• About 20 people gathered on Thursday outside the Ritz-Carlton in New York City—where the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was said to be staying—to protest his trip to the United States for medical treatment and a deal he received that granted him immunity from prosecution for  crimes against protesters during uprisings last year.

• Thousands of Bahrainis held a peaceful anti-government protest in a suburb of the capital on Friday, demanding the release of political prisoners and political reforms in the troubled Gulf Arab state.

• Protesters defied a heavy security presence across Syria on Friday to commemorate the 30th anniversary of a deadly crackdown on Islamist opposition in the city of Hama, but were effectively prevented from turning out in the capital, Damascus.

• Several thousand people rallied in Bratislava and seven other Slovakian cities Friday to demand that early elections planned in March be postponed to allow a thorough investigation.

• Poland’s prime minister says he is suspending the ratification process for an international copyright treaty after widespread protests and attacks on government websites.

• Members of an Indian tribe in Panama are blocking roads in two provinces on the border with Costa Rica in a dispute over mineral exploitation on their lands.

• Cambodian police violently dispersed a group of around 150 women protesting forced evictions in the capital Phnom Penh on Thursday.

• Around 300 people gathered outside Budapest’s New Theater on Wednesday to protest its new director, an actor with links to far-right parties.

• Hackers associated with the activist group Anonymous posted a protest against Greece’s EU and IMF-inspired austerity policies on the website of the country’s justice ministry Friday

A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different. Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.” Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbø will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories. Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change. In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.) The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent. When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena. In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24. The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million! The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928. The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations. Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt. By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side. This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.) The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?) Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid. Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good. Correction: In an earlier version, Henning Mankell was mistakenly referred to by the name of Kurt Wallender, the protagonist in several of his books.

The short-term issue which birthed the network now being called Occupy Nigeria was the hastily-announced January 1, 2012 end of the federal fuel subsidies which had enabled average Nigerians to afford gas pumped from oil reserves on their own land. This resulted in an overnight 120 percent price increase, and an outburst of fury at decades of governmental collusion with the multi-billion dollar oil industry. The initial demands of the movement—to simply return to the status quo before 2012—were quickly followed up with calls for an end to the nepotism of politicians and an improvement in infrastructure. By the end of the first week of local protests, Nigerian police had killed at least ten activists, and a call went out for a nationwide, indefinite strike which would halt the Nigerian economy. Many mainstream professional associations joined the call, including the Nigerian Labour Congress and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association. Ongoing and intensified shut-downs promise to paralyze international oil supplies.

The fact is, for many long-term observers, there are no surprises here; Nigerian society may be crippled by the violence of multinational greed but has long been a staging ground for peaceful resistance to the neocolonialism of oil companies and their foreign profiteers. Nigerian educator Judith Atiri, in our recently published Seeds Bearing Fruit: Pan African Peace Action for the 21st Century, testified to the “fertile soil and inspiring possibilities” deep in the history of Africa’s most populated nation. Early examples of creative anti-colonial challenges included a popular tax resistance campaign in the 1920s, and a series of general strikes throughout the 1940s. After independence in 1960, protests became more localized and region-specific with the discovery of oil and movements for secession taking center stage. It was quickly evident that direct British colonization had been replaced by the all-consuming power of the empire-building multinationals. The 1990 coming together of nine separate associations of the indigenous Ogoni peoples of the southeast set the stage for modern Nigerian resistance.

Ken Saro-Wiwa

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), it should be remembered, was a coalition demanding both control over natural resources as well as general self-determination. Their Ogoni Bill of Rights gave a detailed set of demands for a greater share of the oil revenues amongst all the people of Nigeria, greater national attention to environmental clean-up, and greater political participation and transparency. Though the multinational oil companies and the Nigerian federal government ignored these demands, protests continued with intensified issues raised: that the Ogoni people have a right to refuse further oil production on their land, and that reparations be paid to make up for centuries of colonial theft. By 1995, MOSOP and their supporters were able to successfully shut down several plants, an act now being repeated by the Occupy movement. Nigeria’s infamous response was swift: MOSOP leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues were hanged by the state. Though Ogoni leaders noted that MOSOP and all the peoples of the Niger Delta region were “barricaded by excessive violence” throughout society, and even tempted by violence, they remained a movement committed to nonviolent social change.

Though conflict and violence has been characteristic amongst many competing groupings in the Niger Delta, with disputes over political representation, work contracts, land issues, and personal rivalries, the overall struggle for unity against corruption and greed continues to take peaceful forms. Women have always been active and leading participants in Nigeria’s freedom campaigns, but the initiatives of the past decade have seen more specifically women-led campaigns than ever before. Nigerian legal scholar and conflict resolution practitioner Ifeoma Ngozi Malo wrote poignantly about the 2002 waves of protest against Chevron-Texaco, where women seized control of several oil terminals, with no ensuing violence. “Armed with only food and their voices,” Ngozi Malo explained, “these village women carrying their children on their back occupied the various oil facilities and the terminals for weeks. They barricaded a storage depot, thus blocking docks, helicopter pads and an airstrip, which covered all the entry points to their facility. Their presence prevented well over 700 workers from working or leaving the premises until the company agreed to certain conditions.”

Part of the successes of these campaigns can be explained by the “shaming” aspect of women’s power in Nigerian society. With strong social bonds in a society where cultural traditions are taken very seriously and honored, a simple dance can have greater impact than an apparently militant protest with angry placards. During many occupations of the past several years, dances were specifically developed to ridicule the unjust practices of local, regional and international businessmen. Using embarrassing songs with satirical and sardonic lyrics, these women-led actions have had lasting effects on their communities. Even in cases where corporate promises were quickly broken, the power and possibility of nonviolent direct action and occupation was fused into the consciousness of civil society.

Perhaps the most unique and ingenious tactic of the modern Nigerian women-led movement has been the threat of nakedness. With its roots in traditional protest amongst the peoples of eastern Nigeria, public nudity symbolized a “permanent curse” of political, economic and physical impotence for the men before whom women were provoked to disrobe. Never taken lightly, contemporary instances of the threat are carefully woven into strategic thinking about escalating campaigns. Warnings are always given by the women, and negotiations often take place before a public disrobing is deemed necessary. It could be said that the idea of public nudity and shaming still strikes fear into Nigeria’s body politic. In any case, clothed or not, it is clear that nonviolent tactics are far from new to Nigeria’s large, heterogeneous, neocolonial society.

But is that what a tree hugger really is? Just some dazed hippie who goes around giving hugs to trees as way to connect with nature. You might be shocked to learn the real origin of the term.

The first tree huggers were 294 men and 69 women belonging to the Bishnois branch of Hinduism, who, in 1730, died while trying to protect the trees in their village from being turned into the raw material for building a palace. They literally clung to the trees, while being slaughtered by the foresters. But their action led to a royal decree prohibiting the cutting of trees in any Bishnoi village. And now those villages are virtual wooded oases amidst an otherwise desert landscape. Not only that, the Bishnois inspired the Chipko movement (which means “to cling”) that started in the 1970s, when a group of peasant women in Northeast India threw their arms around trees designated to be cut down. Within a few years, this tactic, also known as tree satyagraha, had spread across India, ultimately forcing reforms in forestry and a moratorium on tree felling in Himalayan regions.

Despite this powerful history of nonviolent resistance, we still consider tree hugger a derogatory term. Meanwhile, a current example of forest protection in Brazil, where the country’s environmental agency has a special ops team that hunts down illegal loggers, gets all kinds of glory. Not that it shouldn’t, considering Brazil has cut deforestation by nearly 80 percent since 2004. But do environmental heroes need to, as the BBC recently described Brazil’s forest agents, “wear military fatigues, with heavy black pistols slung casually on their thighs” in order to get any respect?

In Africa, there are several conservation organizations that have a shoot-to-kill policy when they see a suspected poacher. Private security firms in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi provide military-style protection for the iconic animals that Western tourists flock to see. While some have argued in support of these desperate measures–pointing to the dramatic rise in poaching in recent years–the “shoot first and ask questions later” approach has led to the deaths of locals, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. These incidents of course lead to resentment toward conservation, which has been shown to be most effective when local communities are involved in the process.

Not surprisingly, people want to protect the land they live on. And like the Bisnhois and people of the Chipko movement, they are often willing to lay down their lives for it–armed only with their own two arms.

The message written on this protester's hands reads: "Our demand is the trial."

• Thousands of Yemenis marched toward the capital on Thursday to demand President Ali Abdullah Saleh face trial for killing protesters during 11 months of demonstrations against him and to denounce a new government that would spare him prosecution.

• Several thousand Eyptian activists gathered in Cairo after Friday prayers today for a mass protest against the ruling military and its handling of a series of clashes between security forces and demonstrators that killed 17 people and drew international criticism.

• In Somalia, residents of Sool’s provincial capital of Las Anod took to the streets and went on strike on Thursday, bringing the city to a standstill, to show solidarity with prisoners staging a hunger strike at the city’s main prison.

• On Thursday, holiday strikes to protest austerity measures paralyzed ground traffic in Belgium.

• Camped outside Hungary’s public broadcaster, a small group of television editors is on hunger strike to protest what they say is widespread news manipulation by the government.

• In Pakistan, more than 2,500 members of seven labor unions from across the country gathered at the Railways Headquarters on Wednesday to stage a sit-in against the government’s ‘inability’ to rescue the Railways.

• In Sudan, dozens of students held a protest assembly at Jackson Square on Tuesday in the heart of Khartoum to show solidarity with the month-long Manasir protest against the the Merowe Hydropower Project.

• A group of asylum seekers who survived last weekend’s boat disaster off the Indonesian island of Java have begun a hunger strike after being moved to a detention centre where as many as 12 people are sharing each cell.

• In Kuwait, police used tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, and smoke bombs to disperse a large protest on Monday by the country’s stateless people in Taimaa. Around 30 men who entered a hunger strike were arrested.

• Dozens of Bahraini Shiite employees fired over pro-democracy protests rallied on Wednesday demanding a return to work, a day after authorities said 181 would be reinstated.

• Thousands of angry Egyptian women joined a fifth day of protests in downtown Cairo to voice outrage over what they said was the military’s abuse and mistreatment of female demonstrators.

• The leaders of the rebellious Wukon village in southern China have reached a tentative resolution with senior provincial officials after a tense 10-day stand-off, which saw the villagers erect blockades around all of its entrances–effectively living outside government control–to protest their lack of basic needs.

• As many as 30,000 people protested plans for a coal-fired power plant in Guangong province, China’s most affluent and open-minded region. Residents stormed local government offices and blocked a busy highway that runs from the manufacturing hub of Shenzhen to the city of Shantou.

• A group of women from the Ukrainian topless-protest group Femen recounted their ordeal in neighboring Belarus, where on Monday they were kidnapped, beaten and abused by local security officials for a protest in Minsk in which they bared their breasts to bring attention to President Aleksander Lukashenko’s crackdown on the opposition.

• After six days of protest, armed with 97,000-plus signatures, queers in Seoul, South Korea got the result they were hoping for. The Seoul Municipal Council’s passage of a Students Rights Ordinance with all clauses intact, including ones that affect the well-being of queer students.

• Demonstrators from Argentina’s UATRE farm hands union, blocked access to the Pan-American highway along some of Buenos Aires City’s main access routes to protest the passage of the controversial Farm Worker Statute, which was debated and approved today at the Senate today.

• For the second time in two weeks, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was temporarily drowned out by Occupy protesters as he made his final push to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. “Mic Check,” they announced, continuing, “Put people first!”

As Occupy Wall Street’s birthday party got going at midday today, the mood was mixed—not unlike the mood with which, in a series of improvisations, the movement began three months earlier on September 17. I talked with organizers I’d known from the movement’s first planning meetings, who were milling around Duarte Square, an open space a mile north of the old encampment at Zuccotti Park. Cars were rushing by along Canal Street toward the Holland Tunnel, spewing exhaust. The square was full; lots of music, planning, anticipating, sign-making, puppeteering, the works. Usual protest stuff. But uncertain.

The imperative for the day was to “Re-Occupy”—specifically, to occupy the empty lot next to Duarte, owned by Trinity Wall Street, which is one of the oldest churches in Manhattan and one of the city’s largest property owners. This was also the place where the occupiers had come the morning after the surprise eviction on November 15, only to be promptly ejected by riot police. Now, after a 15-day hunger strike, failed negotiations with Trinity, and even a letter from Desmond Tutu calling on the church to let the occupiers use the lot (followed by another one denouncing protester trespassing), they were back. They wanted a place to build a new encampment, a new headquarters for the movement. Trinity, for its part, gave no sign of budging. And some in the movement weren’t sure it made sense to keep pushing.

“When it comes to space, Trinity has been pretty good to us,” one organizer told me. The church, after all, has already allowed occupiers to use its indoor spaces downtown for meetings, WiFi, bathrooms, and breaks from the cold.

I repeated this to Father Paul Mayer, a Catholic priest and longtime radical. “No, Trinity hasn’t done enough,” he replied. When people are crying out in need, he explained, churches can’t go with business as usual. I asked how he thinks the Catholic Church would respond to a demand like this from occupiers. “It would be worse, of course.”

In the days leading up to so-called D12, as the demands upon Trinity’s benevolence mounted, the occupiers’ request sounded more desperate than strategic: sanctuary. (“#Sanctuary” was even one of the hashtags used for the day, along with “#D12,” on Twitter.) Trinity Church, they seemed to be saying, act like a church!

For the last few months, Occupy Wall Street has given an enormous jolt of energy to the political imaginations and actions of people across the United States and around the world. But now, after more than a month without Zuccotti Park as a home base, the movement has lost its center; meetings often go nowhere, and those who’ve given themselves to activism full-time, without escape or enough rest, are showing signs of wear. As the initial euphoria of the movement wears off, its crisis is in no small part a spiritual one.

By mid-afternoon, I and a thousand others watched as retired Episcopal Bishop (and Vietnam veteran) George Packard, dressed in a purple cassock, was the first to mount a festive yellow ladder over the fence around Trinity’s lot, climb up, and jump down—a trespasser on the land of his own church. Father Mayer soon followed, as did Sister Susan Wilcox, along with a handful of other clergy and several dozen occupiers, who then called on others to join, to come in, to climb the fence and give them strength in numbers. Some did. But soon, the police were in there with them too, arresting everyone inside, clergy and all. As usual, the crowd reacted angrily against police officers—“Shame!” “Who do you serve?”—and some outside of the fence began rocking it back and forth, trying to bring it down. This caused the police to charge, to push people back, to clear the area around the perimeter. The protesters retreated back to Duarte Square, where a dance party was already starting. As they did, they cried a chant often heard in the occupation’s uneasy first days: “This is just a practice!”

Walking around the fenced-in lot, I found Astra Taylor, who had recently articulated her doubts about this action in the third “OWS-Inspired Gazette” produced by the literary magazine n+1. Despite a few moments of excitement as the ladder went up and the bishop went over, her fears were confirmed by what took place. “What is this going to look like?” she asked. To her mind, it wasn’t clear that the movement is strong enough to be targeting its lukewarm friends. She and I watched as police took Bishop Packard away in plastic cuffs, and as protesters ran by, shouting. Citing the silent vigil that followed the pepper-spray attack on UC Davis protesters, she added, “Sometimes restraint is a good thing.”

One can’t help but imagine that, as publicity stunts go, there are more straightforwardly nefarious targets imaginable than a church—even an especially well-endowed and Wall Street-friendly church—whose holdings go to fund outreach and charity, not executive bonuses or political candidates. For a movement that still struggles to make its goals clear to the public, putting the focus on this church, rather than a bank or a lobby or an appendage of government, will further muddy the message and provide kindling to critics.

What would appear to be a strategic faux pas, however, has a certain strategic logic nonetheless—even if a not very articulate one. The movement has lent American society so much energy, rage, and creativity, and it has made a rupture. It has broken a spell. But now it needs the very institutions that have been the mortar of complacency to follow suit, to take risks. It’s not enough to simply applaud the movement and then keep keeping on. The unions need to endanger their comfortable pacts with politicians and big business, to be willing to actually shut down the engines of an unjust economy. The non-profits need to mobilize their resources and knowledge in new, more radical ways. And the religious communities need to offer their spaces, their networks, their moral leadership. Perhaps most of all, their spiritual resources are needed—the wells of hope, the rubrics of ritual, the songs, the techniques of perseverance. These were keys to the success, for instance, of the civil rights movement.

If Occupy Wall Street is in some sense, as Adbusters’ initial call to “Occupy” stated, “a Tahrir moment,” consider Egypt as well. There, the major days of action were Fridays, fueled by the gatherings in the mosques, even despite restrictions imposed on the speeches of state-controlled imams. Protesters prayed en masse before advancing police vehicles. Unions were eventually the decisive force, threatening to halt the country’s economy on the movement’s behalf. After Mubarak’s fall, the revolution’s future depends on those resurgent political organizations strong enough to rally people against the military’s bid to retain its hold on power.

“Sanctuary for Assembly,” reads one of the banners that protesters carried on D17. “Assembly,” of course, is the movement’s insistence that it needs physical, in-person, public, outdoor spaces to conduct its experiments in direct democracy. This is the method by which Occupy has caught fire in communities throughout the country. It’s familiar. But the word “Sanctuary” is something new, with winter just a few days away. It’s a cry, a plea, for the institutions which uphold the way of things to no longer stand aside, but to join in making the rupture grow—to radicalize, and to occupy.

Located in the Montes de Maria region of Colombia’s Bolivar department on the Caribbean coast, the community of Mampuján has experienced the full force of Colombia’s past and ongoing armed conflicts. Their most decisive event, however, occurred on March 11, 2000, during the height of violence in this zone, when the members of the community of Mampuján were displaced from their original location by a group of right-wing paramilitaries, known as the Heroes of Montes de Maria. The community members were rounded up, accused of supporting guerrilla forces, and commanded to leave Mampuján immediately. Three hundred families fled, and 11 campesinos from the surrounding area of Las Brisas were massacred.

Since this time, the majority of the community has resettled in temporary housing, located about seven kilometres away in New Mampuján, where they live a reality very similar to that of the other 5 million internally displaced persons living in Colombia.

However, Mampuján and several surrounding neighbor communities are significantly different from the rest of the victims as they are the first communities to receive a verdict under the Law of Justice and Peace (Law 975 of 2005), where the paramilitary leaders responsible for the displacement have been sentenced to jail time and ordered to repay their victims for damages suffered. This has been the only sentence of its kind in Colombia, despite the existence of this law for over six years.

Under this sentence and an additional sentence by the Supreme Court of Justice in April 2011, the community is entitled to receive both individual and community reparations for damages suffered during displacement. The Supreme Court sentence defines the parameters that the courts, the State and various institutions will work within to make sure that reparations take place. However, despite this groundbreaking legal action, nothing has in reality taken place. The community of Mampuján and its surrounding neighbours have not received their promised reparations and there are increasing fears that nothing will happen as the Justice and Peace Law and government offices dedicated to enforcing this law are phased out and replaced with the new Victim’s Law.

If the only sentence of and reparations from paramilitary violence in Colombia’s history cannot be carried out for a community of 250 families, what are the chances of justice for the rest of the over 5 million victims, even with new laws?  This is a significant testing of the government’s stated intention to support and provide justice for the victims, especially as President Santos has staked his presidency on providing justice.

Therefore, the community of Mampuján is getting ready to march, not only for their own benefit, as they demand their reparations, but for the benefit of all the victims of armed conflict in Colombia. This morning community members—the majority children and senior citizens—are planning on leaving their homes behind and non-violently walking 32 kilometres to Cartagena, the capital of Bolivar province and the home of numerous different institutions and state governments. They are demanding to meet with the different agencies responsible for their reparations and are hoping to be joined by other victims of armed conflict along the way.

This is the first action of this type for the community, so a lot of learning is taking place as they go along, but they are steadily moving forward, accompanied by a number of different organizations and experienced nonviolent activists. Mampuján is already gaining national attention for its women’s quilting group and its sentence; this march will serve to focus this attention and pressure the Colombian government to comply with its promised changes.

• Building on the largest opposition rally in years Monday, Russian protests spread to more cities on Tuesday as demonstrators denounced federal election results—resulting in hundreds of arrests.

• On Tuesday, thousands of young Yemenis in Sanaa continued their sit-in, despite President Saleh’s signed agreement that he would step down, declaring that their revolution is far from over. This followed demonstrations which erupted on Sunday, as residents of Taiz marched in protest of immunity provisions given to the outgoing President.

• Greenpeace activists infiltrated a French nuclear plant Monday and hung a banner on a reactor building in an attempt to expose nuclear national security weaknesses.

• Dozens of Occupy D.C. members were arrested late Sunday in an act of civil disobedience when they refused to dismantle a structure that they were building for shelter.

• Thousands protested at the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa on Sunday, calling for a strong international plan to address climate change.

• Animal rights advocates in Taipei, Taiwan gathered by the hundreds on Sunday, condemning the conditions of animal shelters throughout the country.

• In India on Sunday, thousands marched and several began a hunger strike to show their support for the decommissioning of a damn in the interest of protecting local farmers.

• Kashmir witnessed protests and sit-ins on Saturday as residents of Srinagar decried the police’s use of pepper guns in breaking up demonstrations the day before.

• On Saturday, secular Tunisians held a counter-rally in front of Parliament, opposing a group of Islamists who were calling for female university students to wear a full-face veil.

• Thousands in India blocked train tracks Saturday, agitating for compensation to be given to victims of the industrial accident at Bhopal in 1984.

• 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.

A Palestinian hangs a photo of the symbolic Palestinian Declaration of Independence, written by Darwish in 1988. (Photo: Al-Ittihad)

“We have triumphed over the plan to expel us from history.”

– Mahmoud Darwish

Twenty-three years ago today, on November 15, 1988, the Palestinian Declaration of Independence was presented by Yasser Arafat in Algiers on behalf of the Palestinian people, and “in the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful.” The document was written by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish one year into the nonviolent movement that would become known as the first Intifada, literally, “shaking off.”

Today is an opportunity to reflect on the progress, or at least the developments since then, not only in Israel and Palestine but around the world. For nonviolence is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon that may even—dare we say it—finally shake off the empire of globalization that is threatening to throttle human aspirations everywhere.

We would like to concentrate here not so much on the quantitative spread of nonviolence (Richard Deats and Walter Wink calculated that more than half the planet had seen a nonviolent campaign of major proportions back in 2000, and they are already out of date) as on lessons learned, new habits and institutions formed, networks built and best practices assimilated.

What is qualitatively new in the Palestinian struggle? Well, the obvious: that they have applied to the UN for recognition as a state. This moves toward fulfillment of the 1988 Declaration:

In the context of its struggle for peace in the land of Love and Peace, the State of Palestine calls upon the United Nations to bear special responsibility for the Palestinian Arab people and its homeland. It calls upon all peace-and freedom-loving peoples and states to assist it in the attainment of its objectives, to provide it with security, to alleviate the tragedy of its people, and to help it terminate Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

From the grassroots also, with the two recent waves of flotillas courageously attempting to relieve the siege of Gaza (and successfully drawing international attention to that violation of international law) we saw a kind of nonviolent “pincer movement” with international action mirroring a renewed struggle from the West Bank villages themselves. Among those villages a far greater sense of commonality arose—despite the extreme difficulty of communication imposed by the Occupation—under the auspices of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committee and similar organizations.

International recognition and internal solidarity are potent factors in a nonviolent campaign; and we are reminded how in the First Intifada itself there arose a combination of “constructive program” projects and active resistance that had rarely if ever been seen since Gandhi’s great campaign. That it came about more or less of necessity is testimony to the creativity that nonviolent struggle tends to bring out in people and to the fact that most innovation in nonviolence has been stumbled on serendipitously—but that is changing.

One of the most significant signs of progress worldwide has been the beginning of systematic learning across movements, of which the input of American scholar Gene Sharp and Serbian youth activists from the successful Otpor movement of 2000 in Egypt was only one relatively well known example.

It is well known now that the important things we learn we learn most efficiently from story-telling. Here is one:

Shortly after the First Intifada a twelve-year-old boy came to our friend Mubarak Awad, one of the movement’s leading figures and a major proponent of its nonviolence, with a complaint. The boy had thrown a stone at an Israeli jeep and a soldier from the jeep had chased him down and beaten him badly. But that was not his complaint. In fact, with increasing difficulty, he had waited for the patrol the next two days and again thrown his defiant stone, only to be beaten once again. But on the third occasion when the soldier caught up with him, he gave him a hug and went back to the jeep. “Why did he hug me?!” he asked Mubarak. Who told him, “because he is human.”

If there is one thing characteristic of nonviolence, and a principle that we cannot forget, it is that the nonviolent vision, this form of struggle, awakens the humanity of oneself and one’s opponent. This renewed sense of connection is not merely a fruit of the tree of nonviolence, it is its very core and our highest victory, because from it will emerge new ideals, stronger communities and healthy children.

Given the spirit of this twelve-year-old that has now resonated throughout the Arab Spring, matched with the spread of learning about nonviolence, we dare hope that the inspiring words of the Declaration will come true in our lifetime:

The State of Palestine is the state of Palestinians wherever they may be. The state is for them to enjoy in it their collective national and cultural identity, theirs to pursue in it a complete equality of rights. . . Governance will be based on principles of social justice, equality and non-discrimination in public rights of men or women, on grounds of race, religion, color or sex, under the aegis of a constitution which ensures the rule of law and an independent judiciary. Thus shall these principles allow no departure from Palestine’s age-old spiritual and civilisational heritage of tolerance and religious coexistence.

Did I get your attention? While titles that draw attention to women’s physical features may summon most of the male population, a title like, Women, War and Peace was probably written off as a women-only television series. You know: “girl’s stuff” or women-as-victims drama.

Over the past month, the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired a fascinating series that showed real women around the world in their roles as serious nonviolent organizers. The five-part film series, now completely available online, offers five cases of women’s activism in the following contexts (I have edited the website’s language with a nonviolent conflict perspective, bolding the significant political achievements of their efforts):

I Came to Testify is a story of how 16 Bosnian women who had been imprisoned and raped by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history’s great silence – and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law. Their courage resulted in a triumphant verdict that led to new international laws about sexual violence in war.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the story of the Liberian women who took on the warlords and regime of dictator Charles Taylor in the midst of a brutal civil war, and won a once unimaginable peace for their shattered country in 2003.

Peace Unveiled follows three women in Afghanistan who are risking their lives to make sure that women’s rights don’t get traded away in the deal for peace talks with the Taliban.

The War We Are Living travels to Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia’s Pacific southwest, where two Afro-Colombian women are braving a nonviolent struggle over land. They are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war.

War Redefined, the capstone of Women, War & Peace, challenges the conventional wisdom that nonviolent leadership is a male domain through incisive interviews with leading thinkers. Although we in the nonviolent conflict community – thinkers, scholars, activists, writers and educators – don’t generally agree with the so-called “leading thinkers” interviewed in this episode, on this topic they are worth hearing out. Unfortunately, the world is short on policy makers, including women, who are committed to nonviolence. I wish the producers had instead featured leading thinkers who specialize in civil resistance, both women and men.

The film production team is mostly women, led by Abigail Disney who also produced the award winning film, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which exposed Liberia’s women’s movement as a critical component of the end to Liberia’s bloody conflict. Just this year, we witnessed the film’s protagonist, Leymah Gwobee, win the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize along with Africa’s first female head of state, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.  By the way, an excellent Al Jazeera People and Power documentary segment, titled, Yemen: A Tale of Two Protests, features the third Nobel Peace Prize winner, Tawakkul Karman, of Yemen.

Watching each of the recent PBS episodes, one can see how the women from each of these countries took on huge political struggles, albeit through a very local angle.  If you can only watch one episode, make it The War We Are Living. The issue of local land struggles amidst political polarization, government and private sector corruption, and the tangled web of institutions and drug traffickers, offers important lessons for nonviolent movements around the world, including Occupy Wall Street.

Just this morning, I came across an article posted by the master of all feminists, Eve Ensler. Perhaps she is dismissed among male circles as the woman who’s always pissed-off about something, but she makes a point about rape that I and many women around the world have to agree with:

I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you? You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?

And if you’re a guy, and I managed to get your attention with the title of this blog post, then Eve Ensler’s recent Huffington Post article, Over It, may be for you! Women’s rights, women’s community organizing, women defending land, and women fighting against rape is not just a “girl” thing. The episodes in Women, War and Peace help shed light on where some of the solutions to the world’s acute injustices lie . . . with the full inclusion and leadership of women. Now that is gorgeous.

To the governments of countries like Chile, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, mining, biofuel and agricultural projects seem like a panacea for confronting economic crises and generating revenue. Although there are some cases of more sustainable development, many contracts given to national and foreign companies for extracting resources brings only short-term employment, along with long-term environmental and social consequences.

The mining industry began a revival five years ago, especially in Chile, Perú and, more recently, in Colombia. There are beneficiaries, of course, and there are victims. The former are the mining companies themselves, as well as local, regional and national governmental institutions. The mineral and metal market has thrived. But the latter are indigenous and rural populations, who face water contamination, land expropriation, cultural deterioration, slavery, prostitution and a variety of health risks. The victims, however, are starting to realize what is happening and to confront it.

After the infamous accident that took place in Chile’s Mine San José on August 5 last year—leaving 33 miners underground for more than one month—mine workers reinforced their organization, demanding better working conditions, an end to exploitation and accurate studies on environmental damage. Gold and copper mining are now the biggest threat to clean water and the environment in that country. Last July, workers from the Escondida mine forced copper prices to fall by 15% after two weeks of striking—with tremendous effect on the status quo, given that the industry represents 20% of the Chilean GDP.

In Colombia there are localized initiatives against several projects. One of them is happening in Boyacá, near Bogotá, where people in the countryside gathered to demand that environmental authorities deny the necessary environmental licenses. A similar protest was successful in Santurban, located in the northeast of the country. Around 40,000 people went into the streets there last February to oppose the mining project and its environmental implications, and the conflict spread throughout the entire country. The protests lasted for weeks, until finally the Canadian company GreyStar Resources was forced to withdraw. The movement then went even further, insisting that the government protect the area as part of the national parks system. These Santurban protests alerted other communities to the dangers of exploitation and encouraged them to join in a common fight to protect their water and natural resources.

A different situation exists in Peru, where protests are causing a proliferation of so-called “informal mining.” There, people are fighting a Newmont gold mining project—which the government supports—with blockades, strikes and protests. As a result of this, however, the value of minerals and metals increases, resulting in widespread illegal exploitation. These miners pose an opposite challenge to the government than protests alone do: they bring water contamination, dangerous residues and an increase in prostitution. As illegal mines attract workers, solitary men are making taverns and brothels a very profitable business, while having no protections under the law themselves. These mines therefore pose a dilemma to both the government and the protesters.

The root of these problems, however, lies with insensitive governments that insist on the necessity of pursuing their economic goals through exploitative mining. The governments give permits to companies covertly, often ignoring the potential for environmental and social damage. However, a broad range of initiatives throughout South America is motivating the people to demand a better balance between the benefits of mining and people’s right to have access to clean water, good health and basic safety protections.

For more information, see No a la Mina, a multinational website promoting civil resistance against mining.

• Pakistani cricket star-turned-opposition politician Imran Khan drew as many as  100,000 people to a rally in Lahore Sunday, where Khan  lambasted the country’s leading political figures as well as the United  States.

• It was announced today that a flotilla made up of a Canadian and an Irish ship is en route to Palestine to break the siege on Gaza.

• Tens of thousands of protesters in the Yemeni  capital Sana’a took to the streets Sunday demanding the release of  fellow demonstrators arrested by government security forces since February.

• Thousands of Egyptians demonstrated on Monday in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest the military’s recent detention of prominent blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah on charges of inciting violence and sabotage.

• On Monday, fresh demonstrations were held in Jayapura demanding Indonesia take formal and legal responsibility for ongoing human rights abuses in West Papua, most recently the brutal attack on the Third Papuan People’s Congress (KP3) earlier this month.

• The abandoned Hotel Madrid, which was taken over by an unknown number of squatters on October 16 after a mass rally in the capital organized by the 15-M movement, opened its doors on Monday to the first person to take up the group’s stated strategy of “freeing up spaces for common use.”

• In the Philippines, over 500 inmates in Compostela Valley held a noise barrage and hunger strike over the slow resolution of their cases.

• About 100 people gathered outside the Michigan League Monday afternoon to protest Eric Cantor, the U.S. House of Representatives majority leader and a Virginia Republican.

• Dressed in their colorful traditional attire, some 200 Wixáritari or Huichol men, women and children traveled 20 hours from western Mexico to protest in the capital last week to demand a stop to the activities of foreign mining companies in the high desert of San Luis Potosí in the central state of that name.

• Last Friday, hundreds of indigenous leaders, fishermen and riverine people from the Xingu River basin who had gathered to permanently occupy the Belo Monte Dam construction site in a peaceful protest to stop its construction in Altamira, located in the state of Pará in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon were evicted.

I have long argued that nonviolence works best when it deals not with mere symbols but with real things that have symbolic power. Gandhi’s Salt March was an outstanding example; another is the ongoing actions of Palestinian farmers, oftentimes organized and supported by the Palestine Solidarity Project, to plant and replant olive trees that are uprooted, poisoned, and otherwise destroyed by Israeli settlers or the military.

There is something primordial, and even beautiful about a direct confrontation of something real and true — and especially a living thing — with the destructive power of human delusions. The olive tree is both a symbol and an actual source of Palestinian well-being, and hence of Palestinian hopes and dignity. To uproot them, which is contrary to Jewish law, is to enact one’s own violence in a way that even the perpetrator is forced to understand the evil that person is perpetrating.

This “forcing reason to be free,” as Gandhi called it, is an important part of nonviolent dynamics. Not long ago, a courageous woman who ran a shelter for destitute mothers with children in Delhi was told by city authorities that she would have to pay taxes that up until then had been waived. She explained that they were a shoestring operation and if the taxes were imposed at least three of her women would have to be turned out on the street. “We can’t help that,” said the men.  “All right,” she replied, but then took them through the door to the large dorm where her charges were housed, and said, “You choose which ones to turn out.” The men left and the tax waiver remained in place.

In the important film Bringing Down a Dictator that chronicles the 2000 Otpor (‘Resist!’) uprising, which in one dramatic day turned Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic out of office (after eleven weeks of NATO bombings that only consolidated his hold on power), student leader Srdja Popovic explained, “we won because we were on the side of life.”

This symbolic valence might be said to be missing from the present occupation movement. Fun, music, and face paint may say “life” to some people more than business suits and portfolios, but they don’t quite evoke the reality and urgency that enabled the oppressed Serbian population to rise up against harsh police brutality and is enabling the Palestinians and their international supporters to face even fatal resistance in Beit Omar, Surif, and other West Bank villages. Proudly declaring that “their weapons don’t scare us,” the message of the Palestinian Solidarity Project, which is coordinating not only the olive-tree planting but roadblock removal, and apartheid wall demonstrations, is quite accurate:

Peace and security are rights not just for some of us, but for all the people of the world. Controlling another person’s life, possessions, future, and thoughts is a crime and a humiliation. We have dreams and hopes of freedom, so we are inviting all the people of the world to stand with us and share in our struggle for freedom.

For any such struggle to succeed — be it that of the Palestinians or of Occupy Wall Street or even a larger movement for peace — it must be able to counter the power of the Apocalyptic myths that have driven the post-9/11 wars and brought the U.S. to a point of near ruin financially and morally. These prevailing narratives of militarism revolve around the powerful archetype of good and evil, order vs. chaos; but they can be overcome by an even more powerful myth, if you will (I taught mythology for many years at U.C. Berkeley), which is the struggle for life itself against death.

The answer is to take back not just our incomes and some civic spaces, but the “spaces” in our minds and our public discourse. In practice, this would mean making common cause with the Palestinian struggle and looking for other ways to show, patiently but insistently, that in opposing greed and militarism we are on the side of life — which would have the added advantage of being true.