Tag Archives: nonviolent

For Fall 2015! Research Seminar: Strategy and Nonviolent Struggle

PEAC 071B. Research Seminar: Strategy and Nonviolent Struggle (Cross-listed as POLS 081 / SOCI 071B) will be offered during the Spring Semester 2015.

This one-credit research seminar involves working and updating the Global Nonviolent Action Database which can be accessed by activists and scholars worldwide at http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu. The database was built at Swarthmore College and includes cases of “people power” drawn from dozens of countries. The database contains crucial information on campaigns for human rights, democracy, environmental sustainability, economic justice, national/ethnic identity, and peace.

Students will be expected to research a series of 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. In addition to research/writing methods, students will also draw on theories in the field. Strategic implications for today will be drawn from theory and from what the group learns from the documented cases of wins and losses experienced by people’s struggles.

This writing (W) course has a limited enrollment of 12 students.

You can learn more by visiting a collection of posts about the database in the Peace and Conflict Studies blog.

In this video, Professor Lakey introduced the launch of the database in 2011.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRfjprMiySI

Fall 2015 Line-up of Peace & Conflict Studies Courses

In addition to all of the excellent courses offered across campus that may be counted toward a minor in Peace and Conflicts Studies, our own program curriculum is expanding next year!

PEAC 015. Introduction to Peace and Conflict Studies

In Introduction to Peace and Conflict Studies, we learn that peace and conflict are not mutually exclusive. To paraphrase Conrad Brunk, the goal of peace and conflict studies is to better understand conflict in order to find nonviolent ways of turning unjust relationships into more just ones. We examine both the prevalence of coercive and non-peaceful means of conducting conflict as well as the development of nonviolent alternatives, locally and globally, through institutions and at the grassroots. The latter include nonviolent collective action, mediation, peacekeeping, and conflict transformation work. Several theoretical and philosophical lenses will be used to explore cultural and psychological dispositions, conflict in human relations, and conceptualizations of peace. The course will take an interdisciplinary approach with significant contributions from the social sciences. U.S.-based social justice movements, such as the struggle for racial equality, and global movements, such as nonviolent activism in Israel/Palestine, and the struggle for climate justice around the world, will serve as case studies.

1 credit. Tues/Thurs. 1:15-2:30 pm

Instructor: Sa’ed Atshan

PEAC 039. Social Entrepreneurship for Social Change (NEW COURSE!)

By integrating innovative approaches with revenue-generating practices, social entrepreneurs and their ventures open compelling and impactful avenues to social change. In this course, students will learn about the pioneering individuals and novel ways that social entrepreneurship responds to social needs that are not adequately served by the market or by the state through in-depth case analysis of social change work (locally, nationally, and globally).

1 credit. Mondays 1:15-4:00 pm

Instructor: Denise Crossan, Lang Professor for Social Change

PEAC 053. Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (NEW COURSE!)

This course will examine the historical underpinnings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how they have shaped the contemporary context in Israel/Palestine. We will approach this from a demography and population-studies framework in order to understand the trajectories and heterogeneity of Israeli and Palestinian societies and politics. For instance, how has the relationship between race and period of migration to Israel impacted Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Israeli sub-populations differently? What explains divergent voting patterns between Palestinian Christians and Muslims over time? How can we measure inequality between Israeli settlers and Palestinian natives in the West Bank in the present? The course will also synthesize competing theoretical paradigms that account for the enduring nature of this conflict. This includes—but is not limited to—the scholarly contributions of realist political scientists, US foreign policy experts, social movements theorists, security sector reformers, human rights advocates, international law experts, and negotiations and conflict resolution practitioners.

Eligible POLS and ISLM credit.

1 credit. Tues./Thurs. 2:40-3:55 pm

Instructor: Sa’ed Atshan

PEAC 071B. Research Seminar: Strategy and Nonviolent Struggle

(Cross-listed as POLS 081 and SOCI 071B)

This research seminar involves working with The Global Nonviolent Action Database built at Swarthmore College. This website is accessed by activists and scholars worldwide. The database contains crucial information on campaigns for human rights, democracy, environmental sustainability, economic justice, national/ethnic identity, and peace. Students will investigate a series of research cases and write them up in two ways: within a template of fields (the database proper) and also as a narrative describing the unfolding struggle. Strategic implications will be drawn from theory and from what the group is learning from the documented cases of wins and losses experienced by people’s struggles.

1 credit. Mondays 1:15-4:00 pm

Instructor: Lee Smithey

Strategic, Successful, and Spiritually Grounded Activism

Strategic, Successful, and Spiritually Grounded Activism
Speaker: Eileen Flanagan

Wednesday, April 1, 2015; 5:00 PM
Bond Hall at Swarthmore College (directions)
500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, PA

After five years of campaigning, Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT) has pushed the seventh largest bank in the US into issuing a policy that effectively ends its investment in mountaintop removal coal mining. Eileen Flanagan will share her own story of feeling led to join EQAT’s campaign and what she is learning about nonviolent direct action.

Eileen Flanagan is the clerk of the board of Earth Quaker Action Team, a teacher in Pendle Hill’s new Answering the Call to Radical Faithfulness program, and a member of Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting. Her newest book, Renewable: One Woman’s Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope , is about the spiritual crisis that led her to climate justice activism.

This event is open to the public.

Memoriam: Charlotte Lacey and The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives

We would like to share this loving memorial to Charlotte Lacey by her partner, Michael Panella:

In Memoriam

Charlotte Lacey, the only Delaware County native and the youngest member of the the peace group, The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, passed away on January 5th in Vancouver, Canada.

Charlotte was 18 years old when on one night in 1970 she along with 10 nuns, priests and young people simultaneously burglarized three of the four Philadelphia draft boards destroying the files of those young men about to be involuntarily sent to Vietnam to kill and be killed. The group also burglarized the lobbying offices of GE in Washington. The GE documents taken exposed the collusion between Congress and GE, the second largest war contractor at the time. Charlotte Lacey and The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives

Charlotte, at that young age, had not only the strong moral compass to see that the Vietnam war was wrong but she had the courage to put her liberty and maybe her life on the line in her effort to stop that war. The 11 members of the Conspiracy to Save Lives published their names with a photo taking responsibility for this non-violent resistance to the war, the draft and the military-industrial complex.

Charlotte was a very special loving person who lived the rest of her life in Canada. Delaware County and all peace loving Americans should be very proud to have had her as their courageous daughter.

Charlotte Lacey and the The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives

Lakey workshop “Get on your feet: Organizing for Peaceful Protest”

GET ON YOUR FEET: ORGANIZING FOR PEACEFUL PROTEST
A workshop with George Lakey

Thursday, February 26
7:00 – 10:30 p.m.
Keith Room – Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility
Swarthmore College (Directions)

You *can* go beyond the boring limits of choosing between a march or a rally by coming to this workshop and learning about:

action logic
edgy actions
using actions leadership development
maximizing the empowerment potential of the actions you design
one-offs vs. campaigns

The workshop includes question time on the use of nonviolent direct action compared with other techniques for social change.

George Lakey is formerly a Lang Professor in Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. He founded the Global Nonviolent Action Database.

Radical Democracy and Humanism: Intersections between Performance and Action

It is our privilege to be a co-sponsor of events in the David Dorfman Performance Residency!

RADICAL DEMOCRACY AND HUMANISM: INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN PERFORMANCE AND ACTION

WITH DAVID DORFMAN DANCE AND OTHERS

Swarthmore College (Departments and Programs of Music and Dance, Black Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Theatre, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility) and the William J. Cooper Foundation present a three-week performance residency RADICAL DEMOCRACY AND HUMANISM: INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN PERFORMANCE AND ACTION. Conceived by Professor Sharon Friedler and led by Swarthmore graduate Kate Speer ‘08, the residency centers around engagements with David Dorfman Dance (DDD), a leading American modern dance company known for politically relevant works centered on community responsibility. From February 9 to February 27, 2015, workshops, classes and lectures will address a spectrum of positions and assumptions regarding intersecting issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, politics and the environment.

Participating facilitators include the following scholars and artists: Kate Speer ‘08, who has written and delivered papers on Dorfman’s dances, creative processes, and their connection to radical democracy, Teya Sepinuck, the founder and director of the Theater of Witness model of performance, David Kyuman Kim, a Connecticut College scholar of race, religion, and public life and George Lakey, visiting professor, non-violence advocate and civil rights activist. In the lectures and workshops, selections of David Dorfman’s repertory works will be taught as aids in broadening individual performing range and exposure to these processes will provide a common basis for the study and discussion of different aspects of performance. Discussions will delve into multiple opinions and perspectives in order to encourage participants to begin dialoguing about the questions at stake, effectively employing democratic practices within the concert stage environment. The residency will seek to explore how Dorfman creates dance that de-stigmatizes the notion of accessibility and interaction in post-modern performance and how dance can add a positive challenge to engage audiences in action.

The residency schedule of events free and open to the public at Swarthmore College will be as follows:

1st Week

February 9, 7-9PM, Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema
Presentation:“Theatre of Witness” with Teya Sepinuck

February 12, 4:30 – 6PM, Lang Performing Arts Center Troy Dance Lab (LPAC 2)
Movement Workshop: David Dorfman and the Active Citizen with Kate Speer

February 15, 1-5PM, Lang Performing Arts Center Boyer Studio (LPAC 3)
Workshop: “Theatre of Witness” with Teya Sepinuck

2nd Week

February 19, 4:30 – 6PM, Lang Performing Arts Center Troy Dance Lab (LPAC 2)Master Class in dance: David Dorfman and company

February 19, 7-9PM, Kohlberg 116
“Engaging Human Differences: Teaching Dialogue and Discourse about Race, Religion and Public Life”
Teach-in with David Kyuman Kim

February 20, 8PM, Lang Performing Arts Center, Pearson-Hall Theatre
DDD, PROPHETS OF FUNK

Final Week

February 24, 2:40-4PM, Lang Music 407
Lecture/Discussion: “Between Apathy and Action” with Kate Speer

February 26, 7-10:30PM, Keith Room, Lang Center for Social Responsibility
Workshop:“Get on Your Feet: Organizing for Peaceful Protest” with George Lakey

All events are free and open to the public without reservation. Seating may be limited for some events and is first come, first served.

The central performance event, David Dorfman’s PROPHETS OF FUNK, is on Friday, February 20 at 8PM is in the Lang Performing Arts Center’s Pearson-Hall Theater. DDD celebrates the band’s groundbreaking, visceral, and powerful visions of prophetic love that continue to shine on despite everyday struggles. PROPHETS OF FUNK lifts up the spirit of Sly: that in the face of the funk of life, there are still hopes and aspirations that reside in all of us. The production of PROPHETS OF FUNK was made possible by generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, The New England Foundation for the Arts, National Dance Project with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, and Friends of David Dorfman Dance. Choreographic material for PROPHETS OF FUNK was developed, in part, during residencies at the Tisch Dance Summer Residency Program at New York University and as company-in-residence at Connecticut College.

For further information about these events, contact Tara Webb at 610-328-8260 or lpacevents@swarthmore.edu. These events are free and open to the public without reservations, but space is limited for some of the smaller lectures and workshops. More details about the schedule of events available at: http://www.swarthmore.edu/dance-program and on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Swarthmore-College-Dance-Program/200840063275757

[Click on the link below to zoom in.]

Global Nonviolent Action Database research seminar offered Spring 2015

We are thrilled to celebrate the fact that the Global Nonviolent Action Database, housed here in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Swarthmore College, reached 1,000 cases this summer!

Even more, we can announce that PEAC 071B. Research Seminar: Strategy and Nonviolent Struggle (Cross-listed as SOAN 071B) will be offered during the Spring Semester 2015.

Professor Smithey will be instructing the course, and Professor Lakey will return in a supporting role during the beginning of the semester. (Professor Smithey’s course, Gun Violence Prevention, will unfortunately not be offered in the spring).

This writing (W) course has a limited enrollment of 12 students.

You can learn more by visiting a collection of posts about the database in the Peace and Conflict Studies blog.

In this video, Professor Lakey introduced the launch of the database in 2011.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRfjprMiySI

Racialized-Gendered Partition and Dissensus in Bahrain’s Pearl Revolution

Frances S. Hasso, Associate Professor in Women’s Studies and Sociology at Duke University, will give a talk entitled:

“Racialized-Gendered Partition and Dissensus in Bahrain’s Pearl Revolution”

October 20, 2014 at 4:30 p.m.
Science Center Room 199

This paper examines the co-production and “interarticulation” of racializing/sectarian and gendering dynamics in Bahrain as longstanding conflict between the majority of citizens and the ruling Al Khalifa regime intensified into the ongoing 14 February Revolution, also called the Pearl Revolution. These dynamics are stamped on and produced through the organization of bodies and space. Embodied and spatialized dynamics are highlighted by the small geographic area of Bahrain, its residential partitions based on sect, ethnicity, and citizenship status, and its post-1979 culture of gender segregation in street life inspired by the Iranian Revolution. Among the Pearl Revolution’s notable dimensions is a rise in women-led confrontational street politics that is not necessarily authorized by Bahraini opposition men and has produced sublimated tensions not captured by images of gender-segregated orderly marches. For their part, Bahraini state officials and their supporters strategically deploy conservative ideologies of sexual respectability and purity to discredit women and men activists. Sectarian discourse, racialized naturalization and policing policies, and gendered and sexual forms of violence and control intersect in marked ways. The Pearl Revolution is a point of historical rupture, I argue, for imaginaries, subjectivities, and how gendered bodies inhabit space.

Co-sponsors: Departments of Sociology and Anthropology, Modern Languages and Literature (Arabic Section) and Political Science and programs in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Islamic Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies.

Waging Peace: David Hartsough book talk

David Hartsough
Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist

Thursday, December 4, 2014
5:00 PM
Bond Hall at Swarthmore College
500 College Ave, Swarthmore, PA

This event is open to the public.
Maps and directions to campus are available.
A flyer is available for download.

David Hartsough knows how to get in the way. He has used his body to block Navy ships headed for Vietnam and trains loaded with munitions on their way to El Salvador and Nicaragua. He has crossed borders to meet “the enemy” in East Berlin, Castro’s Cuba, and present-day Iran. He has marched with mothers confronting a violent regime in Guatemala and stood with refugees threatened by death squads in the Philippines.

Inspired by the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Hartsough has spent his life experimenting with the power of active nonviolence. His new memoir, Waging Peace, offers a peace activist’s eyewitness account of many of the major historical events of the past sixty years, including the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements in the United States and the little- known but equally signiﬁcant nonviolent efforts in the Soviet Union, Kosovo, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines.

Hartsough’s story demonstrates the power and effectiveness of organized nonviolent action and shows how this struggle is waged all over the world by ordinary people committed to ending the spiral of violence and war.

Read more about David Hartsough and his work in this 2004 interview in the New Internationalist magazine.

Photo: David Hartsough (seated at right end of counter) with fellow students at a lunchtime sit-in Arlington, Virginia – circa 1960

Co-sponsored by Swarthmore Friends Meeting and the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Swarthmore College.

Daniel Hirschel-Burns ’14 awarded the 2014 Peace and Justice Studies Association Undergraduate Paper Award

We are thrilled to announce that, for the second year in a row, a Swarthmore peace and conflict studies special major has won the Peace and Justice Studies Association‘s Undergraduate Student Paper Award. Danny Hirschel Burns ’14 will receive this year’s award for his thesis, “Filling the Gap: Nonviolent Strategies for Civilian Self-protection during Mass Atrocities.” (Elowyn Corby won the award last year.)

The PJSA is the primary professional association for peace and conflict studies educators and researchers in North America, and it is the North American affiliate of the International Peace Research Association.

Danny’s thesis was co-advised by Professors Krista Thomason and Lee Smithey. The award will be presented at the association’s award ceremony on October 18, 2014 during the annual PJSA meeting at the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego. Danny’s award comes with a $500 travel stipend and an invitation to present his thesis at the conference.

Danny is currently serving as an atrocity prevention intern at Humanity United in Washington D.C.

Please join us in congratulating Danny (@DHirschelBurns) on his excellent work!