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Join Nonviolence International, Beautiful Trouble, BlackOUT Collective, and OR Books for a webinar on:
"Democracy Defense: Advice from Activists Around the World."
Tuesday, October 6, 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT (16:00-18:00 GMT)
This interactive webinar will feature presentations by scholars and activists who took part in people power defense of democracy and elections. Speakers include:
- Philippine professor and activist Joaquin Gonzalez
- Serbian professor and nonviolent organizer Ivan Marovic
- Gambian organizer and activist Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan
- American professor and author Stephen Zunes
- Brazilian organizer and activist Joana Varon
- Our host will be author and activist Maria J. Stephan
Is U.S. democracy staring at its own grave? Might we need to protect election results against a militarized, white supremacist effort to stop a full vote count? Are Americans up against something unlike anything they’ve experienced in our lifetime? If you answered “yes” to any of the above questions, you’ll certainly understand why we’ve organized a panel of global anti-coup experts to advise Americans on their strategy for the months or years ahead. And we want you to be a part of it. We invite you to join us on a public 2-hour Zoom call moderated panel and discussion that can help us strategize about the very real threats that feel new for so many Americans, but are all too familiar for those who have resisted dictators before.
PANELISTS:
Joaquin Gonzalez (Philippines/USA) is the Mayor George Christopher Professor of Public Administration at Golden Gate University in California. Prior to immigrating to the United States, Dr. Gonzalez was a street activist in the 1986 People Power Revolution which peacefully removed a long-time Philippine authoritarian ruler. He started out as a volunteer with the non-partisan National Movement for a Free Elections (NAMFREL) tasked to ensure that votes were properly cast and counted.
Ivan Marovic (Serbia) is an organizer, software developer and social innovator from Belgrade, Serbia. He was a student organizer and one of the leaders of Otpor, a resistance movement which played a critical role in the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. After a brief time in politics, it was time to grow up and move to more serious things, so Ivan started developing video games like A Force More Powerful and People Power, and platforms for local organizing like Moba. He successfully stayed out of politics for two decades, the time he spent advising activists and organizers around the world on strategies for citizen self organizing and movement building. Ivan holds a BSC in Process Engineering from Belgrade University and MA in international relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Stephen Zunes (USA) is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he served as founding director of the program in Middle Eastern Studies. Zunes serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, an associate editor of Peace Review, and a contributing editor of Tikkun.
He is the author of hundreds of articles for scholarly and general readership on Middle Eastern politics, U.S. foreign policy, nonviolent action, and human rights. He is the principal editor of Nonviolent Social Movements (Blackwell Publishers, 1999), the author of the Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003) and co-author (with Jacob Mundy) of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution (Syracuse University Press, 2010).
Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan (Gambia) is an award winning Pan African Advocate of the year 2018 and was named as 100 most influential young people leaders in Africa in 2019. As a human rights activist he organized widespread protests to get long Gambia dictator Yaya Jammeh to step down. Muhammed Lamin the Movement Coordinators of Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. A Pan African grassroots Movement of the people and organizations working to foster an Africa-wide solidarity and unity of purpose of the Peoples of Africa to build the Future we want – a right to peace, social inclusion and shared prosperity. Muhammed Lamin Saidykhan is a Gambian with a back ground on community organizing, youth and women development, campaigns for social change, policy advocacy, movement building and none violence activism.
Joana Varon (Brazil) Executive Directress and Creative Chaos Catalyst at Coding Rights, a women-run organization working to expose and redress the power imbalances built into technology and its application, particularly those that reinforce gender and North/South inequalities. Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from Harvard Kennedy School and affiliated to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Former Mozilla Media Fellow, she is co-creator of several creative projects operating in the interplay between activism, arts and technologies, such as transfeministech.org, chupadados.com, #safersisters, Safer Nudes, protestos.org, Net of Rights and freenetfilm.org.
Host and Contributor:
Maria J. Stephan's (USA) career has bridged the academic, policy, and non-profit sectors, with a focus on the role of civil resistance and nonviolent movements in advancing human rights, democratic freedoms, and sustainable peace globally. Stephan is the co-author (with Erica Chenoweth) of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, which was awarded the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Prize by the American Political Science Association for the best book published in political science, and the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. She is the co-author of Bolstering Democracy: Lessons Learned and the Path Forward (Atlantic Council, 2018); the co-editor of Is Authoritarianism Staging a Comeback? (Atlantic Council, 2015); and the editor of Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization and Governance in the Middle East (Palgrave, 2009). Stephan, a native Vermonter, received her PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
PARTNERS:
Beautiful Trouble exists to make nonviolent revolution irresistible by providing an ever-growing suite of strategic tools and trainings that inspire movements for a more just, healthy, and equitable world.
BlackOUT Collective is a radical full service direct action organization. We build organizations’ capacity to execute creative and effective direct actions in service of their organizing and advocacy work. We do this through providing personalized direct action trainings and on the ground action support. We see ourselves as a “Liberation Lab”- a container for experimentation, deep space visioning and learning.
OR Books is a new type of publishing company. It embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business.
This webinar is part of NVI's series - We Are All Part of One Another. The purpose of the webinar is to educate the world about nonviolent activism and its utility in defending democracy. Through these timely webinars, Nonviolence International educates, inspires, and builds a strong community as we work for a better world. We celebrate the visionary work of these passionate leaders and look forward to sharing the inspiration with all of you.
We will be hosting an impressive range of nonviolent activists, thinkers, and leaders. We hope that you will make our webinar series a regular part of your schedule. Each episode you will hear a powerful story of how people are using creative nonviolence in these difficult days.
We look forward to an interactive and inspirational webinar series.