Metta’s Opinion

Building a Movement of Peace Teams: training coming to a city near you

by

 

By Jessica Anderson, the Metta Center for Nonviolence

Note: If you are interested in getting trained the skills and strategies for building a national movement of local peace teams, we have good news. MPT Is going to be going on a nationwide tour to do just that. You can find out more about where they will be at this link, and contact them if you would like to host them in your town.

 

 

Note the role of the “third party”: no intervention. We can change this picture.

 

How do we address violence: not only violence in our communities but violence from those who are supposed to protect community (aka “peace” officers)?

We need people who are trained in creating safe spaces, and the slightest hope that it might be possible to create such spaces—is what drives organizations like Meta Peace Team (MPT, formerly Michigan Peace Team). MPT’s goal is not to take sides, not even really to come up with solutions, but simply to create safe spaces where people might be able to deal with the challenges of conflict without violence.

From its very beginning in the 1980s as Michigan Faith and Resistance, through its years as Michigan Peace Team, MPT has sought to equip peacemakers to use their heads, hearts, and hands—to find their personal centers, to be scholarly activists, and to do something about what they learn and experience. These peacemakers are based out of Lansing, MI, but they have worked beyond the state’s borders almost from the very beginning. To reflect this, the group finally took the step this year of changing its name to Meta Peace Team—chosen because meta calls up ideas of transforming relationships and of going beyond borders that are central to MPT’s vision for its work.

Meta Peace Team is conceptualized as a way to plan, train, and deploy peace teams where invited both domestically and internationally—again not to take sides or to “fix” problems, but to create space for people to come up with their own solutions to conflicts. The teams are made up of people who are trained in violence de-escalation techniques, committed to the internal work of personal centering so as to be able to overcome fear in the midst of violence, and willing to work collaboratively and with consensus processes.

They believe that conflict per se can be constructive but that the use of violence to deal with conflict tends to be destructive—and, accordingly, they see the core of their mission as protecting people from violence no matter where that violence comes from or toward whom it is directed. And, they “walk their talk.” They do not take sides, and they don’t invite themselves in to handle just any situation—although they might reach out and make contact with people on the ground to see if help is needed.  As MPT staff member Mary Hanna quips, the teams are not there to quell disturbances but to protect against violence: “Sometimes people think of us as parade marshals – we’re not there to make sure your event goes swimmingly, we’re there to make sure nobody gets hurt.”

I had a chance to speak with Mary a few weeks ago, and she shared her own story of getting involved with MPT. Mary’s exposure to active peace work began during her time as an undergrad student at Michigan State University, where she was fortunate enough to find herself “in the company of prophetic peacemakers”—people who really lived out their convictions and encouraged her to do the same. She began to volunteer with MPT while working first for a community mental health center and then for a peace education center, and finally switched to full-time work with MPT as her involvement with the organization continued to build. Mary’s official job title with MPT is “Operations Manager,” but as she explains it, she does a little (or a lot!) of everything “to make sure that we can keep going as an organization.”

Mary was able to clarify for me some of the mechanics of MPT’s peace team deployment, as the organization follows a unique model of short-term deployments to both domestic and international situations. Domestic deployments, she describes, are typically very short (1-3 days) and often revolve around single events—past examples have included everything from Ku Klux Klan rallies to Gay Pride parades. Participants in domestic teams need to have attended at least eight hours of training with MPT, and larger deployments are often broken up into smaller autonomous teams for increased flexibility. International deployments are longer, ranging from roughly three weeks to about three months. Preparation for these team members is much more intensive and includes regionally specific training, strategy-building and personal/team awareness exercises, and even simulated experiences such as those one might encounter during the deployment. Mary explains that the goal of all this is to send people who are personally centered, able to work together cohesively, and aware of the general dynamics (at the very least) of the situation they’re about to enter – the hope being that such a team could be a help rather than a hindrance to the local community.

I was curious about the three-month upper limit to international deployments, and Mary helpfully points out that the most common site for MPT international deployments has been the West Bank—and that three months is the longest duration for which one can obtain a visa to travel to the West Bank. This deployment length may shift as MPT engages with communities in different parts of the world, but it is likely to remain relatively short in comparison to the international peace team deployments of other organizations. Mary recognizes that this (the shorter duration) poses certain challenges to the way peace teams operate on the ground, but she argues that the more condensed timeframe also lowers some of the barriers to participation in a team and thus allows for broader investment in the concept. She adds that in this context the capacity for continuity, relationship-building, and on-the-ground familiarity comes from peace team members called “anchors” who return to a region repeatedly (and at overlapping times)—allowing MPT to maintain a constant presence in the community over the course of different peace team deployments.

Efforts to scale up this concept of peace teams have brought MPT to the next stage of its journey as a founding member of the Shanti Sena Network of North American peace teams. This network is composed of a variety of organizations across the U.S. and Canada, and it was inspired by Gandhi’s idea of a shanti sena, or ‘peace army.’ Mary explains that “when something big (violent) was happening, we wanted to be able to deploy peace teams as quickly and as effectively as the military deploys their troops and as the police deploys officers.” To do this, the groups need to develop a standardized training and a network to mobilize people in response to violence—to get those trained teams to the places where they are needed, and to do it quickly. They are beginning by coordinating their curricula to include a basic training that all agree is foundational for peace team work, and they hope that this coordination and cooperation in training will also start to build up the networks of relationships that can later be used to mobilize and dispatch trained teams to situations where violence threatens. Over the long haul, they hope to bring Gandhi’s vision of a ‘peace army’ to life in North America.

Note: If you are interested in getting trained the skills and strategies for building a national movement of local peace teams, we have good news. MPT Is going to be going on a nationwide tour to do just that. You can find out more about where they will be at this link, and contact them if you would like to host them in your town.

Peace Paradigm Radio

by

Peace Paradigm Radio has been reborn as Nonviolence Radio.  This page is here for historical purposes only. 

Screen Shot 2014-01-30 at 6.04.07 PM

 

We are constantly being astonished at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt-of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence.

—Gandhi

 

 

In a growingly militarized and violent society, the nonviolent response is often conspicuous by its absence in our mass-media; yet, it is the one tool that we have that will rescue our civilization–and planet–from the downward course it is currently spiraling. And because we hear so little about nonviolence, most people have misconceptions about what it is and how to access its power–if they even think that nonviolence is a power at all. This is not a mistake–the “old” systems that are not working have everything to gain from a citizenry who is disunited and responds in kind to violence. Education about nonviolence is thus essential.

Nonviolence does not mean passivity or “doing nothing.” It is an extremely active force within us to which we all have access and that we can cultivate as a practice in an effort to counter what has become a culture of violence with its antidote: the seeds of a nonviolent culture. As a power, nonviolence is not a matter of succumbing to threats or profit-seeking–it is what Peace Researcher Kenneth Boulding refers to as “integrative power;” we draw on our courage to be authentic, and in doing so, though we no doubt must face risks, it draws people closer together. It is a higher state of prosperity, some might say.

Another way of thinking of nonviolence is through a term that Gandhi coined, sarvodaya. Sarvodaya means “the uplift” or “fulfillment of all,” and it stands in direct challenge to the widespread notions thanks to the mass-media of utilitarianism, or the greatest good for the greatest number (or in some cases, the greatest good for the wealthiest citizens…). In practice what sarvodaya looks like is a society that seeks out win-win situations when making any decision that affects people, creatures or the planet (which is about every decision we make). Yes, it is possible to find solutions that work for everyone, and it is very hard work–but that’s exactly the kind of work we need to do, and there is nothing passive about it. This shift in paradigms is the basis of a nonviolent culture. It’s not easy and it takes time to not only learn intellectually but to put into practice.

That’s where Peace Paradigm Radio comes in–we work on both angles: the intellectual and practical aspects of nonviolence.  A project of the Metta Center for Nonviolence with the support of KWMR, we explore the power of active nonviolence in a highly educational and enjoyable way. Each show has a segment with Professor Michael Nagler (co-founder of UC Berkeley’s Peace and Conflict Studies Program) on ‘nonviolence in the news’ which not only shares stories of where nonviolence is happening, but analyzes what worked well and why. And Stephanie Van Hook, Metta Center Director, talks with guests who are practicing putting the principles of nonviolence into action to inspire others in their struggles for a better world. Each show will vary but these two segments remain consistent. We also regularly host Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers of PopularResistance.org for a monthly Resistance Report and author of Transition to Peace, Russ Faurbrauc to talk about making the transition to the nonviolent world.

Nonviolence is our future, and just by learning more about it, you can have a transformative effect on the world around you.

This is more than a show; it’s the key to unlock a livable and prosperous future for the coming generations.

Airs every other Friday at 1 pm PST on KWMR Community Radio. You can listen live at www.kwmr.org or access the show’s archive at this link.

 

Upcoming shows: February 7, February 21, March 7, March 21 …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Homage to Martin Luther King Jr.

by

My Homage to MLK

by Michael N. Nagler

Dr. Martin Luther King

I never knew Martin Luther King, Jr., but I grew up politically in his America. My personal awakening to nonviolence came one day in Greenwich Village when I happened to listen in to a radio broadcast covering a Civil Rights rally going on somewhere down south.  A justifiably angry African American man said to the rally organizer, “They beat us, they hit us: why don’t we use violence back?”  The leader, whoever it was, calmly said, “Because that is not who we are.”  From that moment on I lived with the vague feeling in the back of my mind that not only is nonviolence a key to what I want to be, it’s what we are as human beings, nonviolence is the destiny toward which we have to strive – if the human experiment is to go on on planet Earth.

 It is common knowledge, I think, that King had an unusually deep grasp of nonviolence.  What this means may not be so commonly acknowledged, namely that it lead him into a profound understanding of and optimism about the nature of reality itself.  When he says that “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hatred cannot drive out hatred; only love can do that,” he is pointing out a simple, polar difference between the two forces that determine the quality and direction of our life.  St. Augustine long before him had said repeatedly in his monumental City of God, “there are two loves’ (or basic drives), that lead respectively to two world orders.”  There are times when we fail to see things because they’re too simple. It takes a kind of courage to peer into that stark, underlying simplicity, to grasp that those two forces, with their opposite character and opposite results, really make up the texture of the moral choices facing us every time we address the major issues of our lives, personal or political.  It is the failure to see these two forces as the underlying criterion of our choices, almost without exception, that makes our decisions such a disastrous incompetence.  Why does raining bombs on, say, Afghanistan, not make it a peaceful, democratic country?  Why doesn’t it just eliminate “bad guys” and let “good guys” take over?  How come, as one commander said about our war in Iraq a few years ago, “we are making terrorists faster than we can kill them”?

The simple answer is, you cannot use darkness to drive out darkness, violence to drive out violence.  And the name of the positive and negative drives which makes the most sense for us today, that most helps us to see their nature and what we’re really dealing with, is nonviolence and violence.

Furthermore, King understood, with Gandhi, that of these two forces – let’s call them anger and compassion for the moment – one was more real.  Anger is really a distortion, or perversion, if you will, of compassion, which alone is real.  To say otherwise is actually a heresy called Manichaeism that Christians are supposed to reject though the vast majority of self-identified Christians today still unconsciously hold it, because our modern culture cannot advance to such a bright view of reality or human nature, Christian or not.  But it was a practical reality for King.  He said, when someone challenged him that the movement roused a lot of anger, no, we did not cause outbursts of anger, “we expressed anger under discipline for maximum effect.”  That mature understanding of the dynamics of anger and the nonviolent effect of its containment or re-direction is rare even among activists today.

The roots of violence/nonviolence are harbored in social conditions favoring one or the other long before the former erupts in open conflict. King was well aware of this.  He clearly saw that life is organized along a principle of unity-in-diversity that again seems to elude most of us (I learned it slowly from my spiritual teacher in whom it was second nature even when he was not using the term itself):

I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.  And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

This is a revolutionary statement that would overturn the most basic, unspoken value of modern culture: competition.  We so closely hold competition as the valid organizing principle of life) that we have made it the sacred cow of business, economics, foreign policy, sports – even education.  It is probably an underlying reason for our tremendous fear of communism, which in its primitive form downgrades competition, especially competition for wealth, though its modern forms show little trace of that awareness (was it Galbraith who said that in capitalism it’s man against man, while in communism it’s exactly the other way around?). 

Because I was not at home in King’s Christian vocabulary, and because I was dazzled by the courage of his achievements, it took me a while to discover that Martin Luther King, Jr. (whose official birthday, like my real one, is today (January 20)), was one of the wisest humans that lived among us in the modern world.  Perhaps if he had been allowed to live we would be following his advice to “rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented civilization to a person-oriented civilization.”  And perhaps the best way to honor his legacy would be to begin it now.

***

martin-luther-king-286x133

Interested more in materials on Dr. King? Check out these talks with Dr. Clay Carson @ the King Institute at Stanford.  

****

Transforming Anger into Nonviolent Power

by

Anger is reasonable and justified in the face of abuse and exploitation. What matters is what we do with it.

As Leymah Gbowee stood in front of a crowd of women at her church in Monrovia, praying for an end to the civil war that was raging in Liberia, she had no idea of the consequences that were about to unfold.

A specialist in healing from trauma, Gbowee and her allies had spent months visiting mosques, markets and churches in order to mobilize a nascent peace movement. By the late summer of 2002, she had become recognized as the leader of Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, which held daily non-violent demonstrations and sit-ins in defiance of orders from Charles Taylor, the Liberian President at the time.

Eighteen months later, in August 2003, the war was brought to an end. Gbowee’s efforts, along with those of newly-elected President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, were recognized by the award of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. I heard Gbowee speak at an interfaith conference in North Carolina in 2012, where she emphasized that the main challenge she had faced was not apathy. Liberians were already angry.

The real issue was how to keep well-intentioned people from exacerbating an already-cruel situation with more violence. Why? Because the more violence there is, the more abuses there will be against women and other people.  Anger is reasonable and justified in the face of abuse and exploitation, but what really matters is what we do with it. According to Gbowee, anger is neutral. We can choose to use it as a fuel for violence or nonviolence. Liberian women chose the latter, and transformed a civil war into a lasting peace.

Gbowee’s insights are rooted in a long tradition of successful nonviolent resistance that runs through the course of history, but whose teachings are often ignored. At a special session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta in September 1920, Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi maintained that even non-cooperation with the established order requires nonviolent discipline:

“I have learnt through bitter experience,” he said, that “the one supreme lesson is to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power that can move the world.”

The women of the Liberian peace movement transformed their anger into nonviolent power in situations of brutality that I pray I will never experience: mutilations, murder and rapes of children and other family members in front of their eyes. These women had more reason than most other people to turn to violence, but they did not, giving the lie to those who say that violence is necessary under such circumstances. This lesson is confirmed by the experiences of many other activists who have refused to react violently even under extreme pressure, but it is often forgotten or dismissed.

“Non-violence, being natural, is not noted in history” wrote Gandhi in his classic text Hind Swaraj. Modern civilization does not give us the tools to see the subtler effects of violence and nonviolence. This problem is compounded by the fact that many of those who use nonviolence to good effect live under the radar screen of history because they are marginalized. Many systems of privilege condition us to write off the experiences of those who are not considered to be experts, like women who are working at the grassroots level or success stories from the global South. And even when such stories arerecognized, they are often interpreted as arguments for the necessity of violence. The end of Apartheid in South Africa is an oft-quoted example.

The victory of the African National Congress is rightly celebrated, but it succeeded in dislodging one system of violence in South Africa and not violence itself.  Structural violence that feeds through into direct violence – like poverty, inequality and exploitation – remains largely unaffected. Apartheid means “apartness,” and that’s what all forms of violence do, by pulling people apart. The balance between armed struggle and nonviolence as forces that led to the overthrow of Apartheid has been debated for more than twenty years. Nelson Mandela, who died on December 5th, internalized this debate in his embrace of both strategies simultaneously.

For every celebration of armed confrontation there are many more nonviolent victories in the “anti-apartheid” struggles of today. The story of Budrus, in the West Bank, is one. By remaining committed to nonviolence and launching a “women’s contingent” to join the struggle, Palestinian activist Ayed Morrar and his fifteen-year old daughter Iltezam were able to unite members of both Fatah and Hamas in a successful attempt to protect their village from destruction by Israel’s “Separation Barrier.”

To those who say that nonviolence is admirable but ineffective, Erica Chenoweth, the author of the ground-breaking book Why Civil Resistance Works, says “think again.”  The growing research base on nonviolent resistance and a burgeoning literature on the effects of violence provide a platform for making more informed judgments about these strategies. When nonviolence is taken seriously, its successes can be systematized and strengthened.

In South Sudan, for example, the world’s newest country, people are not only learning from the experience of the Liberian women’s movement, but taking it one step further by institutionalizing nonviolent ways of dealing with the country’s conflict-ridden transition to independence. A variety of local and international groups are collaborating to reduce the potential for violent conflict by training unarmed civilian peacekeepers to create local peace teams.

One of the key actors in these endeavors is the Nonviolent Peaceforce, which through its civilian protection monitoring role is helping different parties to achieve sustainable peace agreements between, for example, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Philippine Government in the Philippines. They have also supported mothers in demanding the safe return of their abducted children in Sri Lanka;  accompanied and protected human rights defenders Guatemala; and are currently beginning a new project in Myanmar.

Unarmed peacekeeping is a good fit for the world’s newest country because it is one of the latest innovations in conflict transformation. It uses state-of-the-art knowledge about resolving conflict without the threat or use of weapons, and trains people in a variety of skills and tactics. They include “nonviolent accompaniment” and “protective presence,” in which peacekeepers live and work alongside people who are threatened; “conflict mapping”, mediation, and direct “interposing” – the act of literally getting in between conflicting parties to deter them from using violence against each other.

The experience of those who use these techniques suggests that courage is not the willingness to kill; it’s the willingness to risk ourselves for the greater good, and that is arguably something that everyone can do when we convert our anger into fuel for nonviolent struggle. We have been conditioned to think that such attitudes are naïve by the continuous hum of violence that surrounds us – its proximity and acceptability in daily life. But maybe that noise is also drowning out the voices of those who could show us that nonviolence really works?

Nonviolence is not passivity – it is immensely active and challenging. But practicing nonviolence enables us to see more deeply into the heart of the problems that face us all, and it helps us to escalate our nonviolent efforts in ways that are more informed, sophisticated and courageous. To echo Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

 

 

Written for Transformation at OpenDemocracy.net –posted on December 9, 2013.

Yeb Sano’s fast for the climate offers sanity amid the madness of global inaction

by

Filipino lead negotiator undertook a 13-day fast for the climate at the U.N. climate talks in Warsaw. (350.org)

Filipino lead negotiator Yeb Sano undertook a 13-day fast for the climate at the U.N. climate talks in Warsaw. (350.org)

By . Originally posted on Waging Nonviolence, November 25th, 2013.

 

Less than two weeks ago, Filipino climate negotiator Yeb Saño delivered a landmark speech on climate change. Speaking before delegates of 195 nations at the 19th conference of parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Warsaw, Poland, Saño quietly wept as he recounted the devastation wrought by “this hellstorm called Super Typhoon Haiyan.” Uncertain of the fate of even his own family amid the “vast wasteland of mud and debris and dead bodies,” Saño’s words carried a palpable sense of loss, pain and angst.

As the strongest typhoon in history to make landfall, Saño argued the unprecedented storm must be considered an unnatural disaster. “It is not natural when the human species has already profoundly changed the climate,” he declared. “What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness — the climate crisis is madness.”

Then, in a fateful turn, Saño departed from his prepared remarks: “In solidarity with my countrymen who are struggling to find food back home, I will now commence a voluntary fasting for the climate.” Continuing, he explained, “I will voluntarily refrain from eating food during this COP, until a meaningful outcome is in sight.” As a result, Saño became the first U.N. official to commit to such principled nonviolent action during a conference.

Saño’s speech galvanized thousands to fast for climate justice. In Warsaw, nearly a hundred negotiators and delegates fasted in solidarity with the people of the Philippines. The next day in Boston, students from Tufts and Brandeis universities put out a call on social media for a collegiate solidarity fast. Within several days, nearly 1,200 students around the world committed to a rolling fast and authored an open letter representing students from 75 universities. The World Council of Churches followed suit, urging its 500 million interfaith members to fast “in solidarity with the poor and vulnerable” and push for “global climate justice.” 350.org then organized over 50 worldwide vigils united under the message #WeStandWithYou. In another unprecedented move for a climate negotiator, Saño authored a petition — which garnered over 717,000 signatures — demanding immediate climate action in Warsaw.

Despite these gains, however, fasts and hunger strikes frequently fall flat, as was the case at COP 15 in Copenhagen four years ago. According to Adam Greenberg, a delegate for the youth-led American group SustainUS, that was because there were no concrete asks and no crucial government personnel who participated. This time, however, the situation was quite different. As UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus and Metta Center for Nonviolence founder Michael Nagler contends, Saño’s fast reflected sound Gandhian logic. According to Nagler, he is a man whose “heart is broken, who has tried everything else, and who seeks to emphasize his peoples’ suffering.” What is less clear, however, is the extent to which Saño’s fast — and wider solidarity actions — were an effective tactic for pressuring the negotiators at COP 19.

While Mohandas Gandhi considered fasting one of the greatest weapons in the arsenal of nonviolence, he urged it be used with caution and adhere to strict guidelines, especially when making demands of other parties. While Saño’s specific demand — “an international mechanism for loss and damage” to help developing nations cope with climate disasters — certainly qualifies as a concrete and realistic ask, Gandhi also advised that the fasters’ demands be directed towards empathetic members of the community. This stipulation was one reason why he never directed his own fasts towards the British — they didn’t see Indians as their equals and therefore weren’t likely to be empathic toward him. Similarly, Saño and the climate justice movement can’t expect empathy from the U.S. government, which not only carries great clout at these meetings, but also — according to chief U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern — will not consider compensation or reparations as a form of climate action.

While fasting carries great challenges, it still can have great power, and climate justice advocates are using the tactic to their advantage. For one thing, Saño’s fast has served as a crucial bridge between communities of faith and climate justice advocates. As journalist Wen Stephenson has argued, the climate crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis that cannot be understood independent of morality. People of faith are increasingly calling for “sustainability, justice, inter-generational equity,” and other acts of “creation care.” In that sense, fasting can connect individuals’ personal sacrifice and spirituality with broader social imperatives, and — in time — it might even provoke people of faith to take more direct nonviolent actions.

Furthermore, this fast has deepened a burgeoning global youth climate justice movement. Calls for solidarity fasts among U.S. college students emerged from newly-organized fossil fuel divestment campaigns. Youth activists were quick to understand that unnatural disasters like Super Typhoon Haiyan are the natural consequence of unchecked fossil fuel extraction. Those who are fasting reside in nations as diverse as Fiji, Egypt, Singapore, Croatia, South Africa, China, Australia, Cyprus and, remarkably, the Philippines. These students are affiliated with a diverse array of organizations, from the Arab Youth Climate Movement to the Federation of Young European Greens. Increasingly connected by the Internet and a common recognition that humanity must keep 80 percent of known fossil-fuel reserves in the ground, these students are among those who stand to lose the most from inaction and are rapidly emerging as the vanguard of climate justice activism.

Finally, the fast is serving as an important tactic for provoking public awareness. As Adam Greenberg noted, “Suddenly my friends who didn’t care about COP — who really rolled their eyes at me and didn’t think it was an effective use of anyone’s time — are now all paying attention.”

Yet, despite these promising benefits, fasts are generally insufficient on their own. As Nagler explained, “Historically social justice and peace movements have not had a way of capturing momentum from one-off spontaneous protests like fasts.” Without translating the gains of fasting into other forms of activism, participants often revert back to a state of disengagement and their fast remains mere opinion. Nagler instead calls for the “ratcheting” of tactics to preserve the emotional energy of fasting and ensure that movements do not stall.

One way activists can do this is by pushing for domestic pressure to leverage international climate progress. Since Saño’s speech and the solidarity fasts “suddenly made COP a story,” as Greenberg noted, the climate justice movement should integrate the annual conference into its overall strategy. Greenberg also believes that activists need to build public support and galvanize political will with the U.N. process in mind — an understanding that has thus far eluded most advocates.

Since the domestic politics of intransigent developed nations — especially the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia — are crucial for a binding global treaty on carbon emissions, U.N. climate meetings are occasions for prolonged and escalated activism. Greenberg says this is especially true for COP 21 in 2015, when the Kyoto Protocol — the only internationally-binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — is set to be replaced. Activists can help determine, “whether that binds us into something good, or something straight out of a horror film.”

For all the talk about building on the momentum of Saño’s fast, there is something fundamentally basic about its execution: In the face of government inaction, resistance — for Saño — felt essential. This is because in its own small, but truly revolutionary way, fasting can help overcome fear and fatalism.

Thanks in part to Saño’s principled 13-day fast, the delegates of COP 19 reached a last-minute deal on Saturday to establish a modest “loss and damage” mechanism. Most importantly, the delegates established this new plank independently of the conference’s existing mitigation and adaptation groups — enabling it to make a significant contribution in the coming years. Yet green groups contend this modest provision is insufficient, deriding the conference as “the dirtiest on record.”

In another sign of their displeasure, over 800 members of civil society — in an unprecedented move — walked out of the COP 19 proceedings on Thursday. Fed up with the complicity of corporate politicians, they declared, “Polluters talk, we walk,” vowing to return stronger and more determined than ever next year. Friends of the Earth proclaimed the walkout a success unto itself, since it “started a domino effect already reaching our home countries, where ordinary citizens are joining the struggle for climate justice.”

If such individual and collective refusals can be seen as the seeds of a more sustained and radical activism, the quiet fasting of COP 19 may well become the tumultuous direct action of COPs 20 and 21.

Love at the barrel of a gun

by

Original content for Transformation at OpenDemocracy.net, posted on 1 November 2013. 

Violence can only be overcome by love. An armed intruder meets an unexpected response at an elementary school in Georgia.

 Sandyhook2

Memorial at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Credit: Shutterstock. All rights reserved.

When Antoinette Tuff was confronted by a would-be mass killer in the entry hall of the Georgia elementary school where she worked as an accountant, she made an unusual decision. Her desire to protect the children in her care inspired her to see the distraught young man as a human being in need of help.  Imagine his reaction when in the course of talking him out of his desperate plan she heard herself say “I love you.”

The attack on Tuff’s school took place in August, 2013, and it prompted thoughts about the massacre that had unfolded a year before in Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut, when 26 people died. But perhaps it’s more useful to think about the shooting that didn’t happen. How did Antoinette Tuff in Georgia save the day?

When she told a heavily-armed intruder “I love you,” this love was not a sentiment. It’s doubtful that she actually felt emotional love for such a threatening figure. In fact she said later that she was “terrified.” Instead, this love was the wisdom to see a hurting human being in a distraught young man, to detect his deepest need in the loveless and alienating societies we’ve created in the modern world. And she had the courage to act on that awareness.

In her actions she was following a pattern that writers from Cicero to Boethius had developed thousands of years ago for talking people out of depression, or dissuading them from acts of desperation. It was called the consolatio: first, identify with the distraught person – in her case Tuff shared details about her misery in her own life. Then contextualize the person’s suffering: others have been through this too, Tuff said, you’re feeling hopeless today but it could be different tomorrow, and things are going to be all right.  Next, exhort the sufferer to do the right thing by giving them back their sense of agency – she asked the intruder’s permission to call the police after he laid his guns on the reception counter and got face down on the floor.

I’m not pointing out these parallels as a mere literary exercise. What these writers did was to codify a pattern they must have observed many times in response to emergencies. Why don’t we apply this same logic in the present day?

In effect there were two completely different systems in place to protect Tuff’s school in Georgia.  One consisted of police and metal-detecting doors that had to be activated by an insider.  This system completely failed.  The would-be killer slipped in behind a teacher who was cleared to enter, while the police were worse than useless. They almost ruined what Tuff was trying to do when they made their presence known outside the building and the intruder started shooting at them.  On the 911 tape that was later made public, the police were recorded screaming orders at the young man who was already lying face down on the floor with his hands behind his back.

The other “system,” if you will, was the aptly named Antoinette Tuff – a courageous woman who had received some training for dealing with eventualities like this, if not on quite this scale. Her minister at church had taught his parishioners a technique called “grounding” which, as she tells the story, she relied on throughout, along with praying. She succeeded brilliantly, saving the 800 or so children who were in the school that day. But the point is that her life-saving response was precisely not a system in the sense of something that already exists at significant scale. We know things like this can happen, but we haven’t thought of institutionalizing effective, human responses even though they work.

Logically, it should be possible to develop the capacity to reject what causes alienation and embrace what draws us closer to each other. This might start small – or it might seem that way – but we can all grow and express the non-sentimental love that Tuff exhibited in large-scale systems by drawing on the personal strength that’s inside each one of us.

After all, what is the war system if not anger writ large? What is corporate capitalism if not greed writ large? What is the American prison-industrial-complex if not fear writ large? Fear, greed and anger when undisciplined and ignored will destroy us.  And if these disruptive, alienating drives can be built into whole institutions then their opposites like community and peace can be built into our social behavior too.

What would our institutions look like if we had enough faith in ourselves to protect our children with that kind of power?

For one thing, problems of discipline in schools would be dealt with by using the principles of restorative instead of retributive justice: instead of an instrument of vengeance, justice requires that we work to restore all those who have been injured by a crime. Restorative justice is a growing phenomenon adopted from experiments in New Zealand and a number of indigenous cultures that has worked well in schools where it’s been tried. Both victims and offenders report high levels of satisfaction.

Another approach has been to head off difficulties before they happen. Take the case of Orchard Garden School in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a school that was plagued by violence from its inception. In fact in 2010 it was ranked in the bottom five of all public schools in the state of Massachusetts.  So Andrew Bott – the sixth principal in seven years – let go the entire security staff and used the savings to bring back art and music programs.  Fights and other disturbances dropped dramatically: “Orchard Gardens has one of the fastest student improvement rates statewide. And the students – once described as loud and unruly, have found their focus.”

There are two other things that can be done.  First, have “peace teams” on hand in the most troubled schools.  Such unarmed teams already patrol the streets of New York and Chicago, and they also exist in Mindañao (the Philippines), South Sudan, and the Caucasus among many other places. They have been proven to be effective in mediating between opposing parties and preventing the escalation of small-scale conflicts. Second, let’s get serious about teaching children peace. Our educational systems rarely acknowledge the fact that human beings have rich inner resources to draw from that connect them with each other. All these changes can be phased in gradually, without asking people to take a leap into the void, allowing for transformations to occur through a build-up of confidence rather than a giant leap of faith.

Schools are a microcosm of society. If we do these things in schools, we could them in other institutions too. It’s time to go beyond defensive campaigns to end one form of violence or another. Instead we should build up cultures of nonviolence where empathy and mutual respect are developed in the same ways that more destructive drives have been embedded up to now.

In his book, “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” Chris Hedges concludes that war can only be overcome by love, but also that love cannot be organized. However, love in the form of active nonviolence can certainly be organized in the ways I have suggested. What we need to do is to organize this form of love, not only for one-off emergencies or temporary campaigns, but as the formative principle of all our institutions.

 

Can unarmed peacekeeping work in Syria? It has in South Sudan

by

By Stephanie Van Hook, from Waging Nonviolence 

 

Kenyan Nonviolent Peaceforce worker Peters Nyawanda in Sri Lanka. (Flickr/Nonviolent Peaceforce)

Kenyan Nonviolent Peaceforce worker Peters Nyawanda in Sri Lanka. (Flickr/Nonviolent Peaceforce)

Over the past few months there have been many discussions about alternatives to war and armed military intervention in light of the ongoing crisis in Syria. Those opposing military force have made alternative proposals that have included the work of unarmed civilian peacekeeping. In order to better understand what this might mean, I spoke with two unarmed civilian peacekeepers with the organization Nonviolent Peaceforce, Lisa Fuller and Tiffany Easthom.

Fuller is a field team leader for Nonviolent Peaceforce. Her work as an unarmed civilian peacekeeper has taken her to Sri Lanka and, most recently to Abyei, the area between Sudan and South Sudan, and the state of Jonglei in South Sudan. Currently she is working on a fundraising project to explore sending unarmed peacekeepers to Syria. Easthom is country director of the Nonviolent Peaceforce South Sudan project.

To start off, tell us about Nonviolent Peaceforce and what you do.

LF: Nonviolent Peaceforce is an international humanitarian organization that was started in 2002 with the idea that there was an alternative to either doing nothing or going to war. We started in Sri Lanka with the idea that international presence would be a way to deter violence and to protect civilians who were under threat. In Sri Lanka there was a 26-year civil war, but both sides cared very much about international opinion. So if there was a civilian or community under threat, and if you put internationals next to that person or those people, they would generally be safe because neither side wanted to be seen as attacking them.

Where are the internationals from?

LF: We try to have as diverse a collection of peacekeepers as possible. They are literally from all over the world — from six continents. I work with people from Africa, Asia, South America and Europe, as well as with people from North America.

Without the protection of weapons, how do you stay safe?

LF: We won’t go into any country to start a new project unless we have an invitation from a civil society organization. So that provides the basis for entering the country. As far as opening different field sites in different communities, we do an assessment beforehand. We meet all of the parties involved. We explain who we are, we ask them if they think that we would be useful or valuable or if they even want us there. And it’s only if they do, and if we think we can help, that we go in.

Community acceptance keeps you remarkably safe. But in order to be able to work, we need all of the actors involved in or affected by the conflict to know who we are. They don’t necessarily have to like us, but they do have to accept our work, view us with respect and understand that we are adding something valuable. In my experience, most parties do like us, despite the fact that we’re non-partisan. I actually feel safer working for Nonviolent Peaceforce than I think I would working for some other organizations.

Most recently I worked in Abyei, a disputed territory between Sudan and South Sudan. And there were areas where no other international organization would go because when they did they would receive threats. We never received any threats, and it’s because we had done the legwork in terms of building relationships. Those relationships provided the basis to allow us to be secure enough to go where we wanted to go.

Why is the Nonviolent Peaceforce in South Sudan and Abyei?

LF: South Sudan is the world’s newest country. It became independent in January 2011 after over 50 years of civil war. The vast majority of the population assessed this as a huge victory — something that they had wanted for a long time. But after independence was gained, internal divisions became apparent. South Sudan has 64 tribes, and they all have unique cultures and unique languages. Although there were divisions and conflicts among them before, the tribes generally put those aside and united against the common enemy of Sudan. But once that common enemy disappeared, they started to focus on the differences between themselves, and inter-tribal violence broke out. It’s hard to describe one particular conflict, because the sad fact is that most of those tribes are now involved in some conflict in one form or another. Because the government is so new and the country is large, there are places so inaccessible that rule of law really isn’t available, which allows armed conflicts to continue.

Can you describe the involvement of women in communities where you worked?

LF: They’re not involved in terms of being the actual fighters or combatants. I’ve never heard of a woman having a weapon and attacking someone. They are involved mainly as victims, especially in areas where the conflict has gotten particularly acute. Sometimes women and children are targeted as a tactic of war. But they’re never the ones that do the fighting.

We have 10 field teams in South Sudan, and different field teams do different work. There were some teams that created separate women’s peacekeeping teams. On my team  we worked closely with a woman leader in our area. One of the things we did was when civilians were being targeted was to set up security meetings so that the community could meet with different security actors — like U.N. peacekeepers and police and the military — and to tell them about the security situation. Those security actors could then adapt their strategies to make those civilians safe.

Nonviolent Peaceforce training at Yeri, South Sudan, in November 2011. (Flickr/Nonviolent Peaceforce)

Nonviolent Peaceforce training at Yeri, South Sudan, in November 2011. (Flickr/Nonviolent Peaceforce)

At the first two security meetings we had no women showed up. It was only men. So we spoke to a woman leader. We asked her if we could have a security meeting for women specifically. We asked her if there was anything we could do to help her organize that. She said don’t worry, just show up at this day on this time, and we did. She had almost every single woman in that community at that meeting, which was more than a number of men who would show up. It was a remarkably successful meeting.

The women said this was the first time they had ever gotten together to talk to a security actor about their security. Even the military and police said it was the first time they’d ever talked to women about their security, and they found out so much more about what was needed in those communities, because it’s the women who spend more time at home. They know what the threats are better than the men who go off to different areas for work. These security meetings, in combination with other strategies that we developed with the local chief and the leading woman, were remarkably effective. The incidences of rape and sexual assault, and actually of all other types of violence, were completely eliminated from the area as soon as the strategies were implemented. This impact was confirmed both by police and U.N. police advisors, as well as by the community itself.

How does unarmed civilian peacekeeping restore relationships among actors in a local conflict?

LF: Abyei is probably the best example. In this area the nomadic tribes and the Dinka are often in conflict. When people talk about them now, it’s as if these are two tribes that have always fought and have nothing in common, and there’s no hope for making peace. But if you actually talk to the people on the ground they’ll tell you the opposite. They’ll tell you, “I’ve known these people my entire life. Every year we sit down and have tea and visit with each other, and the only time this stops is when there’s a greater conflict around us in which people are too embarrassed to see each other or too scared to see each other. But really, in the end, we just want to sit down and have tea or coffee together.”

Since both of those groups trusted us, they were able to sit down and drink coffee if we were there. Sometimes that was enough. In a small community, for the community and the nomads to get together and realize that these were people they’d known all their lives, they realized there was no reason to defend themselves at all.

How do you approach the conflict differently than other forms of international intervention do? What about the conflict in Syria, for example?

TE: It is really important to illustrate the complexity of conflict in general and particularly a conflict like the one in and around Syria. Those on the outside tend to see the issue as one thing — the government against the rebels. What is important to highlight that in every conflict there are multiple layers. A war creates conditions whereby opportunistic violence arises; long-standing grudges are meted out during the confusion and cover of war, and displacement creates massive vulnerabilities for civilians. There are also peace and ceasefire agreements in communities throughout the conflict that are never really noticed by the general public, and these are often the most effective ways of bringing about increased security for civilians who are waiting for a political solution. Based on previous experience, this is an area where Nonviolent Peaceforce could be quite effective.

Do you think that unarmed civilian peacekeeping is limited in any ways? 

LF: Absolutely there are limits. There are places that unarmed civilian peacekeeping is effective and there are places that it probably wouldn’t be safe or effective. Nonviolent Peaceforce has 24 criteria that we analyze before going into a country to help us decide whether or not it is appropriate and safe, and whether or not we will be able to protect people. In May we began a scoping process in Syria. We will follow that up with additional visits in October and November, when we will meet with potential partners and discuss and analyze possibilities.

A Nonviolent Peaceforce worker at a community meeting in Sudan in June 2011. (Flickr/Nonviolent Peaceforce)

A Nonviolent Peaceforce worker at a community meeting in Sudan in June 2011. (Flickr/Nonviolent Peaceforce)

We met with a variety of people on the visit in May including government officials, religious leaders, nonviolent activists, members of the Free Syrian Army, refugees, internally displaced people and representatives from the U.N. and Syrian Arab Red Crescent. Most agreed that unarmed civilian peacekeeping was needed but there was wide disagreement as to when. Some people said, “Come now.” Others said to send people now would be suicide. Most agreed that the time to start organizing and training is now.

What kinds of activities would you carry out in Syria if you decide to take on this mission?

LF: Activities could include accompanying people under threat because of their peace and human rights work or providing a protective presence in zones of peace, schools or hospitals. We might be able to work with communities in setting up early warning and early response mechanisms. Also, we have had numerous requests for training of trainers in unarmed civilian peacekeeping.

The project certainly seems daunting. How do you overcome that feeling?

TE: Conflict is complicated, and the international community often becomes so hypnotized by this complexity that inaction becomes more common than action. But the reality is that there are always entry points for violence reduction if you are willing to look for them and do the analysis to see them. We must break through the false dichotomy that the options are either to do nothing or to send in the bombers and cruise missiles. There are always alternatives. Unarmed civilian peacekeeping may be one of them.