Photo: Anna Graves

President’s Nobel Prize Speech Could Spark New Conversation About the Power of Nonviolence

A lot of umbrage is being taken at President Obama’s remarks delivered at the Nobel Prize ceremony on December 10 concerning the limits of nonviolence and the apparent swipes taken by the president at Gandhi and Dr. King (affixing an asterisk to their record, as Joel Achenbach put it in his Washington Post blog the next day). 

While my mind has been swarming with argument and refutation (tinged with the afore-mentioned umbrage), I am finally left with the rueful thought that those of us who are convinced that creative nonviolence is an unparalleled force for constructive and lasting peace and justice have fallen down on the job. In the end, we have not sufficiently dramatized and communicated the news that nonviolence is proving itself a powerful and effective alternative to both violence and passivity. 

President Obama is able so matter-of-factly to discredit nonviolence – and thus buttress his argument for war – because there is no sturdy conviction in the mind of the larger public that nonviolence is anything but limited, weak, passive, utopian, and ineffective.

Therefore, of course, there is no alternative to war.

The president’s version of the limitations of nonviolent power and tactics is itself limited, but this is less about his grasp of this subject (after all, few presidents would have referenced Gandhi and King at all except in the most banal way) as much as it is about how his grasp reflects the conventional take most people have on nonviolence. 

It is possible – indeed, crucial – to offer a spirited, critical and documented response to president’s presentation.  More significant still, it is important to finally engage in a systematic awareness and education campaign to dramatically shift public understanding of nonviolence and its impact.

Just as we have gradually mainstreamed the rule of law, human rights, and the vision of democracy, we have the opportunity to mainstream the power of creative nonviolence

Such an effort would work to reframe the general comprehension of nonviolence from “idealistic but ineffective relic of the Sixties” to an increasingly established form of people-power.  This would mean conveying the power of nonviolent uprisings that ended dictatorships in the Philippines, Chile, and Serbia (where “Hitler of the Balkans” Slobodan Milosevic was brought down by a movement led by students).  It would mean giving nonviolence its due in guiding Velvet Revolutions throughout Eastern Europe in 1989 and bringing down the Soviet Union in 1991.  It would mean raising the visibility of successful nonviolent movements in South Africa, Ukraine, Georgia, Indonesia, and East Timor. 

These are only a small fraction of the intractable conflicts that have been transformed through nonviolent people-power in the past half-century.  More significantly, innumerable nonviolent people-power initiatives are taking place every day around the globe, as documented, for example, at the wagingnonviolence.org website.

Widening the cultural aperture to see more clearly the historical and contemporary successes of nonviolent people-power will help us reclaim a tradition of global change in which we stand, often unwittingly.  Even more importantly, it will deepen our confidence in unleashing nonviolent people-power as we confront climate change, poverty, rampant violence, the entrenched structural violence of racism, sexism and homophobia – and even international conflict and terrorism. 

Mainstreaming Nonviolence

My shorthand phrase for this shift is “mainstreaming nonviolence.”  Just as we have gradually mainstreamed the rule of law, human rights, and the vision of democracy, we have the opportunity to mainstream the power of active, creative and relentlessly persistent nonviolence for engaging conflict without escalating violence.

By mainstreaming nonviolence I do not mean creating a utopia where all violence and conflict cease, just as mainstreaming democracy does not mean definitively doing away with all tendencies toward domination.  Instead, mainstreaming nonviolence means establishing an enduring, plausible cultural framework for engaging and transforming personal, interpersonal and social structural conflicts and violence by promoting and activating the principles and methods of nonviolent power. 

This culture would likely open the creative floodgates for designing structures and ways of being to nurture the emergence and durability of the use of this power that refuses to cooperate with violence yet does this in a spirit rooted in connection, cooperation, compassion, creativity.

Just as the decision was made in the United States and elsewhere in the 19th century to mainstream literacy, we are called at this critical moment to mainstream the power of creative nonviolence to effectively meet the challenges of our time.

This is a power each one of us possesses – but only if we know it, learn about it, and use it.

President Obama’s well-publicized verdict on the shortcomings of nonviolence would seem to set this job back.  But maybe not.  The president’s speech has opened the space for us to publicly engage this interpretation. 

On the specifics of Afghanistan, the president’s “necessary just war” is being seriously questioned in terms of both justice and necessity, but it is equally being questioned in terms of the impact of the bloody hammer of violence that will now accelerate its tearing through the web of life there, a hammering that the history of violence tells us, will likely lead to a piercing cycle of retaliation.  This moment of crisis invites us, once and for all, to seriously apprise the horror of coercive power – in this case, the weight of US military might smashing through countless lives in Afghanistan. 

But this moment is also an opportunity.  It is a chance to critically examine assumptions that too carelessly discard the nonviolent option for peacebuilding (like those sketched by the American Friends Service Committee which operates in Afghanistan).

No one would be foolhardy enough to claim that the nonviolent option will always work.  But the beauty of the search for a nonviolent way and solution is that it opens itself to alternatives one could not imagine at the beginning.  This possibility is foreclosed on if it is assumed from the beginning that this nonviolent alternative will not work. 

Next Steps

For four decades a succession of US presidents argued that the Soviet Union (Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire”) could only be dealt with through the violence of the Cold War and one regional hot war after another.  In the end, however, the unrelenting force that brought this superpower down was grassroots people power.  Such an option went largely unimagined by policy-makers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. 

Today we face the prospect of terrorism, and can only think of violent solutions, and so we will see many more people – Afghanis and Coalition troops – die.  Such a route undermines the breakthrough that is waiting to happen – the breakthrough that will be in the interest of the vast majority on both sides of the current line, and more likely than not will emerge from the people on the ground who are most at risk.

If the US government is too ready to abandon the prospect of a nonviolent alternative, there are people throughout the US and the world who are not.  And as in so many past cases, we will nonviolently and persistently set a new course and create the conditions for the policy-makers to follow, including building the next movement to end the current wars and to build the conditions for a stubbornly enduring peace.

But this moment of peril and opportunity is not only about the current policy.  That is the unexpected chance to chart a fundamentally new direction toward a long-term just and lasting peace not achieved through the illusory promises of war but through building a culture of unfettered nonviolent power. 

Pace e Bene Australia Associate Brendan McKeague has also been exploring and experimenting with  “mainstreaming nonviolnce.”  Click here to read ssome of Brendan’s reflections.