Tag: government

This is the third of three posts comprising Part II 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 and Part 2b.

Nonviolent movements are less likely to catch oppressors by surprise than they once were.  As machine gun-firing, molotov cocktail-throwing, bomb-detonating revolutionary violence goes increasingly out of style in our post-Cold War age, nonviolence becomes a more common strategy.  And governments have increasingly devised a large array of strategies to infiltrate, corrupt, disrupt, distract, and—if necessary—crush these movements with an efficient minimum of brutality.  The U.S. government did a particularly elegant job of effectively erasing the beautiful and exclusively nonviolent Occupy movement, for instance, and without killing a single person (though apparently they had plans to launch sniper attacks against some movement leaders).  Another example is China.  Since the public relations disaster of the Beijing Massacre in 1989, China and the U.S. have developed very similar means of crushing internal dissent—maximal repression with minimal murderousness.

And, as the popularly-supported coup in Ukraine makes clear, governments also appear to have figured out how to create economic conditions for, and then mobilize, nonviolent revolutions in other countries in a way that suits their strategic interests.  When a nonviolent movement is “successful,” there is reason to suspect that its success was not entirely a matter of “people power” but also of other regional or global power plays behind the scenes.

Take home message: big powers can turn even a disciplined (mostly) nonviolent mass movement to their advantage, and against the interests of those who struggled in that movement.  Originally nonviolent mass movements (like the massive street protests against Morsi in Egypt and against Yanukovych in Ukraine) can even be manipulated to enable the violent coup-like overthrow of unpopular but democratically-elected governments.   As bad as these unpopular governments sometimes are, overthrowing them with popularly-supported coups may be inferior to impeachment proceedings or voting the offending party or person out in the next election.  Nonviolence wears a halo compared to violence, but not every mostly nonviolent movement deserves our moral adulation.

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.