• 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!”

Leymah Gbowee, Liberian activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

One of the most extraordinary nonviolent, transnational movements of the modern age was the women’s suffrage movement of the first two decades of the 20th century. New Zealand first extended the franchise in the late 19th century—after two decades of organizing efforts. As the new century began, women’s suffrage movements gained strength in China, Iran, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Russia, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and Vietnam. Another 20 years and women were enfranchised in countries around the world, from Uruguay to Austria, the Netherlands to Turkey, and Germany to the United States. Few if any of those leading the campaigns for the ballot for women would have identified their approach as one of nonviolent action, nor would they have known its philosophical underpinnings or strategic wisdom. Like most who have turned to civil resistance, they did so because it was a direct method not reliant on representatives or agencies and a practical way to oppose an intolerable situation.

What exactly is the link between the rights of women, gender, nonviolent action, and building peace?

The word gender originates with Old French and until recently pertained mainly to linguistic and grammatical practices of classifying words as either masculine, feminine or (in some languages) neuter. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest English usage in 1384. Chaucer used the French spelling gendre in 1398. UNESCO’s Guidelines on Gender-Neutral Language note that a person’s sex is a matter of chromosomes, whereas a person’s gender is a social and historical construction—the result of conditioning. I would further define the “feminist” project as the struggle for women’s emancipation, the insistence that women should be free as human beings to make fundamental choices in their lives.

Gender is not women’s lib by another name. Nor is it to say, with respect to nonviolent action, that women exude maternal attributes or possess a reflexive interest in peacemaking. Notions that women have a “natural” inclination toward conciliation and peace delegitimize the voices of women in policy and international relations. Rather, as Susan Moller Okin shows, the “social institutionalization of sexual differences” goes to the heart of politics, and therefore, peace.

At the University for Peace (UPEACE), where I teach, the gender and peace building department has persistently recognized the importance for young peace builders of studying nonviolent action. This recognition is partly related to an insight explained by Pam McAllister, who argues that “most of what we commonly call ‘women’s history’ is actually the history of women’s role in the development of nonviolent action.”

Programs and procedures for the empowerment of women have increasingly been recognized as fundamental to achieving durable peace. Data gathered over the past three decades show that improvements in the education and status of women stabilize and elevate the whole of societies. The uplift of women and their participation in public policy is now widely understood to be essential to economic growth, health status, reducing poverty, sustaining the environment, and consolidating democracy in all societies, including those long bent by authoritarianism and despotism.

Essential to the building of peace is an understanding that the ideologies and structures of patriarchy are among the most resilient systems of domination in human history, and are explicitly related to the socialization of men as warriors and exclusion of women from policy. The longevity and entrenchment of this social system has benefited from justifications of itself as “natural” and divinely sanctioned. Patriarchy has permeated structures and assumptions of power and economics, including forms of labor, presumptions of representative parliamentary bodies, religious dogma and the orthodoxies of faith traditions and leadership, military services, and concepts of the meanings of security.

In Africa, the exclusion of women is now being inferentially linked to the root causes of acute violent conflicts. For example, their customary invisibility in Rwanda is part of the background to 100 days in 1994 in which nearly one million unarmed persons were slaughtered. Crimes went unhalted. The international powers remained silent. (It should be noted that women participated in the genocide as well, killing other women or inciting men to rape and kill Tutsi women—as in the case of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, now on trial in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania.) In 2002, Rwanda’s secretary general for the ministry of gender, M. Claire Mukasine, now an elected senator, told a visiting UPEACE delegation of which I was part that Rwandan governance had traditionally excluded women from public affairs. “Rwanda had no tradition whatsoever of women being able to speak in public,” she said of the colonial period and onward.

It was assumed that the father, brother, or husband speaks for the women; in the past, women never took a stand in public. They were not permitted to speak out at community meetings or the elders’ sessions. We think the exclusion of women is connected to the sad events in Rwanda.

The results of this recognition are striking. Today, Rwanda has more women on an absolute and proportional basis of its parliamentarians than any other such legislative body worldwide.

The awarding of a 2011 joint Nobel Peace Prize to a Liberian woman, Leymah Gbowee, embodies the links between gender, war, peace, and nonviolent struggle. Miriam O’Reilly’s interview of her for the BBC World Service illustrates the connection. In the midst of civil war led by the warlord Charles Taylor, Gbowee’s Women and Peace Network in 2000 brought together thousands of Christian and Muslim women to sit-in in a football stadium, exerting their popular defiance against “all the violence around us.” They had to protest, she maintains, because “there were no other possibilities. We had no option of being invited to the peace talks. We put ourselves out there as a symbol.” The women called for an immediate ceasefire. When it was violated, the network turned to another nonviolent method: Lysistratic nonaction, refusing sex with their husbands.

This method is named for Aristophanes’ farce of 411 B.C.E., first performed in an Athens exhausted by the Peloponnesian War. His hit play, Lysistrata, featured a sex strike by the war-weary women of both sides to end hostilities. Gbowee told the BBC that the idea of a sex strike came from frustration, as a means of pushing Liberian men, who had been silent and thus complicit with the war and violence. Maintaining that they would be fasting as an act of denial, the Liberian women held that as long as they were protesting and fasting, they could not be intimate with their men.

“We said let’s place our already battered bodies into the streets,” Gbowee remembers. “Let’s show the world that with our broken selves we can heal the nation.”

In 2006, the newly elected President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, another of the 2011 Nobel Peace laureates, formally requested Taylor’s extradition. Upon arrival in Monrovia, he was transferred to the custody of the United Nations. He is still held in the U.N. Detention Unit in The Hague, where he is on trial for his role in the civil war.

Taking gender seriously in the process of building peace, finally, is the job of everyone, not just of women. A former student of mine is the gender officer for the Nigerian parliament, and he, along with several other male, West African former students of mine, are doing important and strategic work. A Pakistani woman student, having completed her doctorate in gender at the London School of Economics, soon returns home to teach with these multiple areas of strength. An Israeli former student completed her doctoral studies, works for a civil-society organization, and is active in the peace movement. Each in different ways recognizes that building lasting peace must include taking questions of gender seriously.

• In spite of the crackdown that has killed at least 110 people in Homs over the last five days, protesters in Hama, Damascus, Deraa as well as several other towns in Idlib and Deir Ez-Zor have taken to the streets in support of those in the beseiged city.

• On Friday, students at Essex High School in Vermont staged a sit-in and protest to support freshman Cole Peterson after he reported being assaulted in anti-gay attack.

• In Chicago, more than 1,000 senior citizens joined forces with Occupy Chicago on Monday to protest cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid. After a large march about 50 people were arrested for blocking traffic on the street.

• About a dozen people occupied a historic building in the Romanian city of Cluj on Monday to protest a plan to mine gold using the controversial cyanide process in a nearby heritage area.

• A four-hour general strike took effect across Israel on Monday to demand the government improve working conditions of contract workers.

• Nine Greenpeace activists were arrested after they chained themselves to a gate and climbed a crane Monday at a South African coal-fired power station to protest dependence on coal, weeks before the country hosts a global conference on climate change.

• Thousands of residents of the Northeastern Chinese port city Dalian took to the streets on Sunday to demand the relocation of a petrochemical plant that threatened to spill toxins into the city last week when a typhoon breached a nearby dike. Chinese authorities have complied and ordered the closure of the plant.

• Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis poured into the streets of major cities and towns across the country on Friday, keeping the pressure on the nation’s embattled president to step down.

• About 100 people participated in a two-mile march in Santa Cruz, California on Sunday to demand a halt to construction of 32 homes on what is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Native American burial site.

• More than 1,000 people led by the poet turned activist Javier Sicilia have joined a march in Mexico City to protest the government’s strategy in the fight against drug gangs.

• Tunisian security forces used tear gas and truncheons Monday to disperse several hundred protesters in the capital demanding that the government step down for failing to prosecute supporters of the ousted president.

• Thousands of people turned out at rallies across Australia on Sunday to call on federal MPs to support a ban on live animal exports.

• Thousands of people took to the streets of Dublin yesterday to demand civil marriage equality.

• Tens of thousands of people gathered across Israel on Saturday to call for lower living costs in an effort to show the government their protest movement has countrywide support.

• More than 300,000 people took part in demonstrations across Israel on Saturday night calling for “social justice,” a blanket term covering demands for reforms in housing, taxes, healthcare, childcare, and education.

• Forty-five thousand Verizon Communications Inc. workers from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., went on strike Sunday after negotiations fizzled over a new labor contract for more than a fifth of the company’s work force.

• Tens of thousands of opponents of embattled Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh held rallies across the country following prayers on Friday.

• Thousands of protestors largely drawn from Pakistan Justice Party staged a sit-in protest in front of country’s Parliament in Islamabad on Saturday evening to protest corruption, unemployment and US drone strikes.

• Israeli forces targeted three separate rallies across the West Bank on Friday, firing tear gas at participants and lightly injuring dozens.

• In Jordan, dozens of activists staged a sit-in following Ramadan evening prayers on Friday night in front of Salt city’s cultural center, protesting what they concidered government stalling in impementing nesessery political and economic reforms.

• Thousands of demonstrators angry about the government’s austerity program briefly reoccupied a central Madrid plaza on Saturday after police withdrew following widespread outrage at officers’ handling of a protest two days earlier.

• The pro-LGBT activists from GetEqual Texas braved the Houston sun on Saturday to protest outside Reliant Stadium, where Governor Rick Perry and thousands of  Evangelicals were holding an unabashedly political “day of prayer,” “The Response.”

• Nepalese riot police arrested teachers affiliated with temporary teacher struggle committee during a sit-in protest in front of the education ministry in Kathmandu on Thursday.

Tina Rosenberg, whose recent book Join the Club is a must read for activists, had a piece on the New York Times’ Opinionator blog yesterday criticizing the importance of social media in social movements. In keeping with the thesis of her book—that peer pressure is the driving force behind social change—Rosenberg argues, much like Malcolm Gladwell, that “the idea of Facebook Revolution has been a great example of wishful thinking by the digerati.” She does cite, however, one recent event that gave her some second thoughts.

On Friday, I wrote about Friendfactor, an organizing tool used in the successful battle for gay marriage in New York State.  Friendfactor combines social media and real-world friendship to motivate people to get active.  Instead of getting an e-mail from a group asking you to support a political goal, you get one from a close friend or family member asking you to “help me get my full rights.”    Friendfactor is particularly interesting because it seems to offer a solution to one of the biggest obstacles in using social media for political change:  people need close personal connections in order to get them to take action — especially if that action is risky and difficult.

The Friendfactor story is an interesting one in its own right and worth a read. But despite the promise it offers for strong-tie building, Rosenberg still concludes that social media are nothing without “careful strategy, meticulous planning, strict nonviolence, unity.”

David Faris took exception to this belittling of digital activism in a blog post for the Meta-Activism Project:

What I would love is for Tina Rosenberg to find someone who studies digital media and thinks that street tactics were unimportant in the Egyptian revolution. My own interviews with activists and planners suggest that at least 10 days of careful on-the-ground planning – including timing how long it would take to march down certain streets as well as producing tactics to produce the illusion of greater numbers – went into the Tahrir protests. I don’t think any rational person would argue that the “digerati” put out the call on Facebook and then magically there were a million people in the streets.  Why must these two things be mutually exclusive? Egyptian organizers also learned a great deal about protest tactics from their Tunisian counterparts – and much of this learning took place with online exchanges, including back-and-forth exchanges on, yes, Facebook. This rigid demarcation between “on-the-ground” and “digital” simply does not square with the reality of today’s organizers.

While Rosenberg doesn’t see the two areas as totally exclusive, she does think the digital realm is more purely informational. Citing CANVAS executive director Srdja Popovic, she says social media has three uses:

It is an efficient and cheap way to give members information — much better than putting up posters.  It also conveys to members the highly motivating realization that they have big numbers — people who know their pro-democracy Facebook group has 70,000 members will be much more excited and less fearful than people unaware they are part of a very big group.  And it is an efficient way to transfer skills and information; for example a CANVAS manual for nonviolent struggle has been downloaded 15,000 times in Arabic since February.

As far as the potential for social media, exhibited in platforms like Friendfactor, Rosenberg says the best they can likely do is “reach deep or reach wide” but probably not both. Faris, however, begs to differ:

But of course social media do both of these things – they bind you to your close friends while also giving you massive amounts of free and easy information about acquaintances. We don’t just protest because our three best friends are doing it – we also do it when our 450 acquaintances all sign up for it too, or when we see 100,000 people committed to do something we believe in. And even if you buy the argument that we only care what our close friends do, chains of information dissemination can pass through circles of close-knit friends and still reach hundreds of thousands of people. That kind of strength in numbers makes individuals much more likely to take the considerable risks associated with protest in authoritarian regimes.

This is an interesting debate but it should be noted that the Meta-Activism Project is providing cutting edge research on this quickly developing field. Perhaps it is not getting the respect it deserves because it is not yet as advanced or as deeply embedded as our understanding of on-the-ground activism. But as Egypt clearly shows, no modern understanding of activism will be complete without continued research and experimentation in the field of digial activism.

For an even more in-depth argument explaining the success of social media in Egypt be sure to read the rest of Faris’s post.

• Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Yemen on Sunday, demanding that a transitional presidential council be created to replace embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh and that his sons and relatives leave the country.

• Thousands of Greek demonstrators have begun gathering in front of the parliament in Athens at the start of a 48-hour general strike to protest against deep budget cuts demanded by international lenders as the price for more financial aid.

• Spain’s “indignant” activists began their last and longest protest march on Saturday, leaving from the northeastern city of Barcelona to cover 650 kilometres on their way to a major Madrid rally on July 24.

• Tens of thousands of people demonstrated around Morocco both for and against a proposed new constitution on Sunday, just a week before it is to be voted on in a referendum.

• About 3,000 people marched through downtown Montreal on Saturday to call for an end in Quebec to shale gas exploitation and a technique known as “fracking” that has triggered strong opposition from environmental groups.

• Thousands of people joined hands on Saturday across beaches from Florida to California to form a human chain to protest offshore oil drilling and promote clean energy.

• Police arrested 12 D.C. voting rights activists in front of the White House Saturday afternoon.

• Hamas prisoners being held in Israeli jails on Monday began a hunger strike after seven of their number were put in solitary confinement.

• Seoul National University student council members ended their 28-day sit-in against the university’s privatization plan on Sunday after 40 of 61 students voted to accept a tentative agreement between the council and the university.

• Russian police have arrested and charged up to 14 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) activists who were attempting to hold a demonstration in St Petersburg.

• Last Wednesday, Zimbabwe’s public workers began an indefinite strike to press the cash-strapped coalition government of President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai to more than double wages.

• Over 80,000 people took to the streets of Athens late Sunday on the 12th consecutive day of protests against the government’s draconian austerity measures. Some 3,000 people also gathered in Greece’s second largest city, Thessaloniki, according to the police.

• Syrians poured into the streets on Friday in some of the largest antigovernment protests yet despite the shutdown of much of Syria’s Internet network. At least 96 people have died over the past three days in the continued crackdown on protests against President Bashar al-Assad.

• In Israel, thousands of people rallied in Tel Aviv to denounce Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. It was one of the largest pro-peace rallies Israel has seen in years.

• Up to 23 people were killed and over 350 wounded on Sunday when Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinian demonstrators stormed the border area from Syria.

• The March on Blair Mountain, with more than six hundred people setting out from Marmet, West Virginia on a fifty-mile, five-day journey began today to protest mountaintop removal, strengthen workers’ rights, and support investment in sustainable jobs for Appalachia.

• A two-day sit-in staged to protest against drone attacks concluded on Sunday with a warning to the relevant authorities that supplies to Nato forces in Afghanistan would be blocked if drone attacks continued.

• At least 30 people were injured when Indian police used teargas and batons to break up a mass anti-corruption protest led by India’s most famous yoga guru on Sunday.

• Approximately 250 supporters —including many veterans—converged on Saturday at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to rally for the release of alleged whistleblower U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning.

• Sri Lanka’s powerful Buddhist clergy demonstrated Friday urging the president to restore rights of workers and students days after a violent police crackdown on a labour protest killed one factory worker.

• Three gay rights activists, including a former Democratic Senate candidate, were arrested last Thursday for their protest on the floor of the North Carolina House of Representatives.

• Fourteen students were arrested at the University of Washington on Wednesday evening on charges of criminal trespass after they refused to leave a building that was closed, as part of the ongoing protests over the UW’s contract with food-services provider Sodexo.

• About 20,000 people assembled in the Greek capital’s central Syntagma Square on Sunday, responding to calls on social networking sites for gatherings across Europe to demand “real democracy”.

• Tens of thousands of mostly liberal protesters again filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday to call on the military council to end the practice of sending civilians to military trials, to expedite legal action against former President Hosni Mubarak and his associates, and to start governing with some civilian presidential council.

• Five protesters were arrested by U.S. Park Police at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC on Saturday after taking part in a flash mob to protest a recent court decision that upheld a ban on dancing within the memorial. A second protest is being planned for this weekend—and over 2,300 people say they’ll attend.

• Russian police detained more than 60 activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg on Tuesday at demonstrations against restrictions on freedom of assembly.

• Several people were arrested for participating in a banned gay-pride event in Moscow on Saturday.

• Up to 100 protesters blocked the driveway to the Brisbane, Australia hotel where mining bosses from the coal seam gas industry were holding an annual summit yesterday.

• Several dozen opponents of shale gas marched through Quebec, Canada on Monday to warn of its possible environmental impact. Training sessions on how to organize sit-ins and occupy exploration sites are also being planned.

• 15,000 people gathered in the Sbata district of Casablanca on Sunday to demand more democratic freedoms, jobs and better social conditions. But security forces intensified their hardline crackdown.

• Dozens of supporters of hunger-striking retail cleaning workers, joined by U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, rallied Sunday in south Minneapolis to demand higher wages for supermarket floor cleaners.

• Over 100,000 Mexicans took to the streets over the weekend to protest the war on drugs, impunity, corruption, and violence.

• Three people were killed when Yemeni security forces opened fire on demonstrators and launched rocket-propelled grenades at an office building Monday as they cracked down on a protest in the flashpoint city of Taiz in the country’s south.

• About 300 Iraqi oil workers staged a brief walkout in the southern oil hub of Basra on Monday, protesting a lack of financial benefits and threatening to halt production at some fields if their demands were not met.

• Mauritanian secondary schoolteachers on Sunday launched a three-day strike to demand health insurance coverage, new social housing and other benefits.

• Over 100 newly-minted lawyers walked out of their own graduation at the University of Michigan Law School on Saturday to protest the ceremony’s commencement speaker, anti-gay Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH).

• Thousands of people rallied in Japan Saturday to demand a shift away from nuclear power after an earthquake and tsunami sparked the world’s worst atomic crisis since Chernobyl a quarter-century ago.

• Palestinian prisoners in four Israeli jails went on a hunger strike on Sunday in protest against the Israeli solitary confinement policy applied against tens of prisoners who have been denied their basic human rights and mainly the right to get family visits.

• On Sunday thousands took the streets across Syria demanding that President Bashar al-Assad step down. At least 13 people were killed and many more arrested when Syrian forces attacked ongoing protests in two towns.

• In Yemen, at least 22 people were wounded Sunday when government forces loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh fired on pro-democracy protesters. The crackdown came just one day after thousands of women took to the streets to protest a claim by Saleh that demonstrators are violating Islamic law because they are allowing women and men to mix.

• A Bahraini hunger striker protesting the assault and detention of her father and husband was taken to hospital Sunday but was released after refusing an intravenous tube.

• In Serbia, some 50,000 protesters Saturday gathered in the capital, Belgrade, to protest against the government and call for early elections.

• Hundreds of people attended a ‘kiss-in’ protest at a London pub after a gay couple claimed they were thrown out for kissing.

• In Pakistan, enraged citizens held protest demonstrations in different parts of Karachi against unannounced load shedding by the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) despite increasing the cost of electricity.

• Around 150 demonstrators set up chairs for a ‘sit- in’ protest in front of the Chinese embassy in Berlin on Sunday to demand the release of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei.

• On Sunday, 6,000 Palestinian prisoner launched a one-day hunger strike to protest the internal Palestinian split and Israeli measures.

• Police fired tear gas and violently dispersed hundreds of protesters in Libya this morning who gathered in front of police headquarters of in Benghazi demanding an end to Gaddafi’s 41-year rule.

• Anti-government protests in Shia villages around Manama, the Bahraini capital, left several people injured and one person reported dead on Monday.

• In Iran, clashes have erupted today at the funeral of a protester killed on Monday, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets in the largest Iranian protests since the aftermath of the nation’s disputed 2009 election.

• In Yemen, protests against longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh are escalating as they continue for a sixth consecutive day. Earlier today government supporters attacked pro-democracy demonstrators as they set off on a march from a university in the capital of Sanaa.

• Labor unions across Egypt have taken the country’s revolution as a cue to stop work and demand better pay and conditions. More than 12,000 workers at state-owned Misr Spinning and Weaving went on strike on Wednesday. In the coastal city of Damietta, about 6,000 spinning and weaving workers were also striking. And thousands of workers and employees from the Upper Egyptian city of Assiut have organized sit-ins.

• On Tuesday, an estimated 10,000 people gathered at the capital building in Madison, Wisconsin to protest against a bill that would eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for public workers and slash their pay and benefits.

• Eighteen people were put in handcuffs and detained by sheriff’s deputies in San Francisco Monday afternoon after a sit-in at the county clerk’s office. The act of civil disobedience was carried out by gay and lesbian couples to protest same-sex marriage bans in California and other states.

• On Tuesday, the train schedule was badly disrupted while 13 locomotives were stranded at the Pakistan Railways Mughalpura workshops as workers went on strike and laid on the railroad tracks in protest against non-payment of salaries.

• Public transport came to a halt in Athens on Tuesday once again due to a 24-hour strike over the controversial new law which envisages a partial privatization of the debt-ridden Greek Railways, the restructure of the sector and transfers of employees to other public companies to save costs.

• “We pay taxes, Why don’t you?” protesters chanted as they carried signs and Valentine’s Day balloons on the sidewalk in front of the Bank of America building in downtown Hartford Monday in a demonstration designed to embarrass Connecticut’s largest bank into greater cooperation with delinquent homeowners.

• A strike by Portuguese train engineers on Tuesday caused severe disruption for commuters in the latest protest against government spending cuts designed to ease a debt crisis.

• One of Equatorial Guinea’s most prominent authors, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, entered his fifth day on a hunger strike yesterday to protest the policies of Equatorial Guinean dictator Teodoro Obiang.

• Around 10,000 of Thailand’s “Red Shirts” gathered in Bangkok Sunday to mark seven months since a deadly military crackdown on their anti-government protest.

• Up to 40,000 opposition activists rallied in central Minsk on Saturday to call for longtime authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko to step down. By late Sunday, police had cleared Independence Square of all demonstrators.

• Public transport workers in Athens again went on strike Monday, bringing the Greek capital to a standstill, in an ongoing series of one-day strikes aimed against a government austerity package.

• Several thousand workers organized by Spain’s main trade unions braved cold weather in several cities around the country on Saturday to protest the government’s austerity measures and its plans to extend retirement age.

• About five hundred people took to the streets of New York City on Sunday as part of the intensifying global response to the decision by administrators of the Smithsonian Institute to censor a video installation by queer icon David Wojnarowicz.

• About a dozen social justice activists gathered in front of Central Prison in Raleigh Friday to protest prison conditions.

• A group of students and citizens staged a sit-in at a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality branch office in Corpus Christi to protest a proposed petroleum-burning power plant.

• Thirty-three women descended 500 m into the El Chiflon del Diablo mine – an unused carbon mine which now operates as a tourist attraction – to protest the elimination of a labor program of which they belonged and have threatened starting a hunger-strike.

• One hundred pinwheels briefly blanketed the ground outside an administrative building on the campus of the University of North Carolina on Tuesday, as members of the Sierra Student Coalition protested the use of coal extracted through mountaintop removal.

• While George Bush and Dick Cheney broke ground on the new presidential library at Southern Methodist University on Tuesday, about 100 people from around the country gathered a few blocks away to protest.

• More than 100 angry Ryanair passengers staged a sit-in in an aircraft cabin for several hours on Wednesday after their flight was diverted to Belgium.

• Dozens of gas drilling demonstrators gathered outside New York’s Broome County Legislature to oppose plans to lease mineral rights on public property.

• Thousands have converged in Lisbon to protest the NATO summit. Several rallies are being held culminating in an antiwar march on Saturday.

• Six illegal immigrants, including a Cal State San Bernardino student and a graduate of UC Riverside, staged a sit-in Wednesday at John McCain’s Washington office to get the Arizona senator’s commitment to a path-to-citizenship proposal he has supported in the past.

• About 17,000 Greek students, teachers, workers and pensioners marched in the rain to the US embassy in Athens on Wednesday, beating drums and chanting slogans that opposed international efforts to solve Greece’s current debt crisis, such as “No IMF, no EU, let’s take our fate into our own hands”.

• Activists of the transsexual, gay and lesbian community gathered along a street in San Salvador on Monday to demand the right to choose a name according to their gender.

The Boston Globe‘s photo blog The Big Picture focused its latest post on recent protests from around the world. The 50 photos range “From quiet, prayerful requests for peace in Mexico to the violent takeover of an office building in London to student demonstrators in Chile and gay rights activists making a statement to the Pope in Spain.”

Of course, we’re more interested in peafecul protest here. Some of my favorites in the set include climate activists forming the phrase “The End?” on an island off the coast of Belize City (shown above), a group of Polish anti-fascists dressed as Nazi death camp prisoners, and students in Bulgaria carrying books on their heads during a protest against cuts in funding for universities.

It’s great to see attention paid to nonviolent protests in a mainstream publication. If there’s one thing we know from running this blog, it’s that protests are great photo subjects.