Summoning the Power of Active Nonviolence
We have more power than we think.
This is a truth that I’ve learned and re-learned across four decades of organizing, and which I’ve found myself adamantly proclaiming in the classroom and on the streets.
As we approach what may be the most important, and nerve-wracking, election of our lifetime, it is critical that we savor this truth—and act on it.
Power pretends to emanate from the top. In fact, it is a bottom-up reality. Ironically, we are sometimes among the pillars that keep it in place. This is both a disheartening and transformative fact.
Disheartening because, if it is true, it means that somehow the mass aggregate of us have sometimes kept the unjust status quo in place—through our apathy, our fear, our obedience, our privilege, our lack of empathy, our racism, our misplaced patriotism, our longing for leaders, our disorganization, or even our preference for the evil we know versus the alternative we don’t.
Transformative because it means that we can actually change things—by removing the stubborn supports that keep them in place and mobilizing for a more just reality.
This, of course, is easier said than done—but the great thing is that people around the globe are, in fact, increasingly getting it done.
Unjust systems, policies and conditions, though often deeply ingrained and fiercely defended, are not metaphysical realities that descend from on high. They are constructions, and, as we now know, anything constructed can be deconstructed. All it takes is the often-laborious process of alerting, educating, and mobilizing the populace to fuel and sustain the people-power necessary to bring down the pillars and to create a more just, peaceful and life-giving reality.
The late activist and thinker Bill Moyer helped us think about the importance of movements for doing this. As he put it his ground-breaking book, Doing Democracy, “The power of movements is directly proportional to the forcefulness with which the grassroots exert their discontent and demand change. The central issue of social movements, therefore, is the struggle between the movement and the power-holders to win the hearts (sympathies), minds (public opinion), and active support of the great majority of the populace, which ultimately holds the power to either preserve the status quo or create change.”
In other words, power ultimately resides in our hands, but it generally will not express itself—and create the conditions for change—without organizing effective social movements.
The Love That Does Justice
And what makes movements effective?
Increasingly, the research shows that the discipline of nonviolence makes the difference. Movement violence muddies the message, often shifting the focus from the issue to the movement’s tactics. On the other hand, nonviolence (what Dr. Martin Luther King called “the love that does justice”) tends to make the issue clear—including the violence and injustice it is working to end—and encourages the larger public to support, and even join, the struggle.
It also is more likely to foster a constructive resolution and, as Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s landmark research shows in Why Civil Resistance Works, nurture a more long-term democratic outcome. Their research indicates that movements capable of organizing and mobilizing 3.5% of the populace often achieve their strategic goals. It also found that it is easier to reach that percentage when movements are nonviolent, if only because violence repels most people while nonviolent strategies are more likely to attract them.
The secret to achieving these outcomes is rooted in the nature of nonviolence itself.
Nonviolence fosters social change by mobilizing a power that does not depend on threat or destructiveness. We have more power than we think because this power is not “power-over” (the power of dominating, coercing or defeating) but “power-with” (connecting, compassionate, communicative, and creative).
This “power-with” is actively driving toward unity and reconciliation. It does this, not through passivity, but by resisting everything that blocks and attacks unity and reconciliation. Nonviolent “power-with” is a strenuous process of challenging, grappling with and disrupting structures, policies, conditions, and systems of injustice, and doing so with a peaceful regard for the humanness and sacredness of all parties: every ally, every opponent, and every member of our wounded and sacred world.
Nonviolence is struggle.
This Pro-Democracy Moment
In the last half-century, we have seen many powerful and largely successful nonviolent pro-democracy struggles, including in Spain and Portugal (1970s), the Philippines (1986), Chile (1980s), Argentina (1980s), Soviet bloc states, including the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, etc. (1989); the thwarted coup in the USSR (1991); South Africa (1980s-1990s); Indonesia (1998); East Timor (2000); Serbia (2000); Georgia (2003); Ukraine (2004); Liberia (2005); and Tunisia and Egypt (2011), and Sudan (2019).
And now, we may be on the verge of a pro-democracy struggle of our own.
I am convinced that nonviolent struggle will be critical to engaging this impending crisis—and to the future of the nation.
We at Pace e Bene have gathered in one place links to many of the coalitions, networks, and organizations that have been organizing to defend democracy: to see that every vote is counted; to see that the election is not stolen; and to see that we are equipped with trainings and resources for nonviolent struggle should we need to engage in it.
Of note, is Choose Democracy and Protect the Results, where you can find actions planned as needed.
These are many great articles posted here as well, including Ashley Quarcoo’s “Three New Ways Civil Society is Protecting the US Election” (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). This piece highlights the centrality of nonviolence to numerous efforts being organized to defend democracy, and includes a link to Pace e Bene trainings among others.
Three Resources
I would especially recommend the following three resources.
First: “Bringing Down a Dictator,” a film available for streaming for free from the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict. This riveting documentary charts how Serbia’s leader, Slobodan Milosevic—known as the “Hitler of the Balkans”—was brought down in 2000 by OTPOR! (Resistance!), a nonviolent movement largely organized by young people. It may give us a sense of what organized nonviolent resistance can look like and what it can achieve. (The one caveat: In my classes and workshops I stress that the violence depicted at the end of the film was at odds with the nonviolence of the OTPOR! movement and risked undoing everything they had achieved. OTPOR! has taught us a great deal about the power of nonviolence, but the violence of a relatively small number of people at the end jeopardized this historic movement.)
Second: Novelist and Pace e Bene trainer Rivera Sun’s superb “Defending the Election with Nonviolence Video.”
Third: it would not hurt to take Dr. King’s six principles of nonviolence into our heart (and perhaps printed out and kept in our back pocket) in preparation for these coming days:
Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
It is active nonviolent resistance to evil.
It is assertive spiritually, mentally and emotionally.
Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
The end result of nonviolence is redemption and reconciliation.
The purpose of nonviolence is the creation of the Beloved Community.
Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.
Nonviolence holds that evil doers are also victims.
The nonviolent resister seeks to defeat evil, not people.
Nonviolence holds that voluntary suffering can educate and transform.
Nonviolence accepts suffering without retaliation.
Nonviolence accepts violence if necessary, but will never inflict it.
Nonviolence willingly accepts the consequences of its acts.
Unearned voluntary suffering is redemptive and has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities.
Voluntary suffering can have the power to convert the enemy when reason fails.
Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.
Nonviolence resists violence of the spirit as well as the body.
Nonviolent love gives willingly, even knowing that it might face hostility.
Nonviolent love is active, not passive.
Nonviolent love is unending in its ability to forgive in order to restore community.
Nonviolent love does not sink to the level of the hater.
Love for the enemy is how we demonstrate love for ourselves.
Love restores community and resists injustice.
Nonviolence recognizes the fact that all life is interrelated.
Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.
The nonviolent resister has deep faith that justice will eventually win.
Nonviolence believes that God is a God of justice and love.
Nonviolence is the Responsibility of All
Nonviolence is for everyone. For change-makers, but also for those who govern and for all the members of society. It is a birthright, but also a responsibility of all.
It is the responsibility of the state as well as those who challenge the injustice of the state.
The concept of democracy at its heart is nonviolent. Democracy was predicated on the notion that “ballots” can trump “bullets" — that we can reach decisions as a nation through nonviolent conflict and peaceable contestation, rather than through violence and war.
This core understanding of democracy now hangs in the balance.
We must help our nation and its political culture understand that nonviolence is the preeminent dynamic at the center of the democratic process, and that it has an obligation to proceed nonviolently, including in how it confronts the forces of nonviolent democracy itself. It is time for the state to model the nonviolence that it sometimes calls others to live.
In these coming days, we may be called to insistent on nonviolence for all by embodying this nonviolence ourselves.
We have more power than we think. And this is likely a moment in history when each of us will be asked to summon this nonviolent power for the good of all.
M.L. King, Jr.’s principles were adapted by the Fellowship of Reconciliation from Dr. King’s book Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1958). May the spirit of the late John Lewis — the great champion of nonviolence — be with us in this time of crisis and opportunity.
