Welcome to Nonviolence Works!

The goal of this site:
To popularize and promote the power of nonviolence.

To do this, we need your help.

What's New

Be sure to visit our new online book shop! There are lots of great books (many more than when I first was introduced to nonviolence 20 years ago) now available. There are now books about specific nonviolent struggles and some of the older books are still available. We have links to Amazon.com and other places where these books are available.

We now have an overview of the Global Nonviolent Peaceforce that is now forming. This force will go to conflict zones and do their best to keep the conflicts nonviolent. They need lots of help and support, and recruits !

And we've also added a Nonviolent Action Handbook. This contains the information that was included in many of the handbooks from nonviolent actions in the 80 at Diablo Canyon, Vandeberg Air Force Base and Livermore Labs. If you are starting to organize a protest in your own community, this is a great place to start in putting together your own handbook. We'll be adding different versions of this handbook as we come acroos them. If you have handbooks or training info, please send it along. We can create a training info library for the world.

We also have our first syllabus for a course taught about nonviolence titled: NONVIOLENT DIRECT ACTION: A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE, taught by Professor Michael True at Columbia University. I am in the process of gathering syllabuses and other course information from around the world and will be posting them here on the site. Please send along any you may have or know about, especially for grade and hight school courses.

On November 18, I gave a presentation titled The Relevance of Nonviolence in a Post-9/11 World. The entire speech, including poems, is also available as a text file. Please, read over this presentation, let me know what you think and use it yourself in your own community (instead of cliking the "text" link, just hold the mouse button down and select "download file to disk" or somthing like that and copy the text file to your hard drive). People are looking for alternatives to militarism. This presentation makes the choice very clear: the reality of militarism, what nonviolence is, how it works, its history and how we can make the shift from militarism to nonviolence. If you can translate the presentation into another language, we can make the translation available as well.Just cut and paste it into your word processor, translate it and then email it back to me.

About This Website

This website, we hope, will become a source of both information and inspiration. Our long-term vision is to involve enough people in the process of learning about and engaging in nonviolent action that we reach the point where the shift from militarism and violence to nonviolence will be unstoppable.

One thing to keep in mind when considering this possibility: paradigm shifts do not occur after everyone agrees with an idea. They happen when a critical mass of 10-15% of the people make the shift in understanding or belief. This could mean 10% of the world's population, but it could also mean 10% of your community, of your church/synagogue, or your block. Once a critical mass is reached, the idea begins to spread on its own momentum. We can all be a part of this shift. And the world we leave to our children and the coming generations will be much safer and freer than the one we have now.

The basic core belief of the Nonviolence Works Project is that people would overwhelmingly choose nonviolent struggle over militarism and violence if they were given the choice and really understood what that choice meant.

But we are not given this choice. You can go through our entire education system and come out with a Ph.D. and never learn a thing about nonviolence, its vast history and how it works. You can read the newspaper every day and watch the most liberal news shows and never learn that there are very serious nonviolent struggles going on around the world right now.

Our schools don't teach it, the media doesn't report about it and politicians ignore it. You see, understanding nonviolence means understanding power and how to wield it. The reason we are not taught about nonviolence may just be that those in power do not want us to understand that we, the people, are the ones with the real power. At the most basic level, we get to choose whether we cooperate or not. Our cooperation is the source of this power. And it makes no difference if we are talking about a democracy or the most brutal of dictatorships.

So, the goal of this site is to make more and more people aware of this reality. It's a process. We are going to have to learn together. And we are going to have to bring more and more people into this process if we hope to succeed. The underlying strategy behind this site is to engage people who come to the site in a gradual, ever-deepening process of learning about and understanding nonviolence.

Strategy for Involvement

We start with the quarterly web zine, which has articles on different aspects of nonviolence and nonviolent struggle: From the Frontlines, about current nonviolent struggles; In the Community, about nonviolence being used on the community level; Education, about different ways people are educating other about nonviolence; Recollections, about or by Elders or past leaders from nonviolent resistance movements around the world; and Perspectives, an editorial on the movement or some controversial aspect of nonviolence. We will provide updates on all the struggles we talk about in Frontlines. These articles and updates will keep the content fresh and give people a reason to come back to the site on a regular basis. Newcomers will find something new that they learn to get excited about from the articles and have the rest of the site to learn from and explore.

Next, the curious can learn more about nonviolence and how it works in the About Nonviolence section. This section will be an ever-expanding source of information about nonviolence. It will include information about how nonviolence works, its history, and how it can be applied on both an interpersonal level and in broader societal or international conflicts. The information currently available are: Common Misunderstandings; The Nature & Control of Political Power; Dynamics of Nonviolent Resistance; Historical Examples of Nonviolent Struggle; Strategy & Tactics; Methods (there are 198 different methods of nonviolent action to choose from); and Philosophy. About Nonviolence is a good place to start if you want to take the next step in learning about nonviolence. Lots of good reference material.

Once people have read a few of the web zine articles and studied some of the information about nonviolence, they can then get involved in the Community Forums. In these forums, people can ask questions, share insights and engage in dialogues around different issues relating to nonviolence. We'll also have weekly topics for discussion, for more structured learning and discussion. As interest groups (teachers, researchers and writers, activists, politicians, ministers, etc.) emerge, they can have their own forums for more focused discussion. We can set up forums for each of them so they can have their own focused discussions.

The next stage of involvement will be the nonviolent strategy games/role plays we will begin in the summer of 2002. Strategy games will get people out of the theoretical and begin really understanding the dynamics of nonviolence and how it works. Like the military, we all need training before we take our understandings and start applying them in the real struggles. WeÕll develop role playing scenarios out of past nonviolent struggles, as well as current or maybe even potential conflicts that may arise in the future. The idea behind these strategy games is to get people to start thinking about nonviolent strategy and all that goes into planning a campaign.

The next step, of course, will be for people to take what they are learning and start applying it in their own communities. We can use the forums to coordinate actions, ask for support and evaluate what has taken place. We can learn from each otherÕs mistakes as well as our successes.

To succeed, we will all need to help spread the word about this website. Copy this flier and give it to everyone you know. Send me an email, and I can send you this information in the body of an email you can forward to your email lists.

Most importantly, get involved. Together we can bring about a world of nonviolence.

Help promote this site by putting a banner linking your site to this one. Here's the banner:

Copy it to your harddrive and then add it to your site. If you need directions for how to do this, just let me know. I am going to set up a separate page under resources where I can put a link to your site as well. So, let me know when you've put up a link to this site and send me your banner and link info.

(return to menu)