The Technology of Nonviolence PDF Download

Author: Joseph G. Bock
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262017628
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Towards an applied theory of violence prevention -- Reporting and warning about deadly possibilities -- Organizing against ethnoreligious violence in Ahmedabad -- Overcoming gang violence in Chicago -- Counteracting ethnoreligious violence in Sri Lanka -- Crowdsourcing during post-election violence in Kenya -- Foisting tribal violence in East Africa -- Comparing the approaches -- How to intervene effectively -- What to do when violence prevention is unlikely to work -- Concerns about misallocation of resources -- Future directions and recommendations.

Author: Joseph G. Bock
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262304627
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
How technology and community organizing can combine to help prevent violence, with examples from Chicago to Sri Lanka. Tunisian and Egyptian protestors famously made use of social media to rally supporters and disseminate information as the “Arab Spring” began to unfold in 2010. Less well known, but with just as much potential to bring about social change, are ongoing local efforts to use social media and other forms of technology to prevent deadly outbreaks of violence. In The Technology of Nonviolence, Joseph Bock describes and documents technology-enhanced efforts to stop violence before it happens in Africa, Asia, and the United States. Once peacekeeping was the purview of international observers, but today local citizens take violence prevention into their own hands. These local approaches often involve technology—including the use of digital mapping, crowdsourcing, and mathematical pattern recognition to identify likely locations of violence—but, as Bock shows, technological advances are of little value unless they are used by a trained cadre of community organizers. After covering general concepts in violence prevention and describing technological approaches to tracking conflict and cooperation, Bock offers five case studies that range from “low-tech” interventions to prevent ethnic and religious violence in Ahmedebad, India, to an anti-gang initiative in Chicago that uses Second Life to train its “violence interrupters.” There is solid evidence of success, Bock concludes, but there is much to be discovered, developed, and, most important, implemented.

Author: Erica Chenoweth
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231527489
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788732782
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

Author: James M. Lawson Jr
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520387856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
A persuasive account of the philosophy and power of nonviolence organizing, and a resource for building and sustaining effective social movements. Despite the rich history of nonviolent philosophy, many people today are unfamiliar with the basic principles and practices of nonviolence––even as these concepts have guided so many direct-action movements to overturn forms of racial apartheid, military and police violence, and dictatorships around the world. Revolutionary Nonviolence is a crucial resource on the long history of nonviolent philosophy through the teachings of Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., one of the great practitioners of revolution through deliberate and sustained nonviolence. His ongoing work demonstrates how we can overcome violence and oppression through organized direct action, presenting a powerful roadmap for a new generation of activists. Rev. Lawson’s work as a theologian, pastor, and social-change activist has inspired hope and liberation for more than sixty years. To hear and see him speak is to experience the power of the prophetic tradition in the African American and social gospel. In Revolutionary Nonviolence, Michael K. Honey and Kent Wong reflect on Rev. Lawson's talks and dialogues, from his speeches at the Nashville sit-in movement in 1960 to his lectures in the current UCLA curriculum. This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to Rev. Lawson's teachings on how to center nonviolence in successfully organizing for change.

Author: Mark A. Mattaini
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1927356415
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
History indicates that there are powerful routes to liberation from oppression that do not involve violence. Mohandas Gandhi called for a science of nonviolent action, one based on satyagraha, or the “insistence on truth.” As Gandhi understood, nonviolent resistance is not passive, nor is it weak; rather, such action is an exercise of power. Despite the success of Gandhi’s “Quit India” movement, the resources dedicated to the application of rigorous science to nonviolent struggle have been vanishingly small. By contrast, almost unimaginable levels of financial and human resources have been devoted to the science and technologies of killing, war, and collective violence. Mark Mattaini reviews the history and theory of nonviolent struggles against oppression and discusses recent research that indicates the substantial need for and advantage of nonviolent alternatives. He then offers a detailed exploration of principles of behavioral systems science that appear to underlie effective strategic civil resistance and “people power.” Strategic Nonviolent Power proposes that the route to what Gandhi described as the “undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries” of nonviolent resistance is the application of rigorous science. Although not a simple science, Mattaini’s application of ecological science grounded in the science of behaviour brings exceptional power to the struggle for justice and liberation. At a time when civil resistance is actively reshaping global political realities, the science of nonviolent struggle deserves the attention of the scientific, activist, strategic, military, spiritual, and diplomatic communities, as well as the informed public.

Author: Anna Hamling
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 9781527566767
Category : Conflict management
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This innovative collection emphasises the contribution of women to the resolution of conflicts through the means of nonviolent tools. It discusses their achievements and their tactics, bringing together international scholars to draw on intersectionality as an important methodological tool in the analysis of the work of many outstanding women from diverse countries such as Yemen, Nigeria, El Salvador, India and the USA. The focus of this volume is the impact of women successfully building peace though nonviolent means. It also provides a study of how, and why, gender matters in the contemporary world, and will serve the needs of students and scholars in peace and conflict resolution studies, womenâ (TM)s studies, international development, political science, history and sociology.

Author: Randall Amster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317254546
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
"Peace Ecology" presents a cutting-edge exploration of an emerging paradigm that links the essence of peace and nonviolence with the tenets of ecology and the principles of environmentalism. Looking at issues including food justice, water sharing, climate change, peace zones, and the free economy, this book considers examples and illustrations from around the world where people, communities, and nations are employing the teachings of ecology as a tool for mitigating conflict and promoting peace. "Peace Ecology" presents an integrative perspective that bears directly upon the most pressing issues of our time, constituting both the ecological realm of peace and the peacemaking potential of ecology. The volume examines the rich history, contemporary relevance, and transformative future potential inherent in this dynamic nexus of theory and action. Its overarching aim is no less than moving the current scarcity-conflict paradigm to one of cooperative resource management and, ultimately, toward peaceful coexistence both among ourselves and within the balance of nature.To read the Common Dreams excerpt of "Peace Ecology" Click Here.Talk Nation Radio Interview with Randall Amster and David Swanson here."

Author: Joan Slonczewski
Publisher: Orb Books
ISBN: 1429963654
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean is the novel upon which the author's reputation as an important SF writer principally rests. A ground-breaking work both of feminist SF and of world-building hard SF, it concerns the Sharers of Shora, a nation of women on a distant moon in the far future who are pacifists, highly advanced in biological sciences, and who reproduce by parthenogenesis--there are no males--and tells of the conflicts that erupt when a neighboring civilization decides to develop their ocean world, and send in an army. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Author: Michael N. Nagler, Ph.D.
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1626561478
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 99

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Book Description
“Nonviolence is not the recourse of the weak but actually calls for an uncommon kind of strength; it is not a refraining from something but the engaging of a positive force,” renowned peace activist Michael Nagler writes. Here he offers a step-by-step guide to creatively using nonviolence to confront any problem and to build change movements capable of restructuring the very bedrock of society. Nagler identifies some specific tactical mistakes made by unsuccessful nonviolent actions such as the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and the Occupy protests and includes stories of successful nonviolent resistance from around the world, including an example from Nazi Germany. And he shows that nonviolence is more than a tactic—it is a way of living that will enrich every area of our lives.