Educational theory and practice is dominated by mass formal schooling systems, which routinely and unjustly harm many students. I call this stance “educational pacifism,” and in this paper argue that ...Montessorians ought to be educational pacifists. That is, they ought to recognize, understand, and reject systemic educational harm and ensure that it does not occur in their own practice, so that Montessori students are not harmed during their education and so that Montessori education might provide a nonharmful educational alternative to mass formal schooling. I suggest that Maria Montessori was, broadly speaking, herself an educational pacifist, and that not only is educational pacifism the morally right position for a Montessorian, but also that it is naturally a Montessorian position.
“Some fleeting glimpse of utopia”. Nonviolence and the challenge of ethical-political planning in Judith Butler The thesis at the heart of this paper is that, in her latest text, The Force of ...Nonviolence. An Ethico-Political Bind, Judith Butler presents a moment of reflection with original aspects compared to her previous thought. She inaugurates here a new point of view in her thinking, through which also previous categories and concepts undergo a shift useful to actively act for the preparation of the future. By deepening and autonomizing the theme of nonviolence, the critical thinker intends to elaborate an ethical-political dimension that, keeping anarchic accents and shared inventiveness from below, wants to present itself as a credible and universalizable alternative. In this framework, not without shadows, complications and paradoxes, nonviolence takes on the shape of what embodies the utopian possibility, common to all human beings, to open a different, revolutionary future, where the reproduction of violence – both psychic, social and, finally and above all, institutional – is stopped, with a view to taking on the vulnerability and precariousness of living beings.
In this ground-breaking and much-needed book, Stellan Vinthagen provides the first major systematic attempt to develop a theory of nonviolent action since Gene Sharp's seminal The Politics of ...Nonviolent Action in 1973. Employing a rich collection of historical and contemporary social movements from various parts of the world as examples - from the civil rights movement in America to anti-Apartheid protestors in South Africa to Gandhi and his followers in India - and addressing core theoretical issues concerning nonviolent action in an innovative, penetrating way, Vinthagen argues for a repertoire of nonviolence that combines resistance and construction. Contrary to earlier research, this repertoire - consisting of dialogue facilitation, normative regulation, power breaking and utopian enactment - is shown to be both multidimensional and contradictory, creating difficult contradictions within nonviolence, while simultaneously providing its creative and transformative force. An important contribution in the field, A Theory of Nonviolent Action is essential for anyone involved with nonviolent action who wants to think about what they are doing.
In this ground-breaking and much-needed book, Stellan Vinthagen provides the first major systematic attempt to develop a theory of nonviolent action since Gene Sharp's seminal The Politics of ...Nonviolent Action in 1973.Employing a rich collection of historical and contemporary social movements from various parts of the world as examples - from the civil rights movement in America to anti-Apartheid protestors in South Africa to Gandhi and his followers in India - and addressing core theoretical issues concerning nonviolent action in an innovative, penetrating way, Vinthagen argues for a repertoire of nonviolence that combines resistance and construction. Contrary to earlier research, this repertoire - consisting of dialogue facilitation, normative regulation, power breaking and utopian enactment - is shown to be both multidimensional and contradictory, creating difficult contradictions within nonviolence, while simultaneously providing its creative and transformative force.An important contribution in the field, A Theory of Nonviolent Action is essential for anyone involved with nonviolent action who wants to think about what they are doing.
Under what conditions are individuals more likely to approve of human rights abuses by their governments? While various theoretical expectations have been offered about public approval of repression, ...many of them have not been directly tested. We analyze the effects of differing opposition tactics, differing government tactics, and legal constraints on approval of repression through a series of survey experiments in India, Israel, and Argentina. Our results indicate that violent action by opposition groups consistently increases support for government repression. In the context of contentious politics, we find that the effects of international law vary by national context. While our respondents in India were less likely to approve of their government when told the government violated international law, the same information likely increased approval of the government in our Israel experiment. The findings provide insights into the microfoundations of existing theories and suggest areas for theory refinement.
Islam calls for the avoidance of violence, if possible, or at least its minimization and use only as the last resort. The purpose of this study is to highlight the roots of pacifism in Islam; the ...primary sources studied are the main Muslim theological texts—the Qur’an and Sunnah (the Prophetic tradition). After analyzing these two sources, I claim that Islam and ‘devout pacifism’ are compatible. Islam calls Muslims to be faithful, decent, and good human beings, who respect the life and property of others, Muslim and non-Muslim. A model of the devout Muslim pacifist is not different from the universal model, but similar to that found in other civilizations and cultures. According to both sources, Islamic pacifism derives from human obedience to Allah, just as in other monotheistic religions that promote peaceful solutions to internal and external crises, domestic and foreign. This paper offers a new perspective on nonviolence in Islam, ethico-theological justification of war, and applications of jihad and violence as factors in managing political relations among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims.
This essay explores the archive of a 1971 interview of Angela Davis by Swedish journalist Bo Holmström—recorded in Santa Clara County Jail where Davis awaited trial—to examine the relationship ...between Black radical thought and its social and intellectual mediation, especially when it comes to questions of violence versus nonviolence. Where Holmström invokes the “violence/nonviolence” binary in the interview, Davis pointedly resists its distortions, restoring the record of contemporary and historical conditions of racial terror that both necessitate and criminalize Black self-defense. Decades later, the interview was filtered through the violence/nonviolence binary in editing for the acclaimed 2011 documentary, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, with Davis’s wider conversation with Holmström not only abridged but remixed into a shorter exchange on armed self-defense. Studying the interview from its conditions of possibility through its later remixing, and reading it together with her opening defense statement (1972) and later speeches and writings, the essay excavates and explicates Davis’s original theoretical interventions and indexes a cluster of forces that mediate Black radical thought, Black women’s radical thought more specifically, and prison texts. The final section historicizes Davis’s theorization of the spatial and relational contexts of Black self-defense in Dynamite Hill, Alabama, and in California, and contends that her incisive interventions into the violence/nonviolence binary in 1971 remain critical here and now.
Radicalization is a process of escalation from nonviolent to increasingly violent repertoires of action that develops through a complex set of interactions unfolding over time. Looking at ...radicalization mainly through the lenses of a relational approach, this article suggests that social movement studies allow us to bridge structural and agentic explanations in an analysis of the impact of political opportunities and organizational resources, as well as framing, in explaining forms of action and inaction. Available political opportunities influence the reactions of political actors in general to movement demands, thus affecting social movements' strategic choices. Moreover, the availability (or lack) of material and symbolic resources affects the choice of radical repertoire. Finally, organizational resources and contextual opportunities are framed differently by social movement actors, in some cases facilitating radicalization. At the individual level, different paths of radicalization are singled out.
In this book, Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani provides the first examination of the applicability of Emmanuel Levinas' work to social and political movements.
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