Sparking Change: How Movements Pass On Inspiration
Change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Resistance is a continuum. Nonviolent movements arise amidst the efforts of many other struggles. The knowledge of how to organize for change is a global legacy passed between movements and generations of activists through lineages of inspiration that stretch through hundreds of years. (The first recorded strike happened in 1170 BC when Egyptian pyramid builders refused to work until they were paid; they’ve been happening much the same way ever since.) We learn from one another both directly and indirectly. We mimic creative tactics. We replicate strategies. We learn from mistakes. We are emboldened by others’ courage.
I collect 30-50 stories of nonviolence in action each week for Nonviolence News, a news round-up that shows how people around the globe are making change. In the news articles, I often notice clear examples of knowledge-sharing and inspiration passing between global movements.
Wunseidel, Germany’s 2014 involuntary walkathon pledged money to social justice causes for every alt-right marcher that showed up for the march, thereby making them fundraise for causes they hate. This inspired a similar action in Portland, OR, that raised $36,000 for immigrants’ rights groups during a mass rally for the alt-right. Recently, Hong Kong protesters deliberately organized a 28-mile human chain inspired by the 1989 Baltic Way – a human chain involving 2.2 million people that stretched hundreds of kilometers across Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. They even named it the Hong Kong Way. When migrant rescue boat captain Carola Rackete was arrested for saving lives, the crew of a second ship, the Alex,was inspired to defy the law as well.
While the Internet has aided this phenomenon, the way ideas leap from one movement to the next is not new. Throughout history – albeit at a slightly slower pace – this has occurred. The word “boycott,” for example, was coined in 1880 when Irish tenants launched a campaign of social ostracizing against Captain Charles Boycott for his role in brutal evictions. Within six weeks, newspapers as far away as New York City were using the term. A few years later, as the term continued to rise into popular usage, guess which student in Britain was reading the British newspaper reports on the Irish and other struggles? A young guy named Mohandas K. Gandhi.
This was far from Gandhi’s only inspiration as he mobilized mass strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience in the struggle for India’s independence from British rule. He was both highly innovative and a deep thinker and strategist. He clearly learned from the struggles of his time. He drew ideas for nonviolent action and philosophy from a wide range of global writers and thinkers, both Eastern and Western. His unique stamp would have, in its own turn, global impact.
Some of this was spontaneous – but much of it occurred through direct connection. African-Americans, for example, had a long and well-documented exchange with both Gandhi and his successors. Letters and essays on nonviolent struggle were published in African-American newspapers and journals.
In the early 1950s, Rev. James Lawson traveled to India just after Gandhi’s assassination to deepen his study of nonviolent resistance. Upon his return, he became one of the foremost strategic architects of the US Civil Rights Movement. In later years, he has worked with numerous labor justice and other movements. He has also taught countless organizers throughout his long life and emphasizes the importance of training and study to movement success.
Movements share tactics and strategies, and they also share artistic themes. When I wrote my novel, The Dandelion Insurrection, using the dandelion as a symbol of resistance, numerous readers wrote to me about its use by movements as disparate as Norway’s resistance to joining the European Union, the United States’ 1970s Movement for a New Society, the recent Black Lives Matter Movement, and even the global climate justice movement. Like its namesake, it’s a symbol that continues to pop up all over the place.
Music, art, slogans, and imagery circulate between movements in innumerable ways. To highlight one example, the iconic song of the Civil Rights Movement, We Shall Overcome, has had many incarnations. The first version was written in 1900 by African-American Rev. Joseph Tidley under the name, I’ll Overcome Some Day. This version was well-known throughout the labor movement of that decade. A second version, I Will Overcome, was sung in a 1945 cigar workers strike in Charleston, South Carolina. Pete Seeger and Zilphia Horton (music director of the Highlander Center) included this version in a book of folk songs they published. It was rekindled within the Civil Rights Movement at the Highlander Center. Guy Carawan is credited with selecting it as the closing song of a training attended by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. From there, they and many other folksingers helped to popularize it in the movement.
There are dangers with superficially mimicking movements, however. One of the assessments of the Arab Spring uprisings is that later movements failed because they learned largely from watching television and Internet footage of Tunisia and Egypt’s mass demonstrations. Replicating only the mass street protests, movements in other countries failed to see – and use – the strikes, boycotts, and mass noncooperation campaigns that had effectively eroded the regimes’ power in the first two countries. When protesters flooded the streets in subsequent countries, the brutal repression of police and military was able to crush the movements because other strategies – especially economic resistance – that could have been shifted to had not been developed.
Some important aspects of struggle – such as organizational infrastructure, widespread training programs, acts of noncooperation, and covert resistance – tend not to be as visible to people from the outside. Studying nonviolent movements helps to illuminate these aspects beyond what we see in the news.
It is undeniable that media coverage of movements helps to inspire subsequent uprisings. The Arab Spring is cited as one of the main inspirations for the Occupy protests in the United States. The Occupy protests launched in New York City in September 2011, in part because of an Adbusters Magazinecall-to-action. Within two weeks, 951 Occupy encampments had sprung up across 82 countries, 600 in the United States . . . and a new phrase had entered movement organizing circles: multi-nodal actions. In a country with the geographic expanse of the United States, the notion – while not new – was a revelation for many. Instead of organizing people to go to big city demonstrations, actions in every city and town were organized.
In the United States, this tactical approach has been replicated continuously since the Occupy protests of 2011. The 2017 Women’s March, for example, mobilized one million people in the streets of DC and another 2.7 million across 500 other locations. One out of every 100 Americans participated in either the Women’s March or the Sister Marches (as the multi-nodal actions were called). This multi-nodal organizing approach also lies at the heart of the Student Climate Strikes, which organize weekly student walkouts and days of larger mobilizations.
The stories continue: global labor movements; women’s suffrage movements in the UK and US; Indigenous solidarity movements around the globe; intersectional movements of the 70s and 80s; anti-globalization protests at major trade conferences that shared tactical philosophies; environmental movements that adapted blockades and tree-sits from forest protection to blocking pipelines; and so much more. Each one of these examples deserves a full article. Both contemporary and historical strands of learning and inspiring can be traced through movements.
The circulation of texts, books, and manuals on nonviolent struggle has played a major role in the ways movements share tactics and strategies. The works of M.K. Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gene Sharp have had global impacts. The advent of the Internet made accessing knowledge and following contemporary movements even more common. Current campaigns seem to draw knowledge from a wide variety of sources, including traditional cultural references, organized training programs, current and recent movements, previous campaigns in their history, and local innovation.
In collecting and circulating the weekly Nonviolence News, one of my goals is to help light the sparks between people working for change. By reading about creative actions, wise strategies, and courageous resistance, we can learn from the endeavors of our fellow human beings. The more we learn, the more the sparks of inspiration lead to robust, strategic, and powerful movements for change.
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Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns. www.riverasun.com
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Dear friend,
Over the years, many of us have explored the greatest calling of nonviolence, which is not just the strategy, but as a way of being in the world. We have wrestled with questions of fear, displacement, identity, trauma, justice, courage, healing, resistance, and what it means to remain human in times that continually pull us toward division and despair.
For me personally, this long journey has also led me deeper into the teachings of a man named Jesus (not as a religious figure) but into his teachings in the time of his life, living under the empire and occupation. In that, I discovered the Beatitudes not simply as religious ideas, but as an invitation to inner transformation and to a different way of living and seeing. That led me to write my book The Sacred Awakening: Reclaiming Christ Consciousness.
This October (10-21), I will be joined by other amazing people, including Palestinian Artivist Rawan Roshni, in guiding a 10-day journey in Palestine called The Sacred Awakening Pilgrimage. This is not a typical tour or traditional pilgrimage. It is an invitation into a deeper inner journey through the teachings of Jesus, the Beatitudes, contemplative practice, community encounters, solidarity, reflection, and the living reality of this land and its people.
The journey is rooted in many of the same questions that have shaped my own work for decades:
- How do we break cycles of fear and domination?
- What does transformation actually require of us?
- What does it mean to embody love, truth, courage, and nonviolence in a fractured world?
- How do we stand in resistance and resistance to empires from a different energy than what we receive from them?
Together we will move through Bethlehem, the desert, the Galilee, Jerusalem, and other spaces, not simply to visit historical sites, but to engage them as mirrors for our own lives, consciousness, and calling.
This experience is definitely open to you or maybe someone you know, to people from all backgrounds, whether religious, spiritual, questioning, active in resistance, or simply seeking a deeper way of living.
If this speaks to you, I invite you to learn more here and sign up for a Q&A taking place on June 6th, at 10AM ET, 5PM Palestine time.
With peace & gratitude,
Sami Awad
NVI Co-Director
P.S. NVI will also be participating in the upcoming Resistance Studies Conference at UMass Amherst on June 18-21. I will be speaking on Palestine alongside activists that will address other occupied territories around the world. If you’ll be attending, the NVI team would love to know and get to connect with you there.
This article was originally published in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
The idea of Palestine as a testing ground for military and surveillance technologies has gained increasing attention in recent years. Analysts and researchers have pointed to how systems developed in the context of occupation are later exported globally and marketed as “battle-tested” tools for policing, border control and warfare.
Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, moderated an online salon focused on the use of Israeli technology tested on Palestinians and its global implications. The salon, held on April 19, was co-hosted by Nonviolence International and Voices from the Holy Land with the War Industry Resistors Network as a cosponsor.
For El-Tayyab the phrase “battle-tested” is not a metaphor; it is a mechanism. “When we describe Palestine as a laboratory,” he said, “we’re naming how surveillance tools, artificial intelligence targeting systems and weapons are tested on a civilian population living under occupation without any consent or accountability.”
And crucially, he added, these tools do not stay there. “Surveillance and weapons systems come back into our own policing, our own borders and our own wars.”
Jeff Halper, Israeli-American anthropologist and director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, situated these developments within the broader framework of settler colonialism. “You can’t come and take over another people’s country without genocide of some kind,” he said, pointing to both “cultural genocide” and “physical genocide,” the latter visible today in Gaza and, in a more incremental form, in the West Bank.
For Halper, this is not a conventional war with a beginning and an end. It is structural. He calls it “a permanent war against the Palestinian people,” one waged not only with weapons but with systems designed to control, surveil and “pacify.” Resistance, he argues, is not incidental to this history; it is built into it. “If you look at this as settler colonialism, it makes sense that a people would resist the takeover of their own country.”
Jalal Abukhater lives inside that reality in Jerusalem. “I cannot overestimate how much this regime of surveillance has control over Palestinians,” said Abukhater, who is a Palestinian writer and a policy manager at 7amleh (the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media). What he described is not simply a matter of checkpoints or movement restrictions. Surveillance, he explained, now reaches into the most intimate decisions of daily life. In Gaza, he noted, it is used to determine whether a family will be killed in their own home. Targeting decisions are made through machine learning, fed by the vast data Israel collects on Palestinian populations.
The impact is both physical and psychological. El-Tayyab, who has visited the West Bank repeatedly, described the physical toll of witnessing this up close. “Every time I’ve gone, I leave feeling very stressed. It really gets into your body. I just don’t understand how Palestinians can have so much tenacity.” For Abukhater, that tenacity is not surprising, it is exactly the point. “They want to make us feel so afraid that we stop acting, or resisting, or writing against them. But what it makes us do is become more smart about how we do our engagement, how we mobilize.” He listed what Israel has tried: annihilating villages, assassinating political leaders, jailing thousands. “But we’re still here, and it’s still ongoing.”
The infrastructure behind these systems is military and involves corporate complicity. Abukhater named Microsoft, Google and Amazon as holding contracts with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, providing services, he said, during a time of genocide. Accountability, he argued, must extend to them. And pressure can work, particularly from within: employees can organize, refuse to work on technologies of oppression and speak publicly. Beyond that, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions remain powerful tools available to ordinary people.
Yet corporate complicity does not operate in a vacuum. It is reinforced by an apartheid legislative framework designed to entrench the same asymmetries. Halper pointed to recently approved legislation including an Israeli death penalty law for terrorism that, by design, can only be applied to Palestinians. In cases of documented settler violence against Palestinians, he noted, conviction under that same law would be effectively impossible.
And yet, all these structures do not exist in isolation from the broader architecture of control. They are part of a system in which the line between military force and civilian governance has been deliberately, and dangerously, dissolved. “Historically, there was a clear distinction between the military and domestic policing, between outside and inside,” Halper said. That wall, he warned, is coming down. In Israel’s case, its “military and policing systems are one.” The result is what he calls the “security state,” a formation in which democracy is preserved in name while security overrides everything in practice. “You can have a democracy, but security trumps everything.”
In different ways, both speakers returned to the danger of normalization, the process by which the unacceptable becomes unremarkable. “There should be a campaign against normalizing Israeli apartheid,” Halper said. For Abukhater, the stakes are explicitly global. “We’ve seen how genocide is normalized and accountability mechanisms suddenly mean nothing. The danger is that this would become normalized elsewhere too.”
Palestine, he said, is not only a crisis. It is a warning. “We are a warning. We are a laboratory. It’s like cancer, and if it’s ignored, it’s going to take over if we don’t address it now.” His conclusion was direct: “Don’t let this warning not be heard. The time to act is now.”
Video recordings of this and 69 other Online Film Salons can be found at the VFHL website: <voicesfromtheholyland.org/salonrecordings>.
Nonviolence Is Not Weak. It Must Be Re-imagined for This Moment
As critics question its effectiveness, the real issue is not whether nonviolence works, but whether we are willing to practice it seriously and deploy it strategically.
There is a common belief that nonviolence is too slow, too soft, or simply not enough for the world we are living in. Serious questions are being raised about whether it works, not from outsiders, but from within movements themselves. Writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates have questioned whether nonviolence alone can confront deeply entrenched systems of power. Voices like Cornel West have warned that it is sometimes used to contain resistance, asking the oppressed to remain calm while injustice continues. And thinkers such as Arundhati Roy have pointed to its limits in the face of militarized states with little accountability. These critiques reflect a real and growing frustration.
Photo: Nayef Hashlamoun Bilin, Palestine
In places like Palestine, that frustration is lived every day. In the open air prisons of the West Bank and Gaza, people are not simply navigating a conflict. They are living under a system that controls movement, resources, and daily life. Within these conditions, communities have committed to nonviolent resistance for decades—through protests, organizing, boycott campaigns, and international solidarity—yet the reality on the ground often remains unchanged. This leads to hard questions: Is nonviolence being ignored? Is it dismissed because it does not threaten power in the same way? Is the cost too high for too little change? You hear it clearly: we marched, we organized, we told our stories, and still nothing changed. If the world does not respond to nonviolence, what are we left with, militarism or international law? These questions are not rejections of nonviolence. They are demands that oppression much stop and we need answers that adapt to the realities we face today.
That skepticism about nonviolence also comes from a misunderstanding of what nonviolence actually is—and of the structures that sustain oppressive systems.If we look more closely, many oppressive systems are not sustained by internal control alone. They are upheld by external support. In the case of Palestine, Israeli policies are reinforced by powerful international alliances, particularly with the United States. This means nonviolent resistance cannot remain local. It must expand to confront the broader systems—political, economic, and ideological—that sustain injustice. The issue is not that oppressed communities are not nonviolent or strategic enough. The issue is that nonviolence has not been scaled to challenge the full structure of power. The terrain of struggle must widen.
My recent speaking tour across the United States, titled From Occupation to Empire: Rethinking Resistance, created space for these conversations from California to Florida. What became clear is that nonviolence cannot remain localized, or practiced by a few, or framed as a moral posture. It has to become a tool of the people. That requires restructuring how we engage it—grounding it in strategy, expanding its reach, and applying it not only in distant conflicts but also against the systems of violence in our own backyards that feed the violent systems in other parts of the world.
NVI’s global database of nonviolent tactics and the book Civil Resistance Tactics of the 21st Century expands our tool kit and helps us re-imagine nonviolent action to include music, visual arts, poetry, video, theatre, disruptive mutual aid, all kinds of creative interventions to unjust global trade and social contracts, non-cooperation by consumers and businesses and workers and pre-figurative resistance where we set the example today of the world we want tomorrow. Indeed riding a bicycle, in a world burning fossil fuels, is a daily act of pre-figurative resistance.
It is also important to name this clearly: systems of oppression understand the power of nonviolence. They do not ignore it because it is weak. They respond to it because it is a threat. They crush it with force when it begins to grow, and they discredit it when force alone is not enough. They frame it as naive, ineffective, or unrealistic so that people abandon it on their own. This is not accidental. It is strategy. Undermining nonviolence—through repression or narrative—is part of how power protects itself.
The question, then, is not whether nonviolence works in theory. The question is whether we are willing to invest in it in practice. The frustration many feel is real, but abandoning nonviolence is not the answer. Strengthening it is. Nonviolence is a disciplined method of struggle that confronts injustice without reproducing the same cycles of harm. It is not about being nice, and it is not about including every voice at the expense of justice. It is about building power differently—power that can challenge systems of domination without becoming them. That means treating it as a serious method of struggle—one that requires training, coordination, discipline, strategy, and long-term commitment.
Nonviolence is not the easier path. It is the most demanding one.
Dear Friends,
From March 20 to 23, NVI Co-Directors, Michael Beer, Sami Awad, and board member Mohammed Abunimer, joined the Nuestra América Delegation to Cuba as part of a much larger international convoy of more than 600 people from around the world. We came as activists, artists, influencers, faith leaders, and community organizers, united by a simple conviction: the Cuban people should not be left alone under an embargo that continues to punish ordinary life.
The delegation was supported by CODEPINK, Progressive International, Global Health Partners, and Busboys and Poets, alongside a wider network that included The People’s Forum, Cuban Americans for Cuba, and Global Exchange.
It was our first time in Cuba! What we witnessed was not theoretical, was not news reports, was not propaganda.
Havana looks like a movie set from the 1950s! The cars and buildings are stunning -- but so run down. During our time there, Cuba continued to experience major electrical outages, part of a broader energy crisis that has left entire neighborhoods in darkness and placed immense strain on daily life. The blackouts are tied to the suffocating impact of the U.S. embargo, including restrictions on oil and essential resources.
In Cuba, this is not an abstract policy debate. It means hospitals under pressure, food and medicine at risk, transportation disrupted, garbage piled in streets, markets shut, restaurants closed, and families forced to survive with less and less.
And yet what we encountered was not defeatism. It was resilience. Generosity. Dignity.
People gathered in the dark. They shared what they had. They played music and sang in the streets. We played spirited mixed-gender ultimate with them (with donated frisbees that Michael brought). That spirit stays with us.
For those of us Palestinians, this was deeply personal. We met with and were inspired by Cuban students and others from around the world including Palestinians. We know what it means to live under systems designed to isolate, weaken, and break a people. We know what it feels like when your suffering is discussed from a distance while you are still living inside it. In Cuba, we recognized something painfully familiar: a people being made to pay the price for refusing to submit.
That is why this trip was not only a solidarity visit with medical relief and aid but also an act of nonviolent defiance.
This said, the convoy defied the embargo and carried real material support. Around 20 tons of aid were delivered, including food, medicine, solar panels, and bicycles. The delegation we were part of brought thousands of pounds of medical supplies and over a hundred suitcases and boxes of humanitarian aid, all going directly to hospitals and health workers facing severe shortages.
After we returned, the delegation faced attacks and accusations meant to discredit the trip and turn solidarity into suspicion. We reject that. People can debate politics from afar, but we know what we saw. The US has no problem engaging and trading with the communist parties of Vietnam, China, Nepal, and Laos. We saw a country under enormous pressure. We saw communities enduring blackouts and shortages. We saw doctors, families, churches, and neighbors doing their best to hold life together. And we saw hundreds of people from across the world choosing not to look away.
The embargo is not just policy, it is collective punishment.
What we carried back from Cuba was more than memory, it was clarity.
The Palestine and Cuba siege are connected, and so must be our response.
What can you do?
- Learn. Stay informed. Support organizations like the ones mentioned above.
- Refuse the narratives that justify collective punishment and oppose US unilateral sanctions on Palestine, Cuba and many other countries.
- Use your voice—in your communities, your platforms, your spaces.
- And find ways—big or small—to stand in real solidarity, including joining future delegations. Visit CUBA!
With Nonviolent Defiance,
Mohammed Abunimer, Michael Beer & Sami Awad
P.S. Please remember to attend our round table Field Testing Israeli Occupation Tech: The Palestine Lab on Sunday, April 19, 2026 3pm ET and see films in advance. This Round Table centers the human impact of this experimentation, examining how Palestinian lives are used as testing grounds for weapons, AI platforms, and policing tactics later exported worldwide. Join the Q&A discussion with: Omar Zahzah, Jeff Halper, Antony Loewenstein, Hassan El-Tayyab
You must register to join the discussion & receive access to the films