• Thousands of Yemenis protested on Sunday against an immunity law protecting  outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh from prosecution and demanded he be put on  trial for offences they say he committed during his 33-year rule.

• More than 50 students from Tuscon High School walked out of class on Monday and marched toward Santa Rita Park in protest of the recent ban on Mexican American studies at TUSD schools.

• In Egypt, dozens of employees at the state-run Nile News TV Channel started an open-ended strike Sunday at the Maspero building, as they protested policies still in place since Mubarak’s rule.

• Malawi lawyers across the country Monday protested in their court regalia to pressure the governement to act on the ongoing judiciary strike.

• Truck drivers across Italy went on strike on Monday against increased fuel prices, while taxis also held a national protest over government reforms to increase competition, causing disruptions nationwide.

• Scores of protests were held across the country on Friday to protest the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which ruled corporations have a right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. A dozen demonstrators were arrested on the U.S. Supreme Court steps.

• In Lebanon, severe electricity cuts fueled several protests Friday as residents and  lawmakers staged a sit-in in the mountain town of Aley and small groups of protesters blocked roads in the south of the country.

• Several women and children staged a sit-in outside the Karachi Press Club (KPC) on Friday to protest against the kidnapping of Baloch youths and the dumping of their bodies in different parts of the province.

• Protests in two West Bank universities have shut down classes in recent days, as students call for easing of tuition fees amid financial crisis in Palestine.

• Beginning last Tuesday, about 100,000 teachers from 24,000 non-government primary schools in Bangladesh held a three-day strike to demand that they be brought onto the government’s payroll.

As the movement reflects on last fall and prepares for spring, the Global Nonviolent Action Database (GNAD) is becoming an ever more valuable resource. Since its release on the web in September, the database has surged to more than 530 cases of nonviolent direct action campaigns, available at no charge to activists and researchers everywhere. The GNAD draws on people’s struggles from over 190 countries, and goes back in history as far as 12th century BCE Egypt. Most are from the 20th and 21st century. The student researchers from Swarthmore College—aided by students at Georgetown and Tufts—have found far more cases than they’ve had time to write up so far. A hundred additional cases are underway.

While many of the campaigns have used the “occupation” method in their struggle—77, in countries including Kenya, Mongolia, Paraguay, Brazil, Germany, England, and Chile—campaigners have used dozens of other methods as well. As the Occupy movement grows to encompass a wider range of tactics, from eviction blockades to strikes and boycotts, the GNAD can help organizers learn from past experiences.

Over two hundred of the database’s cases involve campaigners who are seeking economic justice. In Sweden, for example, the political power of the wealthiest—that country’s own “1 percent”—was undermined by a mass nonviolent struggle in the 1920s; when the 1 percent resorted to ordering troops to shoot workers in 1931, protests surged even more and the Social Democrats took over the leadership of the country, bringing a truer democracy and the redistribution of resources that today is the envy of most of the world.

There are older campaigns for economic justice in the database. The first strike in the U.S., for example, was in colonial Jamestown, Virginia—somehow not included in Disney’s Pocahantas! It also includes much more recent examples, such as last year’s victories in Bolivia, Jordan and Oman.

A virtue of the database for strategizing is that all the published cases cover complete campaigns; they’ve reached a conclusion—win, lose or draw. The reader can therefore more easily take lessons from them, seeing how certain choices led to certain outcomes. In addition, all sources are cited, so readers can delve more deeply into any particular case to learn more about it.

We’re already hearing back from activists about how the database is expanding their ideas of what is possible. It builds, in fact, on scholar Gene Sharp’s famous taxonomy of 198 nonviolent methods of struggle—it has already added a 199th method to his list! We’re also always looking for more cases that are not yet in the database; if you know of one that you don’t find after conducting a search, please write to me at glakey1@swarthmore.edu.

Happy strategizing!

• Cairo and Alexandria witnessed a fresh wave of strikes and protests on Sunday, blocking roads and causing disruption to the work of the Ministry of Transport.

• On Monday, a week-long nationwide strike in Nigeria ended, after Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan announced in a televised address that fuel will be reduced in price.

• Kuwaiti riot police on Saturday used tear gas and batons to disperse hundreds of stateless demonstrators for the second day in a row and arrested dozens.

• About 4,000 Chinese workers protested over compensation and job security at a Sanyo plant in southern Shenzhen over the weekend in the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China’s manufacturing hub.

• In Oman, thousands of expatriate laborers working for one of the Muscat International Airport projects who have been on strike since Thursday protested in front of their company premises in Azaiba on Sunday. The government’s decision to ban the export of Omani fish to the UAE was “revoked” after over 400 fishermen held a sit-in at Khasab demanding the reversal of the decision on Saturday.

• Activists from a local peace group blocked entry to the main gate at the Navy’s West coast Trident nuclear submarine base Saturday for nearly a half hour in an act of civil resistance to nuclear weapons.

• Police detained a liberal opposition-party leader and another activist Saturday at a rally protesting alleged vote fraud in Russia’s parliamentary election.

• In Pennsylvania, nearly 300 students from two Chester high schools walked out of classes Friday, demanding an end to the financial crisis jeopardizing their school year.

• After five days of a sit-in protest, workers at a lingerie store in Ireland have won their battle for back pay.

• A flash mob of youngsters performed at the crowded Model Town market on Friday afternoon in Delhi as a way of celebrating Lohri with a message against corruption.

• A national strike paralyzed much of Nigeria on Monday, with more than 10,000 demonstrators swarming its commercial capital to protest soaring fuel prices and decades of government corruption in the oil-rich country.

• Tensions flared at the American Licorice factory Monday as protesters associated with the Occupy Oakland movement joined the month-old factory workers’ strike, blocking entrances and turning away delivery trucks.

• Over five hundred people in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand attended the silent march on Saturday, to show their support for Wissam El-Yamini, a thirty years old man who went into coma following his violent arrest on New Year’s Eve.

• Tens of thousands demonstrating in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Friday chanted “freedom to the detainees,” a slogan chosen by protest organizers for demonstrations in 18 cities across the impoverished nation.

• Around ten thousand people blocked railways and the Aswan-Cairo highway in the Upper Egyptian City of Nagaa-Hammadi, Qena, late on Friday, to protest the results of the ongoing parliamentary elections in their constituency.

• More than 20 Omanis continue their prison hunger strike, which began in mid-December, in protest at what they say are unfair sentences for taking part in demonstrations last year.

• In Turkey, police dispersed scores of anti-NATO activists in the southern city of Adana on Friday as they were setting up tents to stage a three-day hunger strike to show their opposition to the NATO missile system that will be established in the eastern province of Malatya.

• On Friday, thousands of shopkeepers in the Indian portion of Kashmir went on a daylong general strike to protest the killing of a student and frequent power cuts.

• A group of parents whose children attend Chicago Public Schools slated for “turnarounds,” closures or other adjustments protested the plan with a sit-in at City Hall Thursday, where they vowed to stay until Mayor Rahm Emanuel granted them a meeting to discuss alternatives.

• Dozens of street dance enthusiasts in Hangzhou, the capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, participated in a flash mob activity advocating environmental protection last Tuesday.

Not five minutes into the Prologue, I sensed Faiz edging his way over to me. His voice quiet, almost a whisper, slips out into the room; “Will you study with me?”  Over the next fifteen minutes, we worked our way through three short lessons in a workbook written for first graders.  Each consists of a simple, one page story followed by a series of questions based on the text. They are extraordinarily simple; they seem almost humiliating for a twenty year old young man. As we study, nineteen-year-old Roz Mohammed shyly carried his blanket and English language dictionary to our corner and settled in.  Every so often, he’d shyly interrupt Faiz as he read and say, “Teacher, what does this word mean?”

Across the room, Maya and Ali worked on the meanings of basic words culled from a middle school dictionary.  Ali studied intently, pronouncing each word carefully, as if it were an egg that might easily be broken. “Basket. Bully. Bundle,” he would say, repeating each word until he got it right.

A half hour after we began, still only a few sentences into Ha Jin’s prologue, I looked across at Maya and asked, “Where in America can you find anything like this?  A cold room, nothing but quilts and a kettle for tea on the floor, and four boys asking us question after question about a language they’re trying to learn.”  In truth, this type of thing happens all the time in our small apartment.  The five young Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers who live here with their friend and mentor, Hakim, never go anywhere without a workbook or dictionary. After breakfast, one pulls a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket and begins to study.  Waiting for a ride, another asks, “What does this mean?”

Across the hall from us live four university students.  One is studying electricity; one aspires to be a pharmacist.  Two days after our arrival, one of them, a young man named Said, knocked on our door and asked if one of us would like to help them learn English.  Maya and I settled on meeting them in their apartment at 7 pm that night.  The first class had three students; the second, five; now there are six.  We work from copied pages and a white board.  Each student actively participates.

Each of these young men, all symbols of the “new Afghanistan,” possesses a thirst that won’t be quenched.  In our conversational practice, we talk of how they will shape their country in the years ahead. According to some figures, 68 percent of Afghanistan’s thirty one million people are under eighteen years old. No matter what the old guard wants to believe, the future of Afghanistan belongs to the young. We can only hope they won’t be co-opted by the temptations dangled before them by western “leadership.” We can only hope they’ll grab the reins of power and gallop off in a new direction, one of peace and reconciliation.

If the world you and I inhabit really wants to help these young people, and I doubt very much it does, it will do all it can to slake their thirst for knowledge. It will provide all the help they ask for, and nothing more. It will respect their intelligence and desire to find their own way. These students deserve our respect. They know, no matter what we say, they don’t have it now.  It’s about time they do.

• Around 8,000 people protested in Moscow and Saint Petersburg on Sunday against what they say were rigged parliamentary polls that handed victory to Vladimir Putin’s ruling party.

• Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis demonstrated Friday across the country rejecting an amnesty given to President Ali Abdullah Saleh against prosecution in a deal that eases him out of office.

• Three Hungarian television employees are holding a hunger strike seeking the dismissal of managers they say are responsible for censorship and restricting news coverage in state-owned media.

• Cyprus’ airports and government offices shut down Thursday in a daylong strike by civil servants and air traffic controllers to protest a wage freeze and other austerity measures they say were unfairly taken without their say.

• Thousands of building cleaners from the local chapter of the Service Employees International Union convened at Essex County College in downtown Newark on Thursday before taking to the streets in solidarity for better working conditions and a new contract.

• On Thursday, hundreds of anti-government protesters in Bahrain tried to enter the highway for a sit-in during an anti-government protest, but were dispersed after riot-police fired tear gas and grenades at them.

• About 150 cooks, servers, janitors, housekeepers and dishwashers stopped serving the 1% today at the California Club by walking off the job in a one-day strike in protest of a potential six-month wage freeze.

• On Thursday, a hardy group of mothers staged a breastfeeding flash-mob demonstration in the UK to declare their right to feed their babies in public.

• Hundreds of students from five Seattle-area high schools walked out of classes Wednesday to protest Washington state’s cuts to education funding.

• In India, leaders and hundreds of workers of the Wapda Hydro Electric Labor Union held a big rally and staged a sit-in on Wednesday to protest against the privatization of thermal power houses, billing and reading departments in the country.

• South Korean protesters calling attention to the women forced into sexual slavery during WWII reached their thousandth weekly demonstration on Wednesday. Marking the occasion, a statue honoring the victims was erected in front of the Japanese embassy.

• Chicago activists progressively interrupted a school board meeting on Wednesday in an act of nonviolent resistance—eventually forcing the board members to retreat out of the room—in protest of proposed changes to low-income schools.

• Demonstrators opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline staged a ‘human oil spill’ in front of Speaker John Boehner’s office in Washington D.C. Wednesday.

• Portugal’s top trade union confederation CGTP on Monday launched a week of protests against the government’s austerity policies.

• Employees of the Lahore College for Women University in Pakistan held a boycott of classes for the second day on Tuesday, demanding better terms for school workers.

• Thousands of taxi drivers in Guinea Bissau went on strike Tuesday to call for an end to police extortion.

• Disabled persons in Athens held a rally on Tuesday to oppose further austerity measures being considered by the Greek government.

• Inmates at seven Kyrgyzstan prisons coordinated a hunger strike on Tuesday to agitate for better living conditions and meals.

• Around 200 Los Angeles high school students walked out of classes on Tuesday and marched several miles to stage a sit-in at district board meeting, decrying cuts to school budgets.

• Thousands of public sector workers in Cyprus staged a three-hour stoppage Tuesday in protest over government moves to freeze salaries for two years as part of an austerity drive to avoid an EU bailout.

• A network of progressive South Korean Christian groups began a four day hunger strike on Monday to protest vote buying and corruption in the country’s largest Protestant association.

• Protests were ongoing Sunday in Tahrir Square after thousands of protesters rallied on Friday for an end to the Army’s rule in Egypt.

• Despite strict controls on public speech, Singapore saw a rare public demonstration on Sunday as hundreds of activists participated in the global “Slut Walk” movement, calling attention to violence against women.

• Jordanian environmentalists staged a sit-in Saturday at the Prime Ministry, objecting to the country’s atomic program.

• Friday marked the seventh day of protests in Pakistan as demonstrators decried a NATO airstrike in Pakistani territory which killed 24 soldiers.

• On Wednesday, a mass rally took place in Bulgaria as thousands demonstrated against austerity measures, including a government plan to raise the retirement age.

• In India, several fired workers agitating for their union’s recognition were arrested Wednesday after protesting in front of a Hyundai plant’s gate.

• Millions of shop owners in India closed their doors on Thursday, striking and marching in protest of a bill which would allow foreign superstores like Walmart to have greater access in their country.

• In the United Kingdom, Wales was the center of one of the largest public sector strikes in a generation Wednesday as around 170,000 workers—including teachers—abandoned their posts in ongoing protests against government pension reforms.

• In the Philippines, hundreds of inmates continued a hunger strike Thursday, instigating noise barrages to agitate for faster case disposition, the release of political prisoners, and to address other grievances.

• Thousands of Greek workers participated in this year’s seventh general strike on Thursday, continuing their calls to end government austerity programs.

• Students from three high schools in Seattle staged a walk out on Thursday to gather at City Hall in protest of a Washington state proposal to fill budget holes with cuts to education funding.

• Building on a series of protests this month against Bank of America’s poor environmental record, a Thursday rally in Asheville, NC culminated in the arrest of several nonviolent resisters who wanted to call attention to BOA’s support of the coal industry.

• Occupy protesters across the country celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, bringing all the trimmings of a traditional meal to the unlikely location of a demonstration. In New York’s Zuccotti Park, organizers said they distributed some 3,000 individually wrapped plates for what they described as an “open feast.”

• Some 10,000 people from the majority Shi’ite community in Bahrain took to the streets of the town of Aali, chanting slogans that were taken from the inquiry led by international rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouni.

• Yemeni protesters—who have been in the millions for nearly 10 months—were out again Thursday, rejecting a provision that gives Saleh immunity from prosecution.

• Portuguese workers’ general strike halted public transport and some factories in many parts of the country on Thursday and thousands marched to protest austerity measures imposed as the price of an EU/IMF bailout.

• A Romanian mayor has begun a hunger strike to protest cuts in heating subsidies imposed under a government austerity drive, reawakening memories of the harsh final years of communism.

• Hundreds of people in Thailand’s Pathum Thani province north of the capital blocked cars from using the outbound lane of an elevated highway on Wednesday to pressure the government to accelerate the drainage of water.

• Iran’s main government-run newspaper was published Tuesday without a front-page headline, replaced by photographs of its headquarters during an assault a day earlier by forces working for the judiciary who briefly arrested the newspaper’s top official and more than 30 others.

• Several thousand Colombian students participated in multiple marches on Thursday to demand more funding for public education. In Argentina, about 1,000 student marched through Buenos Aires holding flags reading “the student struggle is walking through Latin America.”

• Thousands of Peruvians have protested a $4.8 billion open-pit gold mining project they fear will damage their water supply.

• Thousands of workers in southern China went on strike in the last week to demand higher pay and better treatment, disrupting work at companies including one that supplies equipment to International Business Machines Corp.

Ray Lewis getting arrested at Occupy Wall Street.

On Monday night, a student protest at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY), began as a peaceful march and demonstration against tuition hikes. But it quickly escalated into a situation where police were pushing students and faculty out of a public forum of CUNY’s Board of Trustees. The incident was terrifying for many of us present, though it fortunately did not result in any serious injuries. The greater damage, perhaps, was emblematic of a pervasive problem in the Occupy movement: the police became a proxy for the “one percent,” and instead of protesters finding ways to directly challenge the powerful elite, they ended up taking their anger out on police officers.

At Baruch, the Trustees were expected to vote on a five percent tuition hike—which they approved almost unanimously. The protesters, who included CUNY students, faculty, and supporters from other universities, learned once they arrived at Baruch that they would not be allowed into the public forum. (Only people who had registered in advance would be permitted, and even then, only 150 spots were allotted. It seemed to me that someone should have looked into this in advance.)

As the protesters pushed their way into the lobby of Baruch, security guards tried to usher them into an overflow room where they could watch it televised, but that wouldn’t suffice. People huddled in the lobby, trying to decide what to do: hold a general assembly to voice grievances about rising tuition, or go into the overflow room. But some people couldn’t give up on the idea of entering the Trustees meeting. They waved their IDs desperately at the security guards, saying, “I’m a student here! Why can’t I go in if the meeting is public?” Soon, a line of police officers formed in front of the protesters. The cops held their batons horizontally in front of their chests.

“Why do you have your billy clubs out?” shouted the students in unison, using the people’s microphone. “This is a school, not a jail. This is a peaceful protest.”

A security official tried to issue orders to the protesters over a loudspeaker, saying that they would have to leave or there would be consequences, but he was hardly audible. Then, the cops began moving forward, their batons pushing into the protesters’ torsos.

The room exploded. Protesters pushed back against the cops, attempting to get around them. In response, the cops shoved harder against the protesters with their batons. This went on for about 30 minutes until every protester had been physically pushed out of the building. Some arrests were made. From what I could tell from my vantage point, standing on a table, not a single baton was used to beat protesters.

An elephant in the room, perhaps, was the recent incident at UC Davis. The use of pepper spray on student protesters there on November 17 has prompted conversations about police violence around the world.

On Sunday night, I attended a discussion of the Occupy Wall Street People’s Think Tank on the topic of “Policing and the Movement.” We were surprised to be joined by an authority on the subject: former Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis. Lewis came to New York City after seeing on the news how the NYPD was treating Occupy Wall Street protesters. He arrived right after the eviction occurred; a few days later, on November 17, he found himself standing alongside protesters who were trying to shut down the New York Stock Exchange. He refused to budge from the entrance to the NYSE, and was arrested. In uniform.

Sitting on a piece of cardboard at the Think Tank, Lewis shared some insights into the life of a police officer. He also listened intently to what others had to say. It was his first time using consensus procedures, but he quickly adapted to the hand signals.

“The police are protectors of the one percent, but they do not feel secure in that role,” said Lewis. “New hires on the force have their pensions cut to about 50 percent of what they used to be. Their health care is being taken away. The force is understaffed, so officers have double workloads. It used to be you’d have a job, then you’d patrol, then you’d have a job, then you’d patrol; now you just go from job to job to job. They are being run ragged.”

One of the things that Lewis finds seriously problematic is white-shirt NYPD officers getting involved in altercations. The white-shirts, he explained, have a supervisorial role over the blue shirts; when they become involved rather than standing aside, there is no one monitoring and issuing orders. That’s a situation in which things can get out of hand, Lewis explained. “The police are only supposed to use force to prevent bodily injury or death. The idea is to use the minimum force necessary to accomplish the task,” he said.

At Baruch, the protesters were belligerently demanding something they could not be granted, and the police were, in fact, using the minimum force necessary to accomplish the task of getting them outside the building. What happened in the Baruch lobby was unsettling—for the protesters, who had no idea whether the police would suddenly turn violent, for the police themselves, who seemed unprepared to deal with the students’ aggressiveness, and for security officers, who had no control over the police once the confrontation began.

I couldn’t help but imagine that this anxiety will stay with these protesters the next time they march, making them feel angrier at the cops, and that it will stay with the police next time they monitor a protest, making them feel less sympathetic toward activists. But the conflict between the protesters and the police was entirely unrelated to the issue of tuition hikes. The Occupy movement has at times been strengthened by the police violence used against it, but the police are also turning into a dangerous distraction from the movement’s real aims.

As he sees it, a commitment to nonviolence only constrains a movement, preventing it from doing any meaningful resistance (despite the fact that Occupy Wall Street has effectively made just such a commitment). It was in explaining this that he reminded me of how, at Berkeley, the authorities described protesters locking arms as violent. If they can say that, he concluded, then nonviolence is by definition tantamount to passivity.

True—but only if we’re willing to accept the kind of wordplay that somehow passes muster at Berkeley.

Here’s some of the statement from UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau following an incident of police clubbing protesters:

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

We regret that, given the instruction to take down tents and prevent encampment, the police were forced to use their batons to enforce the policy.

Added the university police force’s Captain Margo Bennett: “The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence.” (H/t Rei Terada’s thoughtful analysis.)

Wrong and wrong. The damage of these statements is twofold. Firstly, they ask us to believe that it is violent to link arms willfully with another willing person, harming no one and no thing. Really? The reasoning appears to be that posing any obstruction to the work of the police is doing violence. Who could possibly believe that, short of a totalitarian? Secondly, by defining violence this way, Bennett and Birgeneau invite others to otherwise redefine it according to their own particular theory of how society should be arranged.

I hope we know better. There’s no need to let anyone—Bennett and Birgeneau, or Molotov-throwing activists—tell us that violence constitutes something other than the obvious. We know what violence is; we know what it means to be peaceful. Violence is harming other people—physically or otherwise—and being peaceful is not.

A simple definition for nonviolent resistance is simply to do something one should be doing (even if you’re told not to) or to not do something you shouldn’t be doing (even if you’re told you must). It’s using means worthy of the ends you want to achieve, acting in accordance with the world you want to create. Once you reach your goal, after all, it’s really hard to do away with the means that got you there. The fact that my conversation at Occupy Wall Street happened on Armistice Day should’ve been a hint: wars don’t end war, they breed more. Locking arms with one’s comrades, however, looks more like a glimpse of utopia.

Among the most eloquent defenses of nonviolence in the Occupy movement has been Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House,” which appears in the second n+1 gazette and online at ZNet. She makes much the same argument I just have, as well as speaking out against the “authoritarianism” of a violent minority within a movement. She also offers an eloquent passage on the question of property damage:

I want to be clear that property damage is not necessarily violence. The firefighter breaks the door to get the people out of the building. But the husband breaks the dishes to demonstrate to his wife that he can and may also break her. It’s violence displaced onto the inanimate as a threat to the animate.

Quietly eradicating experimental GMO crops or pulling up mining claim stakes is generally like the firefighter. Breaking windows during a big demonstration is more like the husband. I saw the windows of a Starbucks  and a Niketown broken in downtown Seattle after nonviolent direct action had shut the central city and the World Trade Organization ministerial down. I saw scared-looking workers and knew that the CEOs and shareholders were not going to face that turbulence and they sure were not going to be the ones to clean it up. Economically it meant nothing to them.

Violence, terror, destruction—these are “the master’s tools,” she writes. “The master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house. And they sure won’t build a better house.”

Nor is nonviolence the preserve of the privileged. If this past century has taught us anything, it is the power of nonviolence in the hands of oppressed people. Largely nonviolent uprisings—from India to Serbia to the Philippines to Tunisia—prevailed over ruthless regimes. Some of the poorest, most powerless people in the world built movements capable of dispatching dictators and expelling empires. This isn’t to say that one should condemn those who use violence in self-defense and out of desperation. But it does mean that, if one wants to help them, there are better things to offer than a gun.

When Birgeneau equates locking arms with violence, he is trying to justify his own violence, which he deemed necessary for the sake of his university. In the process, though, trading common sense for the semblance of a clean conscience, he invites others to claim that acts of violence are actually otherwise.

• The Occupy Wall Street movement marked its two-month anniversary on Thursday with a series of actions in New York City, including a massive rally in Foley Square and march across the Brooklyn Bridge in which an estimated 32,000 people participated.  There were also major protests, which led to scores of arrests, in cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, St. Louis, Boston, Milwaukee, Nashville, Columbia (South Carolina), and Washington, D.C.

• Tens of thousands of people are rallying in Egypt today as part of the ongoing protests calling for a quicker transition from military to civilian government.

• In San Francisco, 95 protesters were arrested on Wednesday after occupying a Bank of America branch in the financial district. The demonstrators pitched a tent inside the branch before they were detained.

• Workers of Nigeria’s state-run power firm on Wednesday protested the deployment of armed troops to their offices across the country in the wake of an order by their union to launch a pay strike.

• Thousands of Kuwaitis stormed parliament on Wednesday after police and elite forces beat  up protesters marching on the Prime Minister’s home to demand he resign and calling for the dissolution of the parliament over corruption.

• On Tuesday, Palestinian activists describing themselves as ‘freedom riders’ were dragged by police off an Israeli bus they planned to ride into Jerusalem.

• As many as 10,000 students and Occupy activists overflowed UC Berkeley’s Sproul  Plaza on Tuesday night following a daylong classroom walkout and established a small camp in defiance of the university’s edict that no tents be erected.

• Student leaders in Colombia have called off a monthlong boycott of classes at public universities after the government met their demand to withdraw educational reform legislation.

• Some 1,000 Iranian students created a human chain Tuesday around the Isfahan uranium conversion facility to protest a recent UN report charging that Tehran may be developing nuclear weapons.

• More than 40 veterans of the Chornobyl cleanup have gone on hunger strike in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk to protest planned pension cuts.

Why, one might ask, is it located in Costa Rica?

To make a long story short, Edgar Cardona, minister of security in the junta that ruled Costa Rica from May 8, 1948, to November 8, 1949, proposed the abolishment of the armed forces as a permanent institution. In December of 1948, the head of the junta, José Figueres Ferrer, later president of the country, declared that a nation that was not rich could not simultaneously afford good education, health care, and a military. The funds dedicated to the armed forces should instead be destined for education, Figueres said in a speech, and in a symbolic act handed the key for a military fortress to the minister of education. In November 1949, a new constitution recognized the ideal of “changing rifles into notebooks.” This perspective of valuing education over militarization has become part of the national memory and aspiration, to be materialized in UPEACE.

In 1976, a rancher named Cruz Rojas Bennett promised the aspiring president, Rodrigo Carazo, a donation of forested areas of his farm for a university dedicated to peace studies, on the condition that the institution would eternally protect what was the last virgin forest in Costa Rica’s central valley. It was approximately 15 miles southwest of the capital San José, in the coffee-growing highlands at El Rodeo, Cantón de Mora. Rojas Bennett was partly motivated by a fear that environmental degradation worldwide had become akin to a war against nature. After his untimely death, the Rojas Bennett family gave 303 hectares, and 100,000 additional trees were planted on what is now the main campus.

By September 27, 1978, under President Rodrigo Carazo Odio, Costa Rica proposed the creation of the University for Peace at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Finally, on December 5, 1980, the 35th General Assembly approved Resolution 35/55, formally creating UPEACE. Its charter, approved by the General Assembly’s founding resolution with no opposition, calls upon UPEACE to

provide humanity with an international institution of higher education for peace … to stimulate cooperation among peoples, and to help lessen obstacles and threats to world peace and progress in keeping with the noble aspirations proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations. To this end, the University shall contribute to the great universal task of educating for peace by engaging in teaching, research, post-graduate training and dissemination of knowledge, … through interdisciplinary study of all matters relating to peace.

The new university was to be a U.N. treaty organization, although receiving no funding from the world body, and it retains autonomy and academic freedom.

UPEACE took possession of the land donated by Rojas Bennett in 1981, placing it under protection as he had intended. Aided by the educator Robert Mueller, and with support from UNESCO in Paris and the U.N. University in Tokyo, the new university began with its first degree in media and peace. Its first donor was the industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa of Japan.

The study of peace is inherently multidisciplinary, since no discipline can address its numerous components. Fifteen disciplines may need to be at the table for serious study. How then to help lessen the obstacles and overcome threats to world peace and progress?

Today, UPEACE offers 11 master’s degrees in fields ranging from environmental security and peace, to gender and peacebuilding, to international law and human rights. Each of these programs explores the trends and forces that give rise to violent upheaval and discord, all in an attempt to push through the limitations in existing theory and practice. Students come from 52 countries, and the faculty is similarly diverse. Teaching with me this month is Jan Pronk, for instance, who formerly held governmental ministerial portfolios for The Netherlands in defense, development, and environment, and was head of peace operations in Sudan. A new distance learning program is allowing people across the world to work toward master’s degrees online. This is one of many ways in which the university is a global institution, not limited to its Costa Rican base.

The UPEACE Africa Programme—based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—does not have students per se. It works with academicians from the continent’s 800 universities and some 26 institutes for peace studies. These are people who want to develop their capacity to respond to the clamor of the young who want to learn how to build more peaceable societies. With assistance from The Netherlands, in 2002–2003 consultative missions visited instructors in 50 universities in 15 African countries, and met with 500 nongovernmental institutions. (I was privileged to be part of the team.) As observers in my classroom this year I’ve had senior fellows in the Great Lakes Programme—instructors in Burundian and Ugandan universities. Junior fellows from Kenya and Zambia are taking my course, preparing to teach upon their return. In addition, Canada’s International Development Research Centre assists the Africa Peace and Conflict Journal, which gives voice to African practitioners and researchers while offering African perspectives on international issues.

On the other side of the planet, this year more than 1,800 young people under 30 years of age applied for 30 slots in the Asia-Pacific Leadership Programme, which is supported by the Nippon Foundation. The Bank of Brazil recently brought staff to the campus and then to New York City for a short course.

My own course at UPEACE in nonviolent transformation of conflict is always a two-way street for me, as we study the extensive history, theory and methods of nonviolent action. In class we’ve heard a firsthand account of the 2007–2009 Lawyers Movement in Pakistan, which succeeded in reinstatement of the chief justice through nonviolent action by barristers, students and human rights activists. Another student has been telling us about the continuing impact of the national nonviolent movement that deposed Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 in the Philippines. From Tiananmen Square to Tahrir Square, we examine failures and vulnerabilities of nonviolent movements as well. Some students arrive with skepticism about civil resistance, which they have heard disparaged as a solely Western phenomenon, and they are intrigued to learn that both Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. formulated their thinking based on active study of nonviolent struggles occurring contemporaneously in Africa, and that if anything knowledge moved from East to West.

Regrettably, one country that pronounces itself indispensable for and committed to democracy and the pursuit of peace—the United States—has never given any funds to support this practical, global educational organization, which prepares specialists to build peace in their home countries around the world. Lessening the obstacles and overcoming threats to world peace and progress needs less lip-service and more concrete contribution to institutions like this, ones that are preparing world leaders to be principled as well as pragmatic.

• A few hundred protesters marched on Waikiki Saturday as leaders of Pacific Rim nations gathered for a summit to discuss free trade agreements and other issues. During the gala dinner, renowned Hawaiian guitarist Makana spent almost 45 minutes repeatedly singing his new protest ballad “We Are the Many” instead of the expected instrumental background music. Over a dozen heads of state, including President Obama, heard Makana’s message that included lines such as “The lobbyists at Washington do gnaw…. And until they are purged, we won’t withdraw.”

• Police confronted an estimated 1,000 protesters in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday after clearing parks occupied by demonstrators for weeks. 50 were arrested after refusing to leave one of the parks. The demonstrators regrouped in the streets, blocking traffic for hours.

• Twenty-seven “Occupy St. Louis” protesters were arrested early Saturday morning after defying an existing park curfew.

• Portuguese civil servants and soldiers staged an anti-austerity protest in Lisbon on Saturday, a sign of the rising social tensions in debt-hit Portugal over deep cuts in spending.

• Thousands of demonstrators rallied in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday against oil legislation that could cost the port city and surrounding state billions of dollars in revenues.

• Angry over a range of environmental issues, about 250 protesters erected a mock coal-fired power station on the steps of Australia’s Parliament House before marching backwards to Treasury Gardens, arguing the government’s policies have taken Victoria backwards.

• More than 350 people linked arms to form a “human chain” on the Stirling Bridge in Fremantle, Australia on Sunday to protest the live animal export trade.

• About 100 peaceful marchers sent a clear message Sunday to vandals who torched cars and scrawled Nazi swastikas in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn. The march included about 25 people from the Occupy Wall Street movement in Manhattan, which put out a statement condemning the vandalism.

• More than 2,000 students marched through London last week to protest cuts to public spending and a big increase in tuition fees.

Thousands of young college students in the streets — some tearing down street signs and tipping a news van –  were confronted by riot police and pepper spray before being dispersed late Wednesday evening. Another unruly mass of Occupy Wall Street protesters? No, it was Penn State students protesting the firing of a football coach.

After charges of sexual abuse by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky were filed last Saturday, Penn State’s Board of Trustees met Wednesday evening and announced the immediate firing of head football coach Joe Paterno and President Graham Spanier for their complicit knowledge in the alleged sexual abuse. Following the announcement, thousands of students gathered in support of Paterno — endearingly known as JoePa — to protest the administration’s decision. At some point in the evening, the protest turned into a riot — which is sadly not the first at the so-called #1 party school.

Admittedly, the student protest-turned-riot does not speak for all of Penn State. As is often the case, the physical damage was inflicted by only a small number of people. Many students, alumni, faculty, and staff are, rather understandably, shocked and dealing with the news in a variety of ways — some extremely positive, like holding a “blue-out” at Saturday’s game to support victims of child abuse. Nevertheless, the events of Wednesday night show a culture rooted in violence, searching for meaning.

While the mainstream media has refreshingly got it right about not having pity for JoePa, it is worth noting that the frenzy-hungry news outlets haven’t pounced on the riot to condemn them for what they are: an absurd reflection of society’s obsession with sports as well as a general lack of critical thought and moral coherence among college students. The Christian Science Monitor published a critical news report and the coverage on ESPN has been fair in contextualizing the fallout from JoePa’s firings. But as institutions charged with having a public, moral character — including the media — there should be outright and explicit op-eds and university statements making this a teachable moment about justice, responsibility, and social action.

Penn State is charged with teaching young people and  “improv[ing] the well being and health of individuals and communities.” The scandal does little to model the kind of moral leadership such a mission demands. Should we really expect more of today’s college students who chose to protest — let alone riot — over the firing of the deified JoePa while neglecting the far graver moral issue of predatory sexual abuse when the institutions themselves are incapable of acting with moral character?

The Penn State affair and subsequent riot is like a mirror, revealing to us a more ugly state of affairs: violence is still a valid response to injustice (perceived or otherwise). The lack of public condemnation of the student protests is equally troubling, suggesting that the student response was in some way justified; it’s as if we tacitly understand or empathize with the students’ losing their beloved JoePa.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” penned F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Both the student riots and larger public response indicate that, in general, society lacks the ability and/or structure to deal with complicated situations in nonviolent and mature ways. The central foci of sports, especially college football, has displaced concern for victims’ needs and perpetuates a culture in loss of real identity. As Harsha Walia pointed out in an interview with Dave Zirin after the Vancouver hockey riot in June 2011:

There is a sense that people rioted over a ‘stupid apolitical hockey game.’ While I too wish people were motivated by social justice issues, the hockey game is not apolitical by any means. The riots were a fundamentalist defense of a type of nationalism, most evident in the beatings of Bruins fans in Vancouver last night. NHL hockey is not simply a game, it is representative of obedience to consumerism and is part of the state’s attempt to forge a false identity—despite vast differences and inequalities across race, class and gender, through the spectacle of sport.

What the Vancouver riot and the Penn State riot have in common is the loss of identity in society. As any Penn Stater or college football fan, for that matter, will tell you, JoePa was God. When he got sacked, there was a vacuum — a search for meaning –  at Penn State that needed to be filled. And contrary to all the press nonviolence has been getting of late, modern society is still dominated by the myth of redemptive violence. This myth, posited from imperial creation myths, suggests that violence is inevitable and the way of the world.

There are many factors that contribute to a riot, but at the core is a deep-seated, unconscious belief in both the social efficacy and ultimacy of violence. Add into the mix the history and circumstances unique to Penn State: JoePa as the greatest college football coach of all time, a socially-embedded culture of partying and heavy drinking, and a collective identity tied to Penn State football. Combine those things with the generalized postmodern angst that young people face without necessarily being given or taught the skills to cope with such ventures of self-reflexivity and systems of meaning-making and we can better understand what happened at Penn State.