Europe’s rampant turbo-militarization is fueled in part by an assumption that it is time to question. This assumption is widespread, both in military circles and in popular culture at large, as well as among many activist circles. The assumption is that violence is an effective method or means of achieving one’s ends.

The questionable effectiveness of violence

However, there is reason to doubt this.

Firstly—and to put it simply, even simplistically—in any violent conflict, if one side wins, the other loses: violence therefore fails at least half the time.

Secondly, the reaction of those against whom violence is used may be to comply, to submit, or to refuse and resist. Examples of this include Hamas, Israel, Ukraine, and Russia, to name but a few. This response is neither predictable nor controllable: those who inflict violence cannot guarantee the reaction of their victims.

Third, few wars in the last century have ended in decisive military victory (states with greater military capacity do not necessarily emerge victorious: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ukraine). Violence is therefore not particularly effective in achieving stated political objectives, nor is a greater capacity to inflict it a guarantee of success.

To be clear, I am not claiming that violence always fails, but in any case it fails more often than we tend to imagine when we preach or accept it. What the use of violence guarantees, on the other hand, is a series of ravages: interpersonal violence (including sexist violence), material and environmental destruction… Violence destroys; it afflicts its victims and their loved ones; it brutalizes its perpetrators; it traumatizes all those it absorbs.

Who benefits from violence?

This does not mean that the use of violence does not benefit anyone. Large profits can be made from the production of weapons. Political agendas and careers can be advanced. Competitors can be discredited. Specific targets can be eliminated. Images of decisive action can be projected. Pacifists have long been concerned about how such interests weigh heavily on decisions to wage and prepare for war.

Armed violence is not as often as we think a smart bet, even when it comes to self-defense. And it leads to dangerous militarization, with authoritarian tendencies and dubious profits.

So what can be done? How can we respond to dangers such as those presented, for example, by Vladimir Putin’s Russia?

An alternative: Nonviolent Civil Defense (NCD)

Well, I think it is high time to bring Nonviolent Civil Defense (or NCD) back to the forefront as an alternative to traditional defense strategies (as does the special issue of Alternatives Non-Violentes from December 2024).

Since the 2011 study by Chenoweth and Stephan (Why Civil Resistance Works), we know that nonviolent resistance seems to work at least as often as violent resistance (twice as often, according to them, although the details are debatable). That said, nonviolence does not guarantee success (any more than violent methods do). Furthermore, the majority of studies on nonviolence cover examples of primarily domestic resistance, not interstate warfare. The question, then, is whether nonviolence could work as a method of defense against military invasion.

There is no great and shining example of a country that has defended itself using CNVD. Lithuania, perhaps, during the fall of the USSR. But there are countless examples of peoples who have resisted, often in a relatively spontaneous manner, and defeated all kinds of authoritarian and colonial regimes, including occupation regimes.

The Ukrainian case: an alternative scenario

Let’s return for a moment to the war in Ukraine. Between the Euromaidan of 2013-14 and 2022, Ukraine moved closer to NATO and doubled its military budget. What if the same commitment in terms of time, funding, and administrative capacity had been devoted during those years to training all Ukrainians in nonviolent resistance? What if Ukraine and its allies had decided to invest as much in NVC as in the military response? The course of events would have been risky, uncertain, and difficult for Ukrainians. But are we sure that the outcome would have been worse than the cities razed to the ground, the populations displaced, the more than 200,000 deaths that the war has cost so far, not to mention the still uncertain outcome and the risk of nuclear escalation? (This is a question I examine in an article published in January.)

Establishing a genuine citizen defense

We will not have proof that DCNV works until we try it. But to implement it, it would “suffice” to organize and finance the training of all citizens in methods of nonviolent resistance. States have the administrative and financial capacity to do this. It would be much less expensive than Europe’s rearmament program. It would avoid the dangers posed by this rampant militarization. And it would, incidentally, equip our democracies to better resist the rise of fascism, to take action against climate change, sexism, etc.

Conclusion: opening up a new horizon

For me, therefore, our current context is an opportunity to campaign for at least part of the resources promised for defense to be used to train all citizens in NVC. This would open up a much more promising and much less terrifying horizon than the one our leaders are asking us to envisage.

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos is a senior lecturer in political science and international relations at Loughborough University. He is the author of Tolstoy’s Political Thought (2020) and Christian Anarchism (2010), as well as numerous articles and chapters on Leo Tolstoy, religious anarchism, pacifism, and anarcho-pacifism. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence. A complete list of his publications is available on his website:

https://sites.google.com/site/christoyannopoulos/publications-by-theme

See also the article published in Pressenza last April on the DCNV: https://www.pressenza.com/fr/2025/04/defense-civile-non-violente-dcnv-histoire-dune-notion/