Through all the dynamic and dramatic progress of the Arab Spring, the pro-democracy campaign in the tiny island nation of Bahrain has tended to be sidelined. It has struggled to attract the world’s sympathy and attention due to a lack of foreign reporters on the ground and little good information circulating in news sources. Additionally, the Bahraini government has silenced local journalists, employed public-relations and lobbying firms to discredit the protesters, even while it regularly pays lip service to delivering reform.

Nada Alwadi, a Bahraini journalist (and Waging Nonviolence contributor), recently delivered a webinar talk from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington, D.C., discussing the current challenges faced by the movement. She was formerly a reporter for Alwasat, a popular newspaper in Bahrain, and was detained in April by security forces for covering the protests in the capital of Manama. Nada left Bahrain earlier this year over concerns for her personal safety. She is currently working in the United States to spread awareness about the situation in her country.

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Waging Nonviolence traveled to the fifth annual Gandhi-King Conference in Memphis this past weekend. In addition to making new friends and reconnecting with old ones—which is what it’s really all about—Eric and I presented a workshop on the role of blogging in nonviolent activism. While it has been an exciting year for us, with massive uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and the rest of the Arab Spring—not to mention Wisconsin—the real excitement has been the past two months, with Occupy Wall Street.

Since Nathan couldn’t join us to talk about his exhilarating experience as one of the early journalists on the OWS scene, we shot this eight-minute video (above), where he lays out the chronology and impact of his reporting. As he explains, being able to track the unfolding of a movement first-hand “fit so perfectly with what we’ve been trying to do all this time.”

We were excited to share this experience with the many great folks attending Gandhi-King this year and receive a really nice write-up in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Jeju Island is very far away from all the ferment and fervor of OccupyWallStreet, OccupyChicago and OccupyBaltimore. It is even further away from OccupyNewLondon (which is going to start on Sunday, 4-6pm every day, down by our infamous whale tale).

Jeju is in South Korea and it is apparently very beautiful. Unofficially, it is known as Honeymoon Island, because Korean newlyweds go there after the wedding (obviously). The area is studded with coral reefs and UNESCO designations.

Officially, Jeju was dubbed the “Island of World Peace” by Roh Moo Hyun (South Korea’s president until 2009) because it was the site of a 1948 democratic uprising that was met by slaughter—it is estimated that between 30,000 and 60,000 civilians were massacred by the military.

Against this backdrop of beauty and suffering, there emerges a new kind of struggle. In the tiny fishing village of Gangjeong, the South Korean Government is building a deep water naval base. In the process, they are dredging the sea and destroying coral reefs and upending life for the residents.

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I am headed to Barcelona next week to attend an international seminar called “War Profiteers and Peace Movement Responses.” The meeting is being organized by War Resisters International, the Spanish organization Foundation for Peace and others. Besides my obvious excitement about mi viaje a España, I am looking forward to being part of a discussion on the costs of war and the work for peace involving activists and analysts from all over the world—from South Africa to Venezuela and many places in between.

As the occupation of Wall Street continues, and Wall Street itself falters, and the tenth year of war in Afghanistan approaches, it is a good time to address these issues in a sober and head on way. How do we make the connections between the costs of war and the price of peace? How do we help our communities move from understanding, to outrage, to action, and how do we make those actions meaningful, strategic and impactful?

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When the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict’s week-long Fletcher Summer Insitute (FSI) at Boston’s Tufts University came to end last Friday, several members of the ICNC team traveled to Strasbourg, France for an entirely different kind of educational conference. While the focus in Boston was on empowering activists from conflict regions around the world, the meeting in Strasbourg—the seat of European Parliament—is all about government power and its responsibility to uphold democratic values.

The Summer University for Democracy (as it’s called) brings together several hundred young public sector leaders from across Europe to discuss what it describes as “the challenges of our times.” This is now the sixth such annual gathering organized by the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, which is one of the oldest international organizations promoting human rights and democracy. The focus changes every year; this time it’s on ethics in politics, the media, and business.

ICNC president Jack DuVall took part in one of the first breakout sessions of the day on Monday, titled “Ethics in the Heart of Democratic Reforms.” Flanked by two ethics professors, whose talks dwelled mainly in the broad and theoritical realm, DuVall delivered a far more urgent message, underscoring the basic dynamics of nonviolent struggle for an audience that—unlike the participants at FSI—was less directly engaged with political action in the streets.

Here is the audio of DuVall’s speech, followed by his answers to several common questions surrounding nonviolent action:

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What makes an action nonviolent? Can’t blocking a road be considered violent if it impedes the freedom of another?

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Can a protests be over-used to the detriment of its effectiveness?

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James Lawson (right) and Nathan Schneider. Photo by Cynthia Boaz.

Over lunch last week, during the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict’s Fletcher Summer Institute, I had the chance to talk with civil-rights movement leader James Lawson with a recorder on. It wasn’t hard to get him going; he had been talking about these things the whole week. Lawson, who organized the decisive Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins, is above all a strategist. He insists on the need to develop long-range strategies, not just short-term tactics. But, as he showed during the ceremony for the first James Lawson Awards, he is also a theologian.

NS: For activists trying to reclaim people’s power among all the powerful corporations at work today, what do you think can be learned from the civil-rights movement? What are the lessons from your experience?

JL: Well, I think that the main thing that activists must learn is nonviolent philosophy, methodology, techniques, and strategy. They need to work from an investigation and assessment of their local base, determining thereby the skills and techniques that will organize and mobilize people in that local scene. No social movement is going to take place if it doesn’t have roots in what’s going on in Cleveland, Ohio, or Washington, DC, or way across Georgia. That’s how movements take place, and that’s how movements have taken place in the United States—not by national policy, but by local groups assessing their own scene and trying to be real about how to start working.

At the local level, people need to get some processes going that will cut down the sales of certain companies and corporations and begin to send a mighty message. It may not be possible to do that in the first year, but I’d be willing to wager that steady organizing around something specific would begin to have an impact. That’s the first task.

I maintain that we have more than enough activists and activism in our country. What we do not have is a unity of understanding about how you go about putting that activism to work. We’re all over the ballpark. Very few people are playing the nine positions of the ball team that you’re going to need to defend, or have an offense.

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Gene Sharp, the leading theorist of nonviolent resistance alive today, doesn’t speak in public much anymore. He has been giving a lot of interviews in the last few months, to be sure—including one with me—and an exciting documentary about him is soon to be released. A new book, Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle, is forthcoming from Oxford. Revolutions whose planners have learned from his work are taking place all around the world. But, among these and so many other things, he is 83 years old. Giving speeches isn’t as easy as it used to be.

Today, though, he came to Tufts University and spoke to the activists, journalists, and scholars gathered for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict‘s Fletcher Summer Institute. What an incredible treat—as excellent as it is rare. He reflected on the triumphs of nonviolent struggle over the course of the last century and the climax it has reached this year in the ongoing Arab Spring. At the end, he took questions, and among his concluding words were these, concerning the limits of what nonviolent struggle can and can’t accomplish:

I’ve never focused on answering that question, on what it can’t do. I focus on what it has done—and therefore it could probably do at least that much in the future. How much can we push back that barrier of impossibility? If we can’t push back that barrier of impossibility, then violence will be used, and that will be out of my control. But if we can keep pushing it back, and revealing that nonviolent struggle can do much more than was ever expected, then pretty soon there will be almost nothing left for violence.

Listen to the whole lecture, beginning with an introduction by Erica Chenoweth, herself one of Sharp’s most promising successors:

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Left to right: Lhadon Tethong, Nada Alwadi, Jack DuVall, James Lawson, Ghada Shahbender, Mary King. Photo by Arzu Geybullayeva.

Yesterday the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict presented its first James Lawson Award for Nonviolent Achievement—or, rather, awards. The ceremony took place over lunch in a multi-purpose room at Tufts University, midway through ICNC’s annual, week-long Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict. All four Lawson Award winners are taking part in FSI this year, and all four are women: Mary King, Ghada Shahbender, Lhadon Tethong, and Nada Alwadi.

FSI has gathered speakers and participants from across the globe, from Burma, to Madagascar, to Sweden, to Azerbaijan. They’re activists, scholars, journalists, resisters, jailbirds, exiles, and a clown. In a room where heroism is pretty much the norm, the mood can sway quickly from hope to frustration, from celebration to mourning. In a moment of laughter, you might even be tempted to think that heroism is easy, until you hear another story that makes you remember how painfully, unspeakably hard it is, and the toll it takes.

Over the course of the week they’ve told stories about beatings, imprisonment, interrogations, victories, absurdities, and homesickness. There have sometimes been a few tears—but they’re not an ordinary sort of tears. Coming as they do after long days of discussion about the strategies and tactics of resistance, they’re laced with very practical, hard-earned hope. There is faith in these rooms, but with reason.

Jack DuVall, president of ICNC, introduced the winners, and Rev. James Lawson himself handed them their plaques and certificates. Lawson was one of the great strategists of the civil rights movement, best known for his role in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins. 50 years ago to the day, he was taking part in the Freedom Rides. By then he had already been a conscientious objector during the Korean War and traveled to India to study Gandhian nonviolence.

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Today at the literary magazine Killing the Buddha (where I am also an editor), Nathaniel Page has a rather nonplussed report on last weekend’s Newark Peace Education Summit, apparently intended by Mayor Cory Booker to stem a recent crime wave. It was a star-studded affair, headlined by Mr. Peace himself, the Dalai Lama. Edward Norton was there too, and Russell Simmons, and Deepak Chopra, and Goldie Hawn. But it didn’t seem to be working, at least immediately:

Outside the venue, token locals—lumpens, in Marxist terms—wearing torn do-rags and saggy jeans loped around, glancing into car windows and chewing on chicken bones. In the bathroom of the train station, two men shaved their heads with Bic razors while one insisted to someone on the phone that he owned only one chain and one ring.

Moments before the guard checked my camera, I watched the Dalai Lama exit the Best Western hotel across the street. A cavalcade of black Cadillac Escalades brought him between there and the venue, a distance of seventy yards. They idled in front of the hotel for twenty minutes before he came out. As they sped away, an agent with an AR-15 glared from the window of his vehicle, his eyes wide and darting over each person in the crowd.

The first day of the summit, I went to Deepak Chopra’s seminar, “The Neuroscience of Enlightenment.” Chopra delivered a monologue about Hilbert space, use-dependent synaptic neuroplasticity and Plank-level space-time geometry. He guided his audience through a five-minute meditation, rewiring our brains for enlightenment. That night, somewhere in Newark, someone was shot four times in the leg.

Read the rest at Killing the Buddha.

For those of you in New York, I will be speaking on a panel with Mathis Chiroux from Iraq Veterans Against the War and Pardiss Kebriaei from the Center for Constitutional Rights this Sunday at the Left Forum. I plan to talk primarily about my trip in December to Afghanistan and how the situation there has only devolved since Obama came to power.

Here is the official description of the panel, which will run from 10-11:50am in room E324 at Pace University:

From the Bush Regime’s “War on Terror” to “Obama’s Contingency Operation” – Why We Resist

An examination of how the Obama administration is, in some ways, worse than the Bush regime in prosecuting secret wars in Pakistan and Yemen with the use of secret ops and unmanned drone attacks; night raids in Afghanistan; continuing involvement of troops, contractors and the largest embassy in the world in Iraq; the development of list of targets for extra-judicial killing by the CIA; the continuation of renditions to third countries, denial of habeas rights for detainees in Bagram; and revelations of the US military policy of fostering human rights abuse of prisoners by puppet armies.