This book is an exploration of nonviolent strategies and tactics that have been used to prevent and end civil wars, invasions, and occupations. The problem of war is examined in light of efforts to transform destructive conflict into constructive conflict. Research into alternatives has produced a corpus of knowledge that enables civil society increasingly to expect success when it engages decision-makers in peaceful conflict resolution. The book asks the reader to consider the questions of social conflict using a cost-benefit analysis—which can reveal the advisability of strategic nonviolence. Research into the causes and correlates of war is robust, and when that research is applied to comparisons of conflict management methods, numerous conclusions about potential strategies for ending war emerge.
Seeking to expand the transformative aspect of conflict resolution, the contributors to this edited collection have focused on gathering scholarship from under-represented voices and viewpoints in the field, the emerging discipline. Most mainstream conflict resolution seems to look either at interpersonal conflict or international conflict without much focus on the differing individuals and social structures involved. These peer-reviewed essays add significant findings to those gaps in the literature. The editors and contributors are, perhaps not coincidentally, mostly women and people of color, whose voices are often absent from other collections.
Beginning back in the waning days of the Civil Rights movement, through the objection to the war in Vietnam, and on to the current global peace movement, this is a personal and professional account offered for the reader curious about whether and how nonviolence works. Topics include Gandhian nonviolence, radical disarmament, war poverty and peace prosperity and movement-building.
As the United States fought the Civil War in the early 1860s, the country’s western frontier was simultaneously the site of significant military campaigns that took the lives of both American and Sioux. The Dakota campaign, led by Commander Henry Hastings Sibley and Brigadier General Alfred Sully against the Sioux between 1863 and 1864 was greater in scope, intensity and bloodshed than almost all other Indian battles fought in the West but is often overlooked.
The Minnesota War of 1862 and the Dakota War of 1863–1865 were among the most significant U.S. victories in the Indian wars, but did not temper the passions of the Sioux to preserve their people and land or the desires of the whites to settle the frontier. The wars only incited the Teton Sioux to enter into a long-term resistance that would end only at Wounded Knee in 1890.
Terrorism, which by definition targets civilians, is unacceptable, but a violent response to violence usually causes more violence. This book outlines some of the best thinking about nonviolent methods of resisting terrorism in the growing fields of international aid and nonviolent interposition.
The first section covers immediate nonviolent response to terrorism: international negotiations, mediations, and adjudication, UN and citizen sanctions, cross-cultural communication, citizen initiatives, international treaties and the World Court, the International Criminal Court, and nonviolent resistance through raising consciousness to mobilization and resisting state-sponsored terror. The second section, on long-term non-violent response to terrorism, discusses halting arms trade and militarism, stopping arms flow to terrorists, “defunding” the military, building sustainable just economies, aid to the poor, reducing privileged overconsumption, peace and conflict education, understanding and using the media, refugee repatriation, and helping indigenous liberation struggles.
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