People Power & Peace
6-Week Online Course with Rivera Sun
Mondays, May 6 – June 17, 2024
No Class May 27
1-2:30pm PT // 2-3:30pm MT // 3-4:30pm CT // 4-5:30pm ET
$95, scholarships available
We have more power than we think. Everyday people, like you and me, have the potential to halt or prevent war through nonviolent strategies.
Join us for an inspiring 6-week course, where you'll explore powerful stories from around the globe. From Liberia to Northern Ireland, Colombia to the Philippines, you'll discover how communities have successfully halted or averted wars through nonviolent action.
Through fascinating real-life examples, you will learn from effective strategies used in peacebuilding initiatives, civilian-based defense, and nonviolent actions. You will discover practical approaches used before, during, and after a war erupts - leaving you with a comprehensive understanding of how people power can be used at every stage of a conflict.
This participatory, engaging course will include breakout room discussions, creative exercises, and weekly assignments to take the knowledge deeper. A detailed resource list of more articles, books, and documentaries is offered for each session. This course is designed to empower you! You'll connect to practical strategies and powerful tools for how you can foster peace in our world and in your community.
Discover inspiring stories: Dive into captivating real-world examples from Algeria, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and beyond, where communities have successfully halted or averted wars through nonviolent strategies.
Explore nonviolent strategies: Examine how societies effectively stopped, replaced, or prevented war through various nonviolent strategies, including peacebuilding, citizen-led ceasefires, and nonviolent action.
Delve into powerful peace work: Investigate the role of local ceasefires, zones of peace, civilian-based defense and peace teams like Nonviolent Peaceforce, discovering how they've made a tangible difference in conflict zones worldwide.
Find your power: Tap into your capacity to build peace and learn to apply the strategies, practices, and skills from this course.
As we bear witness to ongoing conflicts in regions like Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and beyond, this course equips you with the knowledge and tools to push for peace in surprising and effective ways. By understanding and learning from these inspiring stories, you'll come away with renewed vision, ideas for action, and the knowledge of how people like you have taken meaningful action to build a more peaceful world.
You will:
Come away with ideas for action on ongoing conflicts
Learn from current and historic examples
Understand the role of nonviolent action in peace efforts
Discover we have more power than we think
Explore promising strategies like peace teams and civilian-based defense
Have chances to apply knowledge to your peace efforts
Week 1 - People Power & Peace: Using an impressive range of strategies, ordinary people like you and me are finding ways to replace, prevent, halt, and end war. These stories give us new tools and approaches for working for peace.
Week 2 - Replacing War With Nonviolent Struggle: With mass protests, boycotts, strikes, and other actions, people are achieving major social-political goals without the use of violence. We will look at examples from Bolivia to Estonia and beyond to see how nonviolent struggle is replacing war.
Week 3 - Preventing War From Breaking Out: From Algeria to Niger to the Philippines, there are extraordinary examples of how people have intervened when wars seemed inevitable. We will learn from these examples and many more.
Week 4 - Waging Struggle Differently: When war crashes down around us, it’s not just a choice of ‘kill or be killed’. Examples from Nazi-occupied countries during WWII and by enslaved African-Americans during the US Civil War show that the ‘resistance’ often includes powerful ways of ‘fighting’ without violence. This session will also examine the role of civilian-based defense in Lithuania, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Quebec and beyond.
Week 5 - Peace Teams, Ceasefires & Bringing War To a Close: From Liberia to Northern Ireland, people power has stopped brutal and entrenched wars. In this session, we will look at those examples, and also the role of peace teams, zones of peace (such as in Colombia), and citizen-led ceasefires in bringing wars to a close.
Week 6 - Building Lasting Peace: By fostering a culture of peace and dismantling the military-industrial complex, societies can make wars less likely to occur. We will look at examples of nations without armies, anti-militarism campaigns, draft resistance, military base closures, peace education, and peace infrastructure around the world.
Facilitator
Author/Activist Rivera Sun is the Editor of Nonviolence News, a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent movements, and the author of many books and novels, including The Dandelion Insurrection and The Way Between. She serves on the Advisory Board of World Beyond War and Backbone Campaign. Rivera helps coordinate Campaign Nonviolence Action Days and our Nonviolent Cities Project. www.riverasun.com