Over at the Meta-Activism Project, Mary Joyce, who I had the pleasure of getting to know in Boston this summer, has launched an ambitious all-volunteer effort to catalog as many case studies on digital activism as possible.

These stories are being entered into the Global Digital Activism Data Set (GDADS), a “non-proprietary quantitative machine-readable data set,” that I think will be of great use to activists and scholars wanting to learn more about this budding field.

The spreadsheet, which recently hit 500 cases, along with a selection of fleshed out case studies can be found here. And of course, if you know a story that isn’t on their list, submit a case study of your own!

The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict just sent notice of a course on civil resistance that they have developed, in conjunction with the United States Institute of Peace, which will be offered this fall in Washington DC.

Having attended their week-long Fletcher Summer Institute this year, I can say that their presentations and educational materials are top notch. Here are the details, in case it’d be something you’d like to attend:

The world is witnessing a surge in people powered movements in places such as Iran, the Niger Delta, Honduras, and the West Bank. As a result, the foreign policy community is carefully following the courageous acts of civil disobedience utilized by people fighting against various forms of repression.
This course is designed to provide an in-depth and multi-disciplinary perspective on civilian-based movements and campaigns that defend and obtain basic rights and justice around the world – from Egypt to Burma, from Zimbabwe to West Papua. The course will ex-amine such questions as: What is civil resistance? What determines the success or failure of a civil resistance movement? How can professionals in the field better understand and analyze what elements are at work when civilians use nonviolent tactics? How and when should external agents – governments, NGOs, media, business – act or not act when civil resistance is gaining momentum? How can the dynamics and history of civil resistance better inform the fields of conflict management, development, diplomacy, and peacemak-ing?

• Interactive course: focuses on simulations and case studies
• Experience opportunities to share lessons across sectors
• Hear insight from expert scholars and practitioners

COST: $195. Participants not based in Washington, DC are responsible for their own accommodations and travel, including visas.

CREDIT: Participants will receive certificate upon completion of course.

APPLICATION: Visit the USIP course listing to apply

VENUE: USIP Headquarters, 1200 17th St. NW, Washington DC, 20036

For more information please contact education@usip.org

On November 22-28, Adbusters and its network of activists and culture jammers (now nearly 87,000 strong) are organizing a “Carnivalesque Rebellion,” with the goal of “shutting down consumer capitalism for a week.”

Think of it as an adventure, as therapy, as Buy Nothing Day times a hundred … think of it as the World Cup of global activism – a week of postering and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will poster our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, spark mayhem in big box stores and provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience.

One creative action that Adbusters cites as an inspiration is this video (above) of The Love Police stirring things up in the UK.

The first action that the magazine has launched is a worldwide boycott of Starbucks, which should be accompanied by a shift to local indie coffee shops. In their most recent tactical briefing, they announced a similar boycott of Nike.

The next issue of the print magazine will be a “theoretical and practice handbook for the November rebellion,” and they are currently asking that you send along your best ideas for coordinated acts of civil disobedience to memewarriors@adbusters.org, which they’ll share in future briefings.

This past weekend, hundreds of activists gathered in Albany, New York for the United National Peace Conference. In this video, Voices for Creative Nonviolence co-coordinator and WNV contributor Kathy Kelly gives a rousing call to action to the gathering. If you wanted to make it to the conference, but weren’t able to (which was unfortunately my situation), you can still watch many other talks from the weekend by clicking here.

At the Fletcher Summer Institute a couple weeks ago Hardy Merriman gave this insightful presentation on strategy and tactics for nonviolent resistance. For anyone new to the field, watching this video would be an easy way to get the basics.

In this video, Jack DuVall, the president of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict and the co-author of A Force More Powerful, gives a good introduction to civil resistance at the Fletcher Summer Institute which I attended last week.

Last week, I had the good fortune of attending the Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict at Tufts University in Boston, hence my absence from this site. The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), which organized the week-long institute, did a phenomenal job in bringing together some of the most inspiring theorists and practitioners of nonviolent action to share their knowledge and experiences in the field.

One of the highlights for me, was getting a chance to hear Rev. James Lawson speak on the opening night and the conversation that we had later in the week. Rev. Lawson was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States who taught Martin Luther King Jr. and many other leaders of the struggle about nonviolence, and organized the student-led sit-ins in Nashville in 1959 that led to the desegregation of the city.

Fortunately, ICNC has made Rev. Lawson’s talk (video above) and several others available online. I’ll share at least a couple other presentations as the week goes on, along with my reflections on the experience as a whole.

• On Friday, a million workers belonging to Italy’s largest union went on strike across the nation to protest proposed austerity cuts by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government.

• Despite some acts of violence, 25,000 peacefully protested the policies of the G20 in Toronto over the weekend amidst a heavy police presence.

• Tens of thousands of opposition supporters marched in Taiwan’s capital Saturday to protest the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, a trade agreement with China opponents said will undermine the island’s self-rule and harm its economy.

• On Saturday, people gathered and held hands to form a symbolic line in the sand for 15 minutes as part of the “Hands Across the Sand” demonstrations organized in the US and abroad to pressure elected officials against any expansion of offshore drilling and to promote “clean” energy. In the U.S. nearly 700 rallies took place in all 50 states.

• Egyptian dissident Mohamed El Baradei led over 4,000 in a protest in Alexandria on Friday demanding an end to police brutality.

• In Michigan, thousands rallied on the state Capitol in Lansing on Thursday to urge lawmakers not to cut funding for public education.

• On Friday, 40 demonstrators greeted Australian Trade Minister Simon Crean at a Melbourne hotel when he arrived at a meeting to approve a deal to export up to 20 million tons of polluting La Trobe Valley brown coal to Vietnam.

A notice came in from The Metta Center for Nonviolence:

Just a quick update to let you all know that Metta president Dr. Michael Nagler will be doing an interview addressing the flotilla situation, tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 8:30am [Pacific Standard Time] on KPFA radio here in Berkeley. If you are local to the Bay Area, you can tune in to 94.1 FM at 8:30am; or you can also listen live online on KPFA’s site. After broadcast the show will be archived on this page on KPFA’s site. I believe there’ll a call-in component to the interview, so be ready with your questions!

Michael Nagler, a literature professor at Berkeley, is one of the most articulate voices advocating for nonviolence in the United States today. We highly recommend his courses about nonviolence, which are available for free online, as an introductory resource on the subject.

Waging Nonviolence is participating in a teach-in on Iran at New York University’s Tisch School this Sunday, May 2nd. The event begins at 1pm with an introductory panel on the current situation in Iran. Then at 2pm, Eric and I will be taking part in an hour-long workshop on the politics of the Green Movement. I will be talking about strategies, tactics and ways for the movement to gain new traction, while Eric will confront the issue of economics within the movement and the importance of preventing a neoliberal agenda from taking hold. There will then be a short break with refreshments, followed by a keynote from Iranian historian Ervand Abrahamian. For more information or to register for this free event visit the Platypus Affiliated Society.

In 1982, the War Resisters League initiated a “Blockade the Bombmakers” series of mass actions in New York City at the UN Missions of the five nuclear powers of the time. It was day one of the UN Special Session on Disarmament, and nearly 1,700 people were arrested in the blockades. The day before, one million people crowded into Manhattan to press for nuclear disarmament.

Times have changed…. alot.

Most people don’t know that 27,000 nuclear warheads still menace the world. Most (95%) are held by the United States and Russia. If they do know, they think they are some distant issue that does not affect daily life.

But for 2011, President Obama is proposing $8 billion in nuclear weapons research and development funding while schools and hospitals are closing or cutting staff, roads and bridges crumble and public services are desperate for money.

Even more alarming, the United States maintains that nuclear weapons play an “essential” role in U.S. national security and the Obama administration has not ruled out “first use” of nuclear weapons. This “right” allows the United States to drop the first bomb in an atomic war, thus leaving U.S. global dominance through military power unchallenged and unchecked. Another key Pentagon document, the Quadrennial Defense Review, suggests that as nuclear reductions are completed, more powerful conventional (i.e. non-nuclear) weapons capabilities — called “Prompt Global Strike” — will be necessary.

So, we might not have a million in the streets, but that does not mean we can be passive and complacent! On May 2, the “Disarm Now: For Peace and Human Needs” march across 42nd St. will bring the world’s message of disarmament to the UN.

The War Resisters League, a secular pacifist organization founded in 1923, invites everyone to Grand Central Station to declare NYC a “nuclear weapons free zone,” and imagine what our city would look like without the billions spent on nuclear weapons and the terrorism of the nuclear threat.

For more information visit: http://www.warresisters.org/NPTactions, and for a full schedule of the events and actions around the NPT conference click here.

After successfully pressuring many of the largest fast food corporations – such as Taco Bell, Subway, McDonald’s and Burger King – to increase wages, improve benefits and follow new guidelines to protect the safety of the farmworkers that pick tomatoes over recent years, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has a new target: Publix Supermarkets.

Even though CIW signed an agreement with foodservice giant Aramark at the beginning of the month, Publix has refused to meet the demands of these exploited workers. In response, as Peter Rothberg at The Nation writes:

…the CIW has organized what is expected to be its largest action ever — a twenty-two mile march from Tampa to Lakeland, where Publix is based. The march is broken up into two distinct daily segments, and will culminate in a rally and concert on Sunday, April 18. The actress and activist Gloria Reuben will join Kerry Kennedy, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, and Stetson Kennedy, Florida’s premier folklorist and longtime human rights champion, as rally hosts…

For all the many of you who aren’t able to join the march, please send Publix CEO Ed Crenshaw an email politely expressing your “support for the Farmworker Freedom March and your hope that he’ll begin working with the CIW to address the sub-poverty wages and abuses faced by the farmworkers who pick Publix’s tomatoes.

Check out the CIW’s site for more information on the Farmworker Freedom March, which begins this Friday, and instructions on how to register to participate.

If you want to receive Waging Nonviolence updates by email please sign up for our mailing list at the top of the page. We will soon start sending weekly updates with links to our top stories, as well as the occasional breaking news item.

The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict has a couple of interesting events coming up. The first is part of an online lecture series on topics related to nonviolent conflict and civil resistance. There have been two presentations since the series began last month, but the latest one is scheduled for this afternoon, starting at 12pm EST. University of San Francisco politics professor Stephen Zunes will be speaking about “the long history of nonviolent action throughout the Islamic world” and highlighting “case studies including Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Mali, Western Sahara, Indonesia, Pakistan, and others.” You must register to attend the Webinar.

The second event is the ICNC’s fifth annual Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict at Tufts University. This week-long Institute “brings together international professionals and journalists from around the world to learn from top practitioners and scholars about strategic concepts and present applications of civil resistance.” It will take place June 20-26. Go to the ICNC website to learn more about the application, which is due March 15th.

If you want to be notified of more events put on by the ICNC sign up for their bi-weekly emails, which also include links to many great stories about nonviolence.

Just over a week ago, I was fortunate enough to attend a conference at The New School called “Iran: Politics of Resistance.” Many great scholars on Iran, both American and Iranian, took part in three panel discussions throughout the day. I was only able to attend the first one—which focused primarily on the Green Movement and whether it can accurately be called a full-fledged revolution—but the others looked to be just as fascinating. Fortunately, they are now all online.

From the first panel, I recommend watching Charles Kurzman from the University of North Carolina speak about “Cultural Jiu-Jitsu and the Iranian Greens,” as well as the talk on “Revolutionary Prefigurations” given by journalist Danny Postel (a good friend of this site). His suggestion that the Green Movement not put off addressing economic issues (like the “color revolutions” of Eastern Europe) was met with serious debate during the Q&A period—a phenomenon we are familiar with on this site. It was also nice to hear a lot of our hunches about the ambiguity of the Green Movement’s objectives and leadership echoed by the speakers.

I have yet to watch the other two panel presentations, but both look particularly useful to those studying social movements and nonviolence. The second is about “Everyday Resistance, Micropolitics and Solidarity” and the third is on “Ethical and Political Demands of the Green Movement,” which includes a presentation on “The Gandhian Movement in Iran.”

I plan on watching both and will add comments if anything strikes me. I hope others will join me.