What is nonviolence ?

Étienne Godinot
Translation : Claudia McKenny Engström

10.02.2015
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 What is nonviolence ?

Contents
• Defining of nonviolence
• Concepts : conflict, force, combativeness, violence
• Philosophy of nonviolence
• Strategy for nonviolent action
• Towards a culture of nonviolence
Sources (for this diaporama)

- Bibliography of Jean-Marie Muller, and in particular his Dictionnaire de la

non-violence (Relié Poche, 2005)

- Bernard Quelquejeu, Sur les chemins de la non-violence. Études de

philosophie morale et politique (Vrin, 2010)
 Defining nonviolence

Nonviolence is both a way of life respectful of Man and

Nature, and a way of relating and action (social, political, etc.)
respectful of ones opponent.

« A way of doing which stems from a way of being »

Aldo Capitini (1899-1968)
Clarifying a few concepts *

The conflict

The conflict, latent or open, stems from a tension, a

disagreement, a difference. Entering in conflict is to affirm
oneself before another, dare to say “no”, seeking recognition of
ones rights. Its also means releasing oneself from
powerlessness, complaint or submission. It means avoiding the
unsaid, which create frustration and unease.

It means allowing oneself to express on the needs, aspirations,

interests, values and points of view of all, on the tensions in the
group.

It means allowing suffering to exteriorise rather persist in

resentment, hatred and violence.

* “Misnaming is to add to the world's woes” (Albert Camus)

 The conflict

Accepting conflict is accepting to change, inventing and

creating thanks to someone else who is different to me, but
who potentially has similar desires to mine.

Conflicts are sign of life, exchange, confrontation, Democracy.

To combat violence, conflict needs to be rehabilitated, only
resolved in the respect of others.

Conflicts don’t have to be destructive : they can be source of

progress, of better interpersonal relations, of a better collective
organisation. Conflict builds life when it is animated by
dialogue, negotiation and imagination as dynamics of
collective life.
 The conflict

It is by learning to manage daily small conflicts that we can

learn how to handle bigger ones :

- By managing minor conflicts in a couple, man and wife

can avoid divorcing.

- By regularly managing conflicts in a classroom, youth

clubs or sports clubs, we avoid incivility at school or the
uprising of entire neighbourhoods.

- By taking into account the needs of an identity,

recognition, natural resources or the territory of a people,
we can avoid wars.
 The conflict

Conflicts are more often than not, unavoidable,

sometimes necessary, often useful, but always
uncomfortable, tiring and painful.

Even if it necessary, the conflict is not a normal way for

people to interact, between individuals or groups. We can
be worried of a couple who never argues, but also of a
couple who is always in conflict…

A conflict can destroy life if it is a confrontation of forces. It

can degenerate into violence if respect is no longer the
rule, if combativeness is not mastered, if anger is not
controlled, if the different actors are trapped in a
symmetrical escalation of words and gestures.
 Combativeness

Combativeness is necessary to deal with conflicts.

Combativeness is a strength in life and a necessity to
affirm oneself before others, to confront without
hedging, to overcome ones fear of acting.

This is the positive aspect of aggressiveness (ad-gradi :

walk towards), but it can also express itself in its
perverse form, that is destructiveness, pathological,
most of the time provoked by past sores.

The first task of a nonviolent action will be to awaken

the combativeness of those who suffer injustice.

Photo : Martin Luther King

 The struggle

The struggle is a confrontation, a fight to obtain respect

of a right, concretisation of a demand, evolution of a
law.

Struggle for justice requires just and adjusted means,

that is to say, nonviolent.

“To want victory and not want to fight, I say that is to be

badly behaved”,
Charles Péguy (1873-1914)
 Force (strenght, power)

Force (or strenght, power) is a cause that provokes an effect or

movement (a force of traction, of an acid, the strenght of an
argument, the power of the soul, etc.).
Force is what obliges the adversary to negotiate and/or yield is
not the violence that wounds or destroys him.
The ratio of power creates the conditions of a dialogue allowing
to negotiate a just solution to a conflict.

It can result in:

- a simple evaluation by an actor of his or her capacity to
mobilise and act, a capacity which is in itself a factor of
dialogue and negotiation.
- a confrontation, a relation where forces are released
(demonstration, strike, boycott, civil disobedience, etc.).

Photos: - The power of a truck

- The power of a sit-in (Ekta Parishad movement in India)
 Violence

Violence is any kind of word, action or omission that

violates another human being, his or her rights,
identity; what wounds or destroys another, physically
or psychologically.

Violence is the result of the absence of words,

communication, between different actors. It is the
failure and perversion of conflicts, and also very often
a cry of desperation towards those who have not
heard.

Photos :
- Racket in the school
-"Ordinary" violence: 10 % of women suffer abuse from their partner
- - Extreme violence : the Holocaust
 Violence

Structural violence * is a violence provoked by

systems and ideologies of domination,
discrimination and injustice.
Examples are slavery, colonialism, machism,
tax havens, corporate land grabbing, corruption,
etc.

That is the mother to all other forms of violence,

because it creates within the oppressed,
a violence of contestation, later crushed by the
violence of repression.

* Johan Galtung.
Helder Camara spoke of violence of the “disestablished
order”.
 The manifestations of violence

Author
Domination, closing, refusal to
admit the injustice of a situation
and the consequences
of his/her behaviour

Law
unjust or inadapted
to the situation

Victim Third party

Caught in complaint, Omission to say what he/she saw
submission, incapacity to talk (report), refusal to interven,
with the autor or third party; failure to provide assistance
résignation or hatred to a person in danger
 Violence or nonviolence ?

Violence is also a method of action which is

sometimes necessary :
- to defend the established order when that order
guarantees freedom;
- to combat the established disorder when that
one maintains oppression.

That is why violence requires an effective

alternative in political action.

Photo below : Peace Brigades International (PBI)

 Legitimacy of counter-violence ?

Facing violence, nonviolence seems sometimes

impossible or too slow to stop an unbearable situation.

Counter-violence, or a violent action to stop an

aggressor from bringing harm to others, even in killing
the aggressor if necessary, has been massively used
throughout history.

It is legitimate, most of the time abused, in the theories

of legitimate defence or of just war, but is sometimes
necessary (to stop one man from killing many others
on the streets, snipers killing in Sarajevo, Kadhafi
tanks threatening to destroy Benghazi, etc.).
Counter-violence: which questions to ask

- Can counter-violence – as limited as possible –

diminish or will it augment Man’s misfortune ?

- What is the less bad solution short term ?

- What are the consequences on the long term ?

- What must be prepared in order to avoid a similar

situation to occur in the future, and replace counter-
violence with non-violence more and more ?
 Philosophy of nonviolence

Nonviolence (a-himsa) is the decision of principal

to refuse all thought, action or institution, which
might threaten life or the dignity of another person.

Gandhi invented the term satyagraha, which

means “the power of love and truth”, not as
preference to ahimsa but to the English passive
resistance, which he used at the beginning of his
struggle in South Africa. During the salt campaign,
he almost always referred to ahimsa or
nonviolence.
 Philosophy of nonviolence

Nonviolence is nothing else but the realisation of the

founding ethical ban: “Thou shall not kill”.

This rule is the common golden rule to all cultures and

religions in the world :

“Do not to do others what you do not want then to do to

you”,
or in its positive version, “Be with others as you wish
they were with you”.
 Philosophy of nonviolence

Democracy

What grounds politics is Speech. Violence is always a

failure of dialogue, failure of politics.

One of the main tasks of Democracy is to invent

institutions that aim at solving conflicts in a constructive
and nonviolent manner.

Free elections are necessary to democracy, but are not

sufficient.
The right and duty to disobey

The rule of majority does not guarantee respect of

the ethical requirements that ground democracy.

History has taught us that democracy is more often

than not, threatened by blind obedience of citizens
rather than their disobedience.

The most efficient form of disobedience towards

the State is civil, open and collective, by accepting
the penalty pronounced, in order to seek legal
evolution.

Photo above: The Vel d’Hiv’ raid (16-17 July 1942))

 Kindness and goodness

Nonviolence opens to Man the path of kindness.

Kindness – or what we also call goodness, gentleness,

charity, love, tenderness, forgiveness – seems to many
the highest representation of transcendence.

“Human transcendence is that possibility to freely take the

risk of dying in order to not kill, rather than taking the risk
of killing to not die”
Jean-Marie Muller.
 Looking at death in the eyes

The anxiety of suffering and death are probably the

major causes explaining why Man succumbs to the
temptation of violence.

More than anything else, the perspective of death leads

to a quest for meaning. Each one, on these topics, is
called to adventure in a personal reflection and to
define a personal attitude, both orienting ones
existence.
 Strategy of nonviolent action

The power of injustice and violence in our societies rests

on the collaboration (silence, resignation, passivity, etc.)
of a majority of the members of this society.

Nonviolence is the non-collaboration with injustice and

lying.

Photos : Etienne de la Boétie,

David Henry Thoreau,
Leon Tolstoï
 Nonviolence, a strength in action

Nonviolent action starts with acts of information,

demand, consultation, which are of the persuasive
domain.
But they do not exclude pressure or constraint
aiming at disarming the adversary, although they
will be led respectfully and with the objective of
reconciliation.
Demonstrations, sit-ins, boycott, civil, collective and
public disobedience to unjust laws, are all forms of
this cooperation.

Photos :
- Gandhi weaving during the boycott campaign against English textile
- Janadesh March of the Ekta Parishad movement in India, 2007
 Political nonviolence

Nonviolent action requires a rigorous

political analysis :

- motivations and strength of present actors

- role of third parties, namely public opinion

- clear, limited and attainable objectives

Photos :
- “Wall of Shame” between Israel and Palestine
- Palestinian nonviolent action
 Political nonviolence

Non-collaboration is associated with

a constructive alternative
programme.

Right Photo : Sheep pen of La Blaquière,

illegally built on the Plateau du Larzac, France
 Political nonviolence

The realisation of such a constructive

programme must allow those who until now have
been kept under oppression in minor situations
within economic and political structures, to take
a hold of their own destiny and participate
directly in the management of what concerns
them.

Without such a programme, nonviolent action

will stay imprisoned by its protests and refusals.

Photos : - Debate en Africa

- Nelson Mandela
Towards a culture of nonviolence

Our societies are dominated by a violent culture :

wars of colonisation and decolonisation, violent revolutions,

world wars, dictatorships and genocides (XXIth Century)

“War toys” given to children of young age, violent video-

games,

bloody lyrics of The Marseillaise, military parades on

national days.
 A culture of violence

A culture of violence is everything

(customs,
institutions,
ways of appreciating and feeling,
collective representations, etc.)
within a society, which stimulates in an individual or a
public authority, an easy and spontaneous recourse to
diverse forms of violence to solve the conflicts created
by social life.

Photos :
- Video games based on violence
- The violence of industrial breeding
 Delegitimize violence

To break a legitimate conception of violence, presented

and necessary, honourable, the first step consists in fully
taking into account the reality of this violence that flaws
our relations to one another.

Then, we must break away from the processes of

justification and legitimisation of violence, and show that
it is not a fatality.

Photo : experiments led by Stanley Milgram to show submission to

authority
 A culture of nonviolence

A culture of nonviolence is one developing

knowledge, morals, ways of living, social institutions,
conscious and unconscious scales of values.

In other words, developing collective ethics in depth,

in order to push back individual and social violence

and inscribe the habits of a people into nonviolent

conflicts.

Photos :
-The monks of Tibhirine
- Meeting between Imams and Rabbis at the initiative of the
Hommes de Parole
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