Nonviolent Change is possible because:

• We all matter
• We all are connected
• We all are wounded
• We all are sacred
• We all have a piece of the truth
• We all can love and be loved

Nonviolent change is possible because we all can choose to: 

• Ease suffering
• Challenge fear
• Transform Us vs. Them
• Decline to be enemies
• End support for violence
• Imagine another way

A French philosopher once admonished his American colleague by saying, “Well yes, it works in practice, but will it work in theory?”

Nonviolence is a beautiful theory, critics have gibed forever, but it doesn’t work in the real world.

Now, like the consternation expressed by our unworldly French philosopher, there is a grudging recognition that it is violence which fails in practice while nonviolence is increasingly working in the real world – and that its effectiveness is rooted in a set of theories (about the power of cooperation, creativity, compassion, and connection) that trump the theories of violence based on the power of threat and domination.

The Progressive Magazine reports on a study by researchers Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, who analyzed 323 resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 demonstrating the overwhelming success of major nonviolent campaigns versus violent ones. Click here to see The Progressive article.  Or click here to get a PDF of the study.

We live in an era when, despite its enormous violence, a deep historical shift is taking place in favor of the cooperative power of active, transformative, and effective nonviolence. This shift, which has been gathering momentum for the past three hundred years, accelerated during the 20th century with the application of spiritually-grounded nonviolence by Mohandas Gandhi to win India’s independence from Britain; with the spirited use of disciplined nonviolence by the US Civil Rights movement to make epochal change in the United States; and with countless nonviolent struggles for human rights, political change and environmental protection. People in innumerable contexts have used nonviolence to work for the survival and dignity of all. Over the past two decades, this disciplined and grounded nonviolent people power has:

• Brought down the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines (1986) and the Suharto regime in Indonesia (1998), and created the conditions for East Timor’s independence from Indonesia (2000);
• Fueled the Solidarity movement’s social transformation of Poland (1980s);
• Powered the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and throughout Eastern Europe (1989) that undermined Soviet control and contributed to the disintegration of the USSR, a collapse that occurred in the wake of the 1991 military coup, which was thwarted by 40,000 people nonviolently defending the parliament building in Moscow;
• Ended military governments in Spain and Portugal (1970s), the dictatorship of Milosevic in Serbia (2000), the corrupt government of the Republic of Georgia (2003), and is in the process of creating nonviolent change in Ukraine (2004);
• Upended numerous military dictatorships in Latin America, including Pinochet’s regime in Chile (1980s) and the governments responsible for Argentina’s “Dirty War” against its own people (1970s and 1980s);
• Ended the apartheid regime in South Africa and sparked that country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1980s-1990s); and
• Created the global conditions for the emergence of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, ending almost all nuclear weapons testing on the earth (1992).

What these and many other movements underscore is that active nonviolence is neither passive nor ineffective. Rather, active nonviolence is a form of effective and deeply rooted power at the disposal of people and societies. Energetic and courageous, this power creates peace, justice and meaning without maintaining and escalating the spiral of retaliatory violence.

Increasingly, theory and practice are meeting. Does this mean we have no work to do? On the contrary, our job is to put this theory – this vision, this set of principles – into practice in addressing the violence and injustice we see around us. But this data and these actions are beautifully illuminating how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s theory – that, while the moral arc of the universe is long, it bends toward justice – is being revealed daily.