Taking Back Civic Space: Nonviolent Protests and Pushbacks against Autocratic Restrictions in Thailand

The year of 2020 witnessed the eruption of Thailand’s largest and longest-lasting mass demonstrations since the 2014 military putsch. Despite threats of crackdown, protesters leveraged a host of innovative nonviolent actions to reclaim political space that the regime had previously squeezed. This article sheds light on key mechanisms that underpin nonviolent actions’ ability to push back against a trend of shrinking space. We argue that the logic of nonviolent action, tactical and digital creativity, and counteracting repression operates in tandem. First, specific forms of nonviolent action carved out space for popular protest and increased public participation in it despite regime hindrances. Second, particularly tactical and digital creativity sustained this mass participation by reversing some effects of repression. Third, nonviolent responses to this repression encouraged further anti-regime mobilization. We conclude our analysis with some caveats. The Thai case shows that keeping regained space can be difficult.

Environmental Movements of India

In her detailed retelling of three iconic movements in India, Professor Emerita Krishna Mallick, PhD, gives hope to grassroots activists working toward environmental justice. Each movement deals with a different crisis and affected population: Chipko, famed for tree-hugging women in the Himalayan forest; Narmada, for villagers displaced by a massive dam; and Navdanya, for hundreds of thousands of farmers whose livelihoods were lost to a compact made by the Indian government and neoliberal purveyors of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Relentlessly researched, the book presents these movements in a framework that explores Hindu Vedic wisdom, as well as Development Ethics, Global Environment Ethics, Feminist Care Ethics, and the Capability Approach. <BR><BR> At a moment when the climate threatens populations who live closest to nature - and depend upon its fodder for heat, its water for life, and its seeds for food - Mallick shows how nonviolent action can give poor people an effective voice.

Gandhi’s Militant Nonviolence in the Light of Girard’s Mimetic Anthropology

Nuclear rivalry, as well as terrorism and the war against terror, exemplify the dangerous escalation of violence that is threatening our world. Gandhi’s militant nonviolence offers a possible alternative that avoids a complacent indifference toward injustice as well as the imitation of violence that leads to its escalation. The French-American cultural anthropologist René Girard discovered mimetic rivalries as one of the main roots of human conflicts, and also highlighted the contagious nature of violence. This article shows that Gandhi shares these basic insights of Girard’s anthropology, which increases the plausibility of his plea for nonviolence. Reading Gandhi with Girard also complements Girard’s mimetic theory by offering an active practice of nonviolence as a response to violent threats, and by broadening the scope of its religious outreach. Gandhi’s reading of the Sermon on Mount not only renounces violence and retaliation like Girard but also underlines the need to actively break with evil. Both Gandhi and Girard also address the religious preconditions of nonviolent action by underlining the need to prefer godly over worldly pursuits, and to overcome the fear of death by God’s grace. This congruence shows that Girard’s anthropology is valid beyond its usual affinity with Judaism and Christianity.

Environmental Movements of India

In her detailed retelling of three iconic movements in India, Professor Emerita Krishna Mallick, PhD, gives hope to grassroots activists working toward environmental justice. Each movement deals with a different crisis and affected population: Chipko, famed for tree-hugging women in the Himalayan forest; Narmada, for villagers displaced by a massive dam; and Navdanya, for hundreds of thousands of farmers whose livelihoods were lost to a compact made by the Indian government and neoliberal purveyors of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Relentlessly researched, Environmental Movements of India: Chipko, Narmada Bachao Andolan, Navdanya presents these movements in a framework that explores Hindu Vedic wisdom, as well as Development Ethics, Global Environment Ethics, Feminist Care Ethics, and the Capability Approach. At a moment when the climate threatens populations who live closest to nature – and depend upon its fodder for heat, its water for life, and its seeds for food – Mallick shows how nonviolent action can give poor people an effective voice.

Between Mao and Gandhi

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the effectiveness and global impact of nonviolent movements, our understanding of their origins and trajectories remains limited. Drawing on cases from Nepal, Syria, India and South Africa, as well as global cross-national data, this book details the processes through which challenger organizations come to embrace or reject civil resistance as a means of capturing state power. It develops a relational theory, showing how the social ties that underpin challenger organizations shape their ability and willingness to attempt regime change using nonviolent means alone.

The Dark Side of Nonviolent Action?

Given a perceived qualitative and quantitative shift in the use of nonviolent action by rightwing populist actors in recent years, this article based on case studies from Austria (the Identitarian movement) and Indonesia (the 2/12 movement) discusses the methods, legitimacy, and effectiveness of the use of nonviolent action by right-wing populist movements. It finds that the use of nonviolent action by those actors is largely pragmatic and tactical and that it often is borderline in terms of remaining nonviolent. It further identifies that in line with right-wing populist ideology, rather than only addressing state authorities and elites, the movements addressees of the nonviolent action are often minority groups or people supporting minority groups. Developing a classification of nonviolent action in democracies (dissent, civil disobedience, political disobedience) the article further finds that right-wing use of nonviolent action has a tendency towards transcending normal dissent towards political disobedience.

Learning from Criticisms of Civil Resistance

In recent decades, civil resistance, also known as nonviolent action, has become more widely used among social movements and recognised by researchers. Alexei Anisin has usefully offered a critique of civil resistance theory and practice. His ideas are used as a basis for reflection and deeper understanding of both strengths and weaknesses of this approach. Inspired by Anisin’s questioning of the dataset used to compare nonviolent and violent anti-regime campaigns, we point to multiple neglected factors. Anisin contrasts quantitative nonviolence research unfavourably with medical and scientific research. Although Anisin’s image of science is idealised, it does point to the value of recognising the role of values in civil resistance research and in critiques of it.

Teaching peace by using nonviolent communication for difficult conversations in the college classroom

Having empathy and respect for oneself and others when engaging in difficult dialogue is an essential part of peace education. Gandhi emphasized that involving emotions was more transformative than purely intellectual approaches to education. Nonviolent communication (NVC), as developed by Marshall Rosenberg, is a tool for fostering empathy and building connection across difference. Using NVC for difficult conversations in any college classroom is a way of mainstreaming peace education across the curriculum. Though there is literature on difficult conversations in the college classroom, and on the effectiveness of NVC in general and in K-12 classrooms, there is very little on NVC in college spaces, and none on NVC for difficult conversations. In this primarily qualitative study college students were asked to use NVC to discuss controversial nonviolent actions. We found that even when both professor and students were NVC beginners, students were able to use it to discuss polarizing protests in a class with a diversity of views and needs for respect were overwhelmingly met. NVC was also useful for deepening analysis of the effectiveness of nonviolent actions, and could serve as a tool of emotional regulation for nonviolent action, or a modern day sort of purification for satyagraha.