What is Nonviolence?

Nonviolence is a Powerful Tool

Nonviolence is a powerful tool that can be used in a wide variety of settings to advance deep and lasting social change.

This is where Nonviolence International focuses a great deal of our effort. We provide a growing series of resources to people all over the world.

Those interested in learning more about how NV can be used as a powerful tool might enjoy visiting our online Nonviolent Tactics Database. This database provides over 350 specific tactics that you can use today. You will find examples of where these tactics have been used.

Please also check out our partnership with Rutgers University, our Nonviolence Training Archive. There you will find top-notch training material sorted to make them easily accessible to both scholars already immersed in the field and those just beginning to explore the force more powerful than any in the world - active nonviolence.

Nonviolence is a Way of Life

For many of us, nonviolence is central to who we are. It recognizes our connection to others and allows us to put into action our deeply held values.

You will find examples of nonviolence in many spiritual and religious traditions, but its active embrace is in no way limited to people of faith. Instead, nonviolence can become a guiding light for all who seek to help create a more peaceful, just, and environmentally sustainable world.

For more information on this aspect of nonviolence, please see these posts.

Also, if you want to see our partners and the wonderful work they accomplish through nonviolence, please visit Our Partner's Page.

Nonviolence is in its Infancy

While nonviolence is an ancient power with a long and proud history that we can learn much from, as a society we have focused far too much of our energy on learning how to make war. Thus the study of active nonviolence remains in its infancy. In this time of interconnected global crises, we must quickly embrace the call to study war no more and instead must focus our collective power on building a new and more impactful version of nonviolence that rises to the challenges we face.

In the US alone we have five major tax payer funded colleges established to study how to make war.

What if we spent a fraction of our excessive military budget addressing the pressing human and environmental needs facing us today? And, we established a top-notch degree granting school that helped advance our understanding of how to build and maintain a peaceful, just world.

What if we from an early age, we taught young people how to resolve their conflicts without resorting to violence?

We might just find that peace is indeed possible.

In addition to Gene Sharp’s powerful work on Nonviolent Tactics (which we feature in our free online database), Gene also did groundbreaking work on Civilian Based Defense.

Along with Nonviolent Third Party Intervention we are just starting to build realistic alternatives to war. Together we must quickly advance this vital work.

Nonviolence is a Journey of Constant Wonder and Discovery

As you see our big tent vision of nonviolence embraces many different aspects of nonviolence. Those of us immersed in this vast and exciting field are often finding that even after years of study and action we are still learning and growing every day.

Gandhi spoke of a search for truth and that search is an ongoing process that requires us to always be willing to shift our perspective. We maintain our deeply held values, but are constantly learning from all the many wonderful people working to promote nonviolence.

Nonviolence is the Recognition of the Humanity of Others

We named our webinar series, “We Are All Part Of One Another.” This is a line from the great feminist nonviolent activist Barbara Deming. That line is, of course, reflective of an ancient truth that lies at the heart of all the world religions and the scientific understanding of humans as intensely social and interdependent creatures.

We know we can’t harm another human being without harming ourselves.

We can’t allow unjust systems to remain in place oppressing our precious sisters and brothers and call ourselves nonviolent. Instead, nonviolence calls on us to actively pursue justice for all.

“In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

-Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Nonviolence is a celebration of life

Nonviolence celebrates the beauty and diversity of life. We learn and grow together as we seek peace and work for justice.

In this shared struggle, we find great joy not only in the eventual outcome but in the process itself.

We cultivate a sense of awe and wonder at the beauty of creation. We seek to find small things to celebrate even as we directly, boldly, and without compromise face difficult challenges.

“Many people want their ethical commitments to social justice, peace, and ecological sanity to connect with achieving a life that is suffused with love, generosity, kindness, and awe, wonder & radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe and all being.”

-Rabbi Michael Lerner

What is Nonviolence?

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