June 2014 – Page 2 – Engaging Peace

Do you hear what I hear?

Posted on June 16, 2014June 16, 2014 by kathiemm

: Photo by Tom Pratt.. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Every way I turn my head, I hear echoes from 9/11.

What I hear:

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. The excited heart of George W. Bush as he envisioned finishing what his father had started and planting Uncle Sam’s big boot on Iraqi oil fields.

No! No! No! The screams of babies, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles as they’re being pierced, shattered, and torn apart by guns, mortars, bombs, and collapsing buildings, courtesy of the U.S. military.

Thud, thud, thud. Earth and sand being thrown on all those graves. There in Iraq. Here in the US.

What I don’t hear:

Triumphant cheers from Iraqi perpetrators of 9/11. And why not? Because Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

The hum of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—there were no WMDs in Iraq until the US sent its troops.

Can you hear what I hear?

The echoes are getting louder. The reverberations are getting stronger.

Beat. Beat. Beat. The sound of the war drums. [http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/06/13-4 ]

My poet friend Tom Greening [www.tomgreening.com ] has a message that is relevant to all the Americans eager to gear up, flaunt their weapons, increase the Department of Defense budget, refill their pockets, distract people from problems at home, and once again make a bad situation worse:

Waging war is often occupational therapy
for men unsure about their
masculinity and life goals
and deluded about
how best to serve their country.
Patriotism should not be confused
with chauvinism and adolescent posturing.

What do I want to hear?

I want to hear all the anti-war groups, all the anti-violence groups, all the pro-peace groups, all the nonviolence groups join together and just say NO! No troops. No bombing. No more killing.

The image in the upper right of this post is a poster from Arlington West Memorial Project of the Veterans for Peace (Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license). Learn more about the Veterans for Peace projects at: http://www.arlingtonwestsantamonica.org/

Rwanda Revisited

Posted on June 13, 2014June 13, 2014 by kathiemm

It has been twenty years since the Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 people were killed in 90 days and thousands more wounded or displaced. This genocide should be remembered not just for the carnage that took place, not just for the failure of the world to provide General Romeo Dallaire, Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1993-1994, with the support he pleaded for (portrayed in “Shake hands with the devil”) and not just for the heroism of groups such as the Benebikira Sisters who refused to capitulate to the genocidal violence; it should also be remembered for the subsequent push for reconciliation led by the nation’s leader Paul Kagame.

To commemorate this genocide, the Co-Exist Learning Project Team created a documentary film that was shown on PBS the evening of April 16, 2014. This film addresses “Rwanda’s unprecedented social experiment in government-mandated reconciliation, through the stories of survivors. Can reconciliation and forgiveness be legislated? The Coexist webpage has links for the New York Times review of the documentary and some useful teaching materials.

Another site, Insight on Conflict, has a brief but inspiring discussion of peace activities being conducted for the 20^th anniversary of the genocide.

Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, suggests that Americans have a lot to learn from the Rwandan social experiment.

What do you think?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Does Nonviolent Resistance Work? Part 3c

Posted on June 9, 2014June 8, 2014 by kathiemm

This is the third of three posts comprising Part III of a series of posts in which Dr. Ian Hansen shares his thoughts on nonviolence.

See also Part 1a, Part 1b, Part 1c, Part 2a, Part 2b, Part2c, Part3a and Part3b.

At the end of my last post, I raised the issue of nations for which the original relations of domination grew even more entrenched after a nonviolent revolution. This is arguably the case with the Palestinians, as Dr. Wasfi noted in the comment inspiring this series of posts.

The first Palestinian Intifada was, for the most part, somewhere between nonviolent and low technology violent (throwing stones). Needless to say, Israeli soldiers did not restrict themselves to throwing stones when trying to suppress the intifada—so it could at least be called a “less violent” revolution than the means of suppression employed against it. And though the Intifada generated a lot more international sympathy than, say, murdering Olympic athletes in Munich did, it still did not get Palestinians a real state, and the resulting Oslo accords were largely seen as a cruel joke from the Palestinian perspective.

Again, it is difficult to tease out cause and effect here since nonviolence and violence have co-occurred in the Palestinian field of resistance over the decades (and, as Dr. Wasfi said in her comment, this is usually the case in most, if not all, historical mass uprisings). However, in cases where nonviolence has been the primary strategy used by Palestinians–as in the West Bank village of Budrus–it seems that the ability to resist land grabs and other acts of oppression is potentially very reliable. (I highly recommend Julia Bacha’s documentary on the Budrus, previewed at the beginning of this post. It is one of the better films about any nonviolent campaign). I haven’t seen any studies that systematically compare the goal-achieving success of relatively violent and relatively nonviolent acts of resistance village-by-village in Palestine, but this is a low hanging fruit for any sociologist of the region.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

Does Nonviolent Resistance Work? Part 3b

Posted on June 5, 2014 by kathiemm

This is the second of three posts comprising Part III of a series of posts in which Dr. Ian Hansen shares his thoughts on nonviolence.

See also Part 1a, Part 1b, Part 1c, Part 2a, Part 2b, Part2c and Part3a.

Libya anti-Gaddafi protest, July 6, 2011
Photo by Mbi3000, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Iran, Egypt, Libya, Ukraine and even Syria all reflect examples of uprisings that had a major nonviolent campaign as the lynchpin of popular revolt and managed to change the relations of power in some way. But none of these uprisings stayed Gandhi-style nonviolent, and it seems these revolutions all had aftermaths ranging from the dubious to the disastrous.

Still, held up against totally violent revolutions that succeeded in overthrowing preceding governments–like those in China 1949, Russia 1917 (the October one), and Cambodia 1975—these dubious nonviolent revolutions look relatively good, if only because the aftermath of the violent revolutions was so hyperbolically horrific.

Even the extreme carnage in Syria (and the specter of a new Cold War between great powers over Ukraine’s Crimea) does not weigh down the partially nonviolent group as much as the Cambodian genocide, Stalin’s purges, and the Great Leap Forward weigh down the violent group. Of course, I have just cherry-picked anecdotal examples here. Chenoweth and Stephan (authors of Why Civil Resistance Works) try to root the contrast of more violent versus less violent uprisings in a systematically principled selection of comparison groups, but they come to largely similar conclusions.

But what about those nonviolent revolutions which Chenoweth and Stephan count as somewhat successful but after which the relations of power have hardly changed at all? Or the cases in which the original relations of domination grew even more entrenched since that revolution? I will discuss one of these cases in the final post in part 3 of this series and in my final series on nonviolence.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.