Waging Nonviolence

By George Lakey In Orson Scott Card’s great 1985 strategy novel “Ender’s Game,” a boy named Ender enters a training school where students learn skills for outwitting an opponent. They play computer games that become ever more challenging. The stakes…

By George Lakey January 15, 2016, for Waging Nonviolence You may have heard the story of the woman who was walking her dog one night and found a man on his hands and knees, searching the sidewalk under the streetlight. “Can…

By George Lakey for Waging Nonviolence “Suffragette,” a British film now in U.S. theaters, tells a gripping story drawn from the direct action wing of Britain’s woman suffrage movement. Because it spotlights one tactic – property destruction – the film…

By Andrea Needham for Waging Nonviolence In January 1996, I was one of 10 women who carried out a Ploughshares action in England, disarming a Hawk attack aircraft at a British Aerospace factory in Lancashire. The Hawk was about to…

By Kate Aronoff for Waging Nonviolence Suppose for a moment that the Trans-Pacific Partnership — “NAFTA on steroids” — would not spell colossal disaster for the environment. Pretend that it wouldn’t empower unelected corporate tribunals to gut basic regulations in…

By George Lakey for Waging Nonviolence When it comes to action, we are pulled by two tendencies that seem compatible but in practice are often in tension. We want our movements to be rational – that is, to strategize well,…

By Ashoka Jegroo for Waging Nonviolence Thousands of protesters marched on June 3 in Buenos Aires and dozens of other cities across Argentina against violence towards women. Shortly before 5 p.m. on Wednesday, massive crowds of protesters gathered in the…

By Ashoka Jegroo for Waging Nonviolence Over 30,000 people crowded onto the streets of Munich, Germany on June 4 to protest the upcoming meeting between leaders of seven of the world’s richest countries. “I’d say I’m here against the inequality…

By Geoff Gilbert May 13, 2015 for Waging Nonviolence Our society’s institutions are in crisis — with looming ecological collapse, historic concentration of capital, incarceration rates far beyond those of any other country, the diminishing civil liberties that come along…

By Frida Berrigan, May 8, 2015 for Waging Nonviolence “From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says ‘Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.’” Julia Ward Howe…