April 30

“The Congress should be able to put forth a non-violent army of volunteers who would be equal to every occasion where the police and military are required.”

–Gandhi (Harijan, 3-26-1938)

If we can train people in violence to serve in fighting and war, does it seem so impossible that we can train them equally well in nonviolence and unarmed peacekeeping? The Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) is one of the most well-known organizations in the world working to respond directly to Gandhi’s call for a Shanti Sena, or Peace Army, offering a kind of nonviolent parallel institution to the military. At time of this writing they have trained field teams in four countries, where they work with local groups to protect human life, provide good offices like rumor abatement and in theory are ready, in the extreme case, to interpose themselves between conflicting parties.  Yes, it’s been done here and there, mostly spontaneously, as in a dramatic example decades back in the Western Sahara where men and women, some of them wheeling baby carriages, just plain stopped a war.  In every way, in fact, the track record is inspiring, for NP and the twenty or so organizations already doing this kind of work — closer to fifty if you count domestic peace teams or ‘hybrid’ organizations like Meta Peace Team that do both domestic and cross-border interventions.  There have been almost no casualties and the cost, compared to any kind of military intervention, as you may imagine, is ridiculous.  NP has taken the lead on waking up the UN to this kind of peace work, the name of which, by the way, is Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping, or UCP.  Why haven’t we heard about it??  Because of the general disorientation of our present culture.

Gandhi was assassinated before he had the chance to build up his “army” in good earnest, but not before he planted the seed and ringingly declared: “That non-violence can be practiced by people but not by nations, which consist of people, is blasphemy.”

Experiment in Nonviolence: 

Learn more about unarmed peacekeeping and some of the organizations in the field. Share them with others.

Daily Metta 2015, a service of the Metta Center for Nonviolence, is a daily reflection on the strategic and spiritual insights of Mahatma Gandhi in thought, word and deed. As Gandhi called his life an “experiment in truth,” we have included an experiment in nonviolence to accompany each Daily Metta. Check in every day for new inspiration. Each year will be dedicated to another wisdom teacher.