Professor George Lakey produced a video this summer drawing on the Global Nonviolent Action Database for a new curriculum being developed by the United Nations Institute for Training and Development (UNITAR) in Geneva, Switzerland. The video outlines three different applications of nonviolent action/civil resistance.
Advising is coming up, and Prof. George Lakey will be offering a new course in Peace and Conflict Studies for Fall 2013!
SECURITY AND DEFENSE: NONVIOLENT STRATEGIES
PEAC 040 / SOAN 040 H
Threats to security exist on many levels: environment, community, nation, human rights, and others. People naturally mobilize for defense, but often choose among a very narrow set of options. This course broadens the framework to focus on modes of nonviolent defense which have had concrete application sometimes involving millions of people, but which remain “off the radar” of most strategic analysis.
The course will learn from cases of successful nonviolent defense of nations, communities, environmental resources, and human rights under threat. Students will research and write “forgotten cases” for publication in the Global Nonviolent Action Database, giving them experience with the data of civilian resistance. They will also take an example of threat in today’s world and begin to explore how a nonviolent strategy could be devised given the circumstances. Through these activities students will gain research skills and broaden their view of the dynamics of struggle.
In case you missed Peace and Conflict Studies Prof. George Lakey’s interview about the Occupy movement on Radio Times today, you can listen at the bottom of this post or on the Radio Times site.
Occupy protesters were evicted in Philadelphia and Los Angeles overnight. We’ll get an update on the latest news of the confrontations between protesters and police and we’ll take stock of the Occupy movement, what it’s done and failed to do, how it fits into U.S. political mainstream and social movement history, and how it doesn’t, and the messages the campaign has sought to project vs. the message we in the media have conveyed vs. the messages received by the public at large. Joining us in studio is GEORGE LAKEY, longtime nonviolence activist, founder of Training for Change and research associate at Swarthmore College’s Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. And we’ll also hear from WILL MARSHALL, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, a leading intellectual of the American centrist left and a critic of the Occupy movement. And finally, we’ll hear from MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ, a writer whose examination of the roots and dynamics of the Occupy movement, “Pre-Occupied,” was published in this week’s The New Yorker.
Peace and Conflict Studies Professor George Lakey on Radio Times on #Occupy November 30, 2011
The prominent blog,Waging Nonviolence, has featured a story on the launch of the Global Nonviolent Action Database. Read the whole story and see the accompanying video below.
WHAT IF activists around the world who want to be more effective could turn to a database of actual campaigns, to get ideas for creative nonviolent strategies and tactics?
WHAT IF scholars and writers who are researching alternatives to violence could turn to a global database with hundreds of cases where people used nonviolent action to struggle for human rights, eco-justice, democracy?
Check the Internet September 11, 2011: http://NVDatabase.swarthmore.edu
Campaigns are drawn from nearly every country in the world, in which people overthrew dictators, changed environmental policies, halted racist discrimination, fought for economic justice, established their religious freedom, changed sexist and other oppressive laws, established national independence, and defended their neighborhoods – all by using nonviolent resistance.
Cases are included where people power failed, as mistakes can be instructive.
Each case is presented in two ways: a database file to assist researchers and activists, and a 2-3 page narrative to assist strategists and organizers. Through the database, users can do searches on countries, kinds of tactics, kinds of movements, degrees of success. The database features “waves” of civilian resistance in which campaigns inspire each other:
– Arab Awakening of 2011
– The “color revolutions” which began in Serbia in 2000
– Soviet Bloc independence campaigns (1989-)
– African democracy campaigns of early 1990s
– Asian democracy campaigns launched by Filipino People Power in 1986
– Latin American democracy campaigns (early 1980s)
– U.S. civil rights movement against racial discrimination (1950s – 60s)
More cases are being added to the database — ranging historically all the way back to 12th century BCE Egypt — by students at Swarthmore College, who have gained assistance from Tufts and Georgetown Universities. The project is sponsored by the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore as well as the Peace and Conflict Studies Department and the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. For more information, email: glakey1@swarthmore.edu.
WHAT IF activists around the world who want to be more effective could turn to a database of actual cases, to get ideas for creative nonviolent strategies and tactics?
WHAT IF scholars and writers who are researching alternatives to violence could turn to a global database with thousands of cases where people used nonviolent action to struggle for justice and democracy?
Created largely by student researchers at Swarthmore College, the Global Nonviolent Action Database aims to make available to organizers, researchers, and writers the thousands of cases of nonviolent action from around the world to learn from and be empowered by. With over 400 case studies and growing, the Database includes a diversity of countries, actors, historical periods, and range of nonviolent tactics. The Database will soon be released to the public via the Internet, but has yet to be introduced to the Swarthmore campus.
The Global Nonviolent Action Database Project
Featuring students in the Research Seminars on Nonviolent Strategy and Struggle
“Putting Egypt etc. in Context” A Fireside Chat organized by Research Seminar students
Wednesday, March 23, 4.30 pm
Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall
Professors will participate in the discussion:
Prof. Lee Smithey
Prof. Shana Minkin
Prof. Steve O’Connell
Prof. George Lakey
“Working on the database project is the most empowering single thing I did during my college years. It contradicted my cynicism about whether change is really possible, and showed me that people like myself can organize campaigns that matter.” – Shandra Bernath-Plaisted,’09.
Mondays 1:15 – 4:00, Lang Center Conference Room
This is a one-credit research seminar whose product will be a database to be mounted on a website for access by activists and scholars worldwide. The Global Nonviolent Action Database being built at Swarthmore College already has cases of “people power” drawn from dozens of countries. The database has crucial information on campaigns for human rights, democracy, environmental sustainability, economic justice, national/ethnic identity, and peace.
The course will be taught by the director of the database project, George Lakey, former Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change and an internationally-known authority on nonviolent action. The seminar is limited to 12 participants.
Students will be expected to research a series of research cases and write them up in two ways: within a template of fields (the database proper) and also as a 2-3 page narrative that describes the unfolding struggle. The seminar will include not only research/writing methods but also theories in the field. Of interest will be strategic implications for today drawn from theory and from what the group is learning from the documented cases of wins and losses experienced by people’s struggles.
“Working on the database project is the most empowering single thing I did during my college years.? It contradicted my cynicism about whether change is really possible, and showed me that people like myself can organize campaigns that matter.” – Shandra Bernath-Plaisted,’09.
If you want to join this course, use your Drop/Add form to register.