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.

According to her, while the movement is popular amongst citizens, it has been unable to target the pillars of support of the monarchy. “Bahrain operates under a system of tribal politics, where the military, finance and judicial departments are run by a closely knit circle of Sunni elites,” she said. She argued, furthermore, that external pressure is currently the most pragmatic means for success, through international support galvanized by Bahraini and international advocacy groups and media.

Alwadi herself, for instance, is the co-founder of the Bahrain Press Association, an organisation which seeks to defend journalists from government repression. The group calls on the Bahraini government to ensure the safety of local and foreign media professionals, as well as to investigate cases of violence against them. She highlighted other advocacy groups like the Bahrain Mirror, a news and opinion website started by a Bahraini journalist based outside the country, and the Freedom for Bahraini Doctors campaign, which seeks the release of doctors and nurses sentenced to jail by the monarchy.

It can be argued that part of the reason Bahrain’s movement hasn’t captured the imagination of the global community is that it still lacks an emotional resonance as compared to other movements in the Middle East. Tunisia, after all, kicked off with a dramatic act of self-immolation, followed by a fervent uprising among citizens. The Egyptian revolution became iconic for the acts of prayer in front of tanks and Christian-Muslim solidarity in Tahrir Square. The bravery of Syrian protesters still demonstrating in the face of violent state repression has granted their pro-democracy movement supportive and sympathetic media narratives. In the case of Bahrain, scenes like the crackdown at the Pearl Roundabout and solidarity between Sunnis and Shias against the monarchy have been somehow less relatable to global audiences.

Nonetheless, the past few weeks in Bahrain have seen the movement take a new strategic turn. Alwadi explained that a new political movement has begun, running in parallel to the demonstrations. A coalition of opposition political parties recently released the Manama Document, a draft constitution for democratic governance in Bahrain. The Document argues that change in Bahrain can only be delivered through “dialogue between the authorities and opposition forces” with “international guarantees.” It calls for an elected government; fair electoral districts guaranteeing political equality for Sunnis and Shias and the principle of one person, one vote; a single chamber parliament with sole legislative and regulatory powers; a trustworthy and independent judicial system; and security for all of Bahrain’s residents. At the same time, the document envisions the reforms to deliver a constitutional monarchy, “retaining the royal family in terms of ruling and governing without powers.”

These moves have brought some measure of success and support to the Bahraini struggle. The Obama administration recently postponed a $53 million arms deal with the monarchy pending a review of an official inquiry into the state crackdown on protesters. Moreover, the crown prince of Bahrain, Salman Al-Khalifa, has supported the need for reforms in his country. In March this year he declared his own “seven principles of reform,” which ultimately became part of the Manama Document.

There is still tremendous uncertainty in the country. Alwadi highlighted how the politicization of the struggle has led to divisions in the movement. Some political elements, for instance, are calling for an end to monarchy altogether and a complete overhaul of the system. Additionally, critics of the pro-democracy movement suspect that a transition to democracy would lead to a fall in crucial international investments, as seen in Egypt. They argue that fears of political turmoil will send the global business community seeking deals elsewhere.

Alwadi also argued that global powers are reluctant to support the movement partly because they enjoy cozy diplomatic and strategic relationships with the monarchy. Bahrain is of course vital to perceived U.S. security interests in the Middle East, serving as the current headquarters of the navy’s Fifth Fleet. Closer to home, Saudi Arabia has made clear its commitment to maintaining the status quo amongst the Gulf nations, especially after sending troops into Bahrain earlier this year to violently suppress the protesters in Manama.

Still, Alwadi continues to be optimistic that popular sentiment will eventually bring democracy to her country. “The political movement in Bahrain is in its nascent stage, and the strategy is still being developed,” she said.

The challenges are great, yet the will of citizens is committed towards democracy. With the Manama Document, that will now has words and a voice. Political advocacy groups must sustain their campaigning on the ground, court international support, and develop ties between Sunni and Shia organizations. It is crucial that the movement does not lose its momentum.

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.

The beautiful island has the misfortune of a strategic location—300 miles from the United States’ rival China, between Japan and the South Korean mainland and along major international shipping lanes. Joon Gang Daily, a South Korean newspaper, described the base under construction as “the spearhead of the country’s defense line.”  The South Korean government maintains that the base is for its own Navy, but activists see the hidden hand of the United States—and its very large destroyer ships. “The Navy Base is too big for the South Korean military,” South Korean activist and War Resisters International Council member Jungmin Choi told me recently. “Our government is so secretive and they have not said, but the base would be big enough to host the Aegis destroyer and we don’t have those.”

Noam Chomsky, the linguist and life-long student of U.S. imperialism, notes in a recent In These Times article that:

the Jeju base would host up to 20 American and South Korean warships, including submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers, several of which would be fitted with the Aegis ballistic-missile defense system.

All of this saber-rattling and base building would put Honeymoon Island in the crosshairs of the next global conflict—or the next battle in the already seething global conflict. Take your pick, but either way the people of Jeju are saying “no thanks” to all of that!

In the five years since the plans were announced, the South Korean government has seen opposition coalesce—94 percent of residents oppose the base—and residents use all of the tools in the democratic tool box to stop the base. And that includes their bodies. Sung-Hee Choi, a Jeju activist, has just related the latest news to members of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. The South Korean Navy began blasting work along the coastline a few days ago over the objections of the Island governor Woo Keun-Min and despite the fact that the Island Council is demanding that the central government and Navy stop construction. She says:

The navy, as usual, has never consulted the villagers for the work today. Do you believe? The navy totally ignoring not only the opinion of villagers but also the demand of the Island Council and even the Island government, conducted six times of test blast of the Gureombee [coastline area] today. Eleven activists were arrested during their resistance in the sea and land.

And this is just the latest. Over and over again, Catholic priests, Buddhist nuns, villagers, students from the mainland and people from every walk of life have been arrested in civil disobedience by the South Korean police. Just a few days ago, nine Catholic priests hopped the fence and were arrested. The struggle is getting more and more international attention.

Celebrated feminist and Ms. Founder Gloria Steinem was on Jeju over the summer and wrote about her experiences in a New York Times op-ed. “I can still hear the dolphins crying as if sensing danger,” she writes, expressing her uncertainty about what will happen next as the military continues construction over the bodies and resistance of the people. “But somehow, my faith is in the villagers who say, “Touch not one stone, not one flower.”

The Global Network will celebrate their 20th year of anti-militarism work with a February 2012 conference to bring international attention to Jeju. They will start in Hawaii at the Pentagon’s Barking Sands Pacific Missile Defense where Aegis missiles defense systems are currently located and then go on to Jeju where they will ultimately end up (unless the campaign is successful). Global Network coordinator Bruce Gagnon writes that “Our friends in Hawaii and Jeju Island are very isolated and we want to join them in a show of solidarity as they work to end the militarization of their island homes.”

We can’t all go to Jeju (or maybe we can), but in the meantime American Friends Service Committee is hosting a “Peace in Asia and the Pacific” conference later in October and Yanae Pak, a Jeju activist, will be there to talk about their militant nonviolent resistance to the base.

Even if you can’t attend the conference, add your voice to chorus of opposition by signing this petition to “Save Jeju Island.”

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?

I definitely don’t have all the answers. Or even any of them… but those are the questions I am asking as I pack my bolsas and practicar mi español.

One of my presentations is a “how to” on researching the arms trade. I am pretty computer illiterate, but I hope to work with more tech savvy colleagues at the War Resisters League and Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Militarism Watch to turn it into a “webinar” (as the kids say, please… tell me that the kids still talk about webinars, that we have not turned a corner away from that innovation). Here are a few factoids that the presentation will help would-be researchers uncover.

In 2009 (the last year for which there is full data—unbelievable, right?), the Pentagon made agreements to sell weapons and military hardware worth $30,660,936,000. Arms buyers around the world took delivery of weapons worth $12,521,676,000. Why the difference? Sometimes, the Pentagon and arms buyers agree to buy more than the country can really afford, or they stretch the buying over a number of years.

It was an interesting year in terms of weapons deliveries. Only two nations took delivery of more than $1 billion in weapons… a sign of a strapped economy if I ever saw one. The first was Saudi Arabia (a consistent big spender) at $1.7 billion in weapons and military hardware and the other was Greece (which most often buys more like a few $100 million in weapons) with $1.2 billion.

You may be asking yourself, “Greece? Isn’t Greece in the news for some reason these days? Not for being a big arms buyer, either, right?”

Greece is in the news because its economy is getting flushed down the toilet—it is on the verge of a default and Athens is considering cutting the national budget by 50 percent. Like in half… In response to these proposals, the Greek public transport system ground to a halt on Thursday, with bus drivers, train conductors, cabbies and even air traffic controllers striking in protest.

Even as it lays off workers, raises taxes and cuts pensions in an attempt to get its economy back on track; Greece is spending billions on weapons. In 2005, the Pentagon notified Congress about an agreement with Greece for a whopping $3.1 billion in weapons, including F-16 fighter planes. Because it takes a few years for a deal this big to get finalized, this year Greece has begun to exercise that license. In March and April, Greece made deals worth a cumulative $260 million for spare parts and equipment for its air force.

Are the protesters flooding Athens and other Greek cities decrying their country’s arms buying spree? Are they talking about their military budget? Greece spends more than 4 percent of GDP on the military, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, making it 22nd in the world, ahead of China (23rd) and the United States (24th). Those are 2005 and 2006 figures, but they are still pretty interesting, right?

Closer to home, Robert Greenwald and others are trying to make U.S. military spending part of the conversation about the U.S. economic crisis. I think it is penetrating, but not as much as it needs to. How do we take it to the next level? How do we inform and educate and organize and mobilize? How do we change the system and our lives? Big questions for a big time! More when I get back from Barcelona!

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:

Download [17:34, 20.1 MB]

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

Download [5:44, 6.6 MB]

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

Download [3:07, 3.6 MB]

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.

NS: How do you go about uniting disparate movements, or quasi-movements, or disparate groups of activists who want to do something? How do you bring them into a common cause?

JL: A wide range of progressive organizations were in the streets while we were campaigning for civil rights. That movement affected many different kinds of issues. For the first time, in the Civil Rights Bill, the government said that hiring—in the public or private sector—could not be discriminatory by national origin, color, gender, or age. Disability came later. As a society, we had never given much thought to that before; if I was a business owner, I could just decide to hire my friends, rather than serving the public. But now, I had an obligation to certain values that strengthened the well-being of the nation as a whole.

Many people don’t remember that during the period between about 1963 and 1968, the Congress, with an activist president—even though he got himself and the country entangled in Vietnam—passed the most progressive legislation that the nation has ever had. This included Medicare, Head Start, and federal grants to allow students to go to college at the expense of the tax dollar. Congress passed the first immigration-reform bill that turned immigration from a white-only policy to a more worldwide policy. It provided funds that nonprofits and local cities and towns could use to make sure there would be affordable housing available. It passed an anti-poverty program, making money available to local citizens and their governments to do a great variety of things concerning adult literacy, children, work, housing, and education.

NS: So, campaigning around the issue of civil rights—or even something narrower like desegregating certain areas of American cities—opened the door for all these other issues?

JL: It opened the door for the president and the Congress to see that there were a great variety of ways in which the quality of life of the whole society could be raised. Local organizing must converge at the point of agenda and bring together issues that affect a broad spectrum of people. A part of my thesis here is that we cannot resolve the issue of racism if we do not resolve the issue of sexism. We cannot resolve the sexism if we are not willing to deal with the forms of structural violence that destroy so many people. And we cannot resolve those if we do not deal with the issue of the injustice of economic exploitation—abuse and fraud and the rest of it. Greed must be brough under some kind of justice. You see, there is a huge set of secondary issues that will be affected by such a convergence. In the civil-rights movement, we were not only talking about Jim Crow law, or segregation. We were talking about the lack to access to work, to education, to housing—the lack of access across the board. The no-hiring-discrimination business affected more women than it affected black people. There has to be a spirit of convergence. Environmentalist groups, for instance, cannot really accomplish the well-being of our social, or natural environment—or the birds or the earth—if they are not willing to work on it in a way that’s going to affect and dismantle other kinds of injustice.

NS: Has doing nonviolent resistance affected your spiritual views? And do you think that a new kind of spirituality is required for the expansion and growth and development of nonviolent movements?

JL: The heart of spirituality, according to biblical thought, is to love God and to love the neighbor as yourself. I see nonviolent theory and practice as a fulfillment of that—maybe even the major fulfillment. It means that it is not a non-traditional spirituality, therefore, that’s necessary, but simply the ancient spiritualities that any number of world religions have tried to cultivate and encourage for centuries.

A part of what nonviolent practice and activity has done for me is it has deeply escalated what I call my “confidence in the universe,” and my willingness to trust in its care. It has also greatly expanded my heart at the point of seeing people in a different light. I think that that’s at the fore of any kind of spirituality; it’s becoming more human. To become more human, your heart has to become more compassionate, more inclusive of other human beings. That’s what Jesus said. So, the spirituality of my childhood and teenage years has been greatly provoked and deepened and enlarged in ways that I could have had no imagination about before. How would I have known? How would you know as a child, as a teenager, or even as a student that this course of action would mean an expansion of life, of spirituality, of compassion for life? I had no notion of that.

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:

Download [1:02:43, 28.7 MB]

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.

Mary King, who worked with Lawson and SNCC in the civil rights movement, was honored not just for her activism but for her “great intellect and scholarship,” as Jack DuVall put it. King is a political scientist who specializes in civil resistance, and on Tuesday she spoke about the First Intifada in Palestine as a nonviolent movement. (She has also contributed to Waging Nonviolence.) “You have no idea how special this is!” she said, embracing her onetime teacher. “50 years—half a century!”

When Ghada Shahbender first began work as an activist in Egypt six years ago, her kids didn’t support her. She lost her job as an English teacher as a result of her activism. “My children were totally against it,” she said. “They had grown up in a culture of fear.” She went through repeated disappointments and frustrations as the regime’s oppression only grew worse. But Shahbender says that “it was worth every minute of every day” when Mubarak finally fell earlier this year. She wouldn’t have guessed it could happen even two months earlier. Her children were there with her in Tahrir.

As a leading organizer in the movement to free Tibet from Chinese rule, Lhadon Tethong is currently director of the Tibet Action Institute, fighting to liberate a land she has never seen. She has been detained for protesting in China and helps to teach new nonviolent tactics to Tibetan dissidents. “I know we can win,” she said in her brief remarks, speaking through tears. “I know we can learn from Rev. Lawson and the struggles of civil rights in this country.”

Finally came Nada Alwadi, a Bahraini journalist who was recently detained and interrogated in her country for contradicting the regime’s misrepresentations of the movement that has risen up against it. All week at FSI, she has been correcting fallacies that appear in the international press about Bahrain. “I was just doing my job,” said Alwadi, also through tears. “I have chosen to report what I have seen.” ICNC is working to help keep her safe in the US.

Lawson took the podium after almost all was said and done, tearing up as well. The strategist noted that he is also a theologian. “If God is,” he said, “then God’s intention is that the human race will tap the infinite potential of being in the likeness and image of life.” There’s no mistaking what form that takes in his mind. He echoed Tethong: “Yes, we will win.”

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.

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.

The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) is now accepting applications for the sixth annual Fletcher Summer Institute (FSI), which is the “only executive education program in the advanced, interdisciplinary study of nonviolent conflict, taught by leading scholars and practitioners of strategic nonviolent action and authorities from related fields.” The week-long conference will take place from June 19-25, and the application, which is due by March 15, can be downloaded here.

I had the good fortune of attending FSI last summer and could not more highly recommend it. The presentations – many of which can be watched here – were top-notch and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the other participants, who were from 29 different countries. If you want to really dig deep into the exciting field of civil resistance, there is no better place to start.

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.