’s political affairs throughout his entire life. In “I Come from There”, Darwish tries to raise the voice of Palestinians; therefore, it can be heard all over the world. The theme of this poem assures his refusal to forget his country and unveils the struggle for a doomed homeland. By appropriating the descriptive and analytical method, along with the discourse analysis of Darwish’s terms and phrases in the poem “I Come from There”, this paper clarifies the symbolic meaning of the words to represent his sense of loss and sense of possession that he feels towards his land. Against this, the paper argues whether resistance protest literature succeeds in defending oppressed people and giving the subaltern their voices and whether literature helps the occupied people to get free and believe in non-violent resistance instead of violent resistance.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MK GANDHI: EXPLORING EQUITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

This article investigates MK Gandhi’s philosophical odyssey, delineating the convergence of his ideologies with a focus on equity and social justice. It scrutinizes the transformative trajectory of Gandhi's beliefs, charting their evolution from his formative years in South Africa to his leadership during India's struggle for independence. The analysis encompasses Gandhi's commitment to nonviolent resistance as a means to foster equity and social justice, examining the amalgamation of these principles in his advocacy for societal change. Additionally, this article explores the contemporary relevance of Gandhi's philosophical evolution, illuminating its influence on current discourses surrounding equity and social justice. It examines Gandhi's steadfast commitment to equity and social justice, tracing the development of his principles and their application in his strategies of nonviolent resistance. This paper scrutinizes the pivotal role of Gandhi’s philosophical evolution in shaping movements for equality and social justice worldwide, elucidating the enduring relevance and impact of his teachings in contemporary societal frameworks. By dissecting Gandhi’s philosophical journey, this article aims to provide insights into the enduring impact of his principles on fostering a more just and equitable society.

The politics of allyship: Multiethnic coalitions and mass attitudes toward protest

Recent work finds that nonviolent resistance by ethnic minorities is perceived as more violent and requiring more policing than identical resistance by ethnic majorities, reducing its impact and effectiveness. We ask whether allies-advantaged group participants in disadvantaged group movements-can mitigate these barriers. On the one hand, allies can counter negative stereotypes and defuse threat perceptions among advantaged group members, while raising expectations of success and lowering expected risks among disadvantaged group members. On the other hand, allies can entail significant costs, carrying risks of cooptation, replication of power hierarchies, and marginalization of core constituencies. To shed light on this question we draw on the case of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which, in 2020, attracted unprecedented White participation. Employing a national survey experiment, we find that sizeable White presence at racial justice protests increases protest approval, reduces perceptions of violence, and raises the likelihood of participation among White audiences, while not causing significant backlash among Black audiences. Black respondents mostly see White presence as useful for advancing the movement's goals, and predominant White presence reduces expectations that protests will be forcefully repressed. We complement these results with analysis of tens of thousands of images shared on social media during the 2020 BLM protests, finding a significant association between the presence of Whites in the images and user engagement and amplification. The findings suggest that allyship can be a powerful tool for promoting sociopolitical change amid deep structural inequality.

Non‐violent resistance treatment for parenting stress and parent–child interaction in parents of adolescents with anorexia nervosa: A pilot study

AbstractParenting a child with anorexia nervosa (AN) is highly stressful, and the struggles around eating have a large impact on family functioning. Parents get involved in conflicts with their child and/or accommodate to the eating disorder symptoms. Non‐violent resistance (NVR) offers an additional treatment option for these families. NVR aims at helping parents effectively deal with their child's (self‐)destructive behaviour and their own helplessness, by non‐violent and non‐escalating means. In our pilot, we examined whether NVR was helpful in reducing stress and improve parent–child interaction. In six parents, it was found that parenting stress was significantly reduced at post‐assessment and at 3‐month follow‐up. For parent–child interaction, a non‐significant trend was found for improvement. Change in body mass index of the adolescents was not associated with the decrease in parenting stress. Although preliminary, the results of this pilot suggest that NVR can be a feasible treatment alternative for families of adolescents with AN.

Christian Climate Action: why getting arrested is important

ABSTRACT This article argues that there is a moral and theological imperative to protest against policies and industries which perpetuate the Climate and Ecological Emergency (CEE). First, evidence is gathered that different church and theological voices are aware of the CEE and engaged with it at some level. Pope Francis’ 2023 Laudate Deum and Quaker Faith and Practice are cited in particular. Walter Wink’s non-violent Jesus is offered as a rationale for creative, prophetic enactment and non-violent direct action (NVDA); and lessons are learned from the success of the 1960s American Civil Rights movement. The Christian Climate Action movement is outlined as a place where authentic and effective enactment takes place. Lastly, words from Martin Luther King Jr. serve as an indictment on today’s church where we fail to offer meaningful protest. A post-script considers ‘hypocrisy’ and the carbon footprint versus radical, systemic change.

Healing Through Activism: Transformative Solidarity in a Japanese American Anti-Racism Movement

In the eight decades since World War II, Japanese Americans have come to understand what Black, Brown, and Indigenous groups in the United States have long understood: that the harm inflicted by exclusion, imprisonment, and family separation is not temporary. Trauma still lingers in survivors of American concentration camps as well as in their descendants. Moreover, the fractures created within and between identity groups by exploitative power structures have inhibited allyship across divisions of race, ethnicity, faith, nationality, and more. This article introduces Tsuru for Solidarity, a grassroots organization at the helm of the anti-racist movement that has caught fire among Japanese Americans nationally. Bearing the scars of past racial oppression, Tsuru for Solidarity combines nonviolent direct action, cross-community organizing, and Healing Circles for Change to advocate for currently targeted immigrant, asylum-seeking, Black, and Indigenous groups. Transformative Solidarity is a concept presented through the lens of Mohanty’s Feminist Solidarity framework (2003), in reference to the healing that Tsuru for Solidarity members have experienced by way of cross-community coalition building. Tsuru for Solidarity’s healing-through-activism approach is a promising model for transformative change in the current contexts of both amplified racial hostility and unprecedented cross-racial mobilization.

Christianity, Democracy, and Suffering in Burma

This article explores why and how Burmese Christians have intensely resisted the return of military tyranny, documents the disastrous ramifications of the deepening political crisis and rising violence for Christians, and presents how churches have cared for one another and helped each other to survive. In terms of number, size, and magnitude, this national catastrophe is historically unprecedented. With other Burmese, Christians have resisted the junta, primarily because, after enduring over half a century of viciousness under military rule, they cannot think of a future without democracy and freedom. This crisis also reveals that nonviolent resistance has failed and armed resistance becomes indispensable if the Burmese want a future without military tyranny. It is, however, not the Burmese that have changed, but the context in which they have found themselves.

Reimagining self-determination: Relational, decolonial, and intersectional perspectives

Self-determination language and practice are increasingly perplexing in the 21st century. Historically linked to decolonization processes and post-imperial transformations of the international system, self-determination has espoused both violent and non-violent resistance, and supported both existing and emergent sovereignty. With the Janus-faced relationship between self-determination and colonialism continuing to this day, the contemporary moment is an opportune time to take stock of self-determination. However, as conventional jurisprudence and international legalism framings have, in many ways, hampered its emancipatory potential, alternative ways of reimagining self-determination are needed. Bringing together scholars from the fields of political and development geography, indigenous studies, international relations, and sociology, this intervention demonstrates how articulations of self-determination in specific sites offer powerful critiques of the state system and the liberal world order and unsettle hegemonic forms of knowledge production. These articulations open up conceptual space to push self-determination beyond the realm of rights, allowing us to reimagine self-determination as a vision and practice, and to recover and reconceptualize the hopeful, emancipatory and aspirational politics that have always underpinned self-determination. This intervention seeks to re-envision self-determination from three novel and interlinked angles: decoloniality, intersectionality, and relationality. Drawing on a range of examples of contemporary and historical self-determination claims and contestations, each author focuses on one or more of these angles to examine the extent to which current practices of and visions for self-determination engender novel understandings of emancipation from ‘foreign’ domination and/or colonial systems of governance.