Civil Resistance and Peacebuilding
In this blog, Visualising Peace student Madighan Ryan reflects on some of the research which she has recently added to our Visualising Peace Library.
Civil Resistance and Peacebuilding
Madighan Ryan, November 2023
Conversations I have had with my peers outside of the Visualising Peace VIP have led me to believe that the most common visualisation of peacebuilding is as a practice consisting primarily of mediation, dialogue, and the de-escalation of conflict. I find myself increasingly resistant to this (often unrealistic) sterile, balanced, picture of two equal representatives engaging in discussion with one another. While some of the experts who spoke with our VIP made a strong case for these techniques in the case of geopolitical or interfaith conflict, I am concerned with establishing what peacebuilding looks like for communities who are not allowed a seat at the table. For those who are ignored when they attempt to engage in dialogue. For those whose lack of peace benefits those in positions of power.
This seemed pressingly relevant as I researched my culminating Visualising Peace Project on climate change and the synergies between the environment and peace; the vast majority of those most affected by environmental hazards are those who are most disenfranchised and excluded from systems of power. Take, for example, Bakersfield, California – the most polluted city in the United States – with a majority Latinx population. A child living in Bakersfield is three times more likely to suffer from asthma as the average Californian child, according to the American Lung Association. Or the Niger Delta, where the 6 million residents struggle to fish or produce non-stunted crops because of the hundreds of oil spills which have occurred in the region. The community’s calls for change and the removal of the Shell Oil Company from their land have not only been ignored, but punished, for decades. In asking myself what peacebuilding looks like in these (or comparable) circumstances, I become engrossed by the rich history of direct action environmental protests. The Wet’suwet’en Nation blocking Canadian rail lines to protest natural gas pipelines. A group of New Zealanders who lived in trees meant to be logged. Just Stop Oil’s tomato soup incident to protest both Big Oil and the cost-of-living crisis.
Civil resistance occurs when a group within society challenges the legal or unspoken status quo. Philosopher Hugo Bedau describes civil disobedience, a type of civil resistance, as an action or movement people take part in when they are convinced that the consequences of their illegal actions are less than those of the law or system being objected to. Civil resistance includes acts of civil disobedience, but also encompasses social, anti-government, uprisings; civil disobedience may look like vandalism, roadblocks, theft, the leaking of documents, or sit-ins. Fundamentally, civil resistance involves disrupting the peace of those who benefit from the existing system, to secure a more peaceful future for those impacted. Thus, because of its controversy and the almost counterintuitive means in which it aims at peace and progress, I will use this blog as a call to action to reframe what we consider to be peacebuilding, and how progress in society is made, to include civil resistance. I will explore civil resistance as a valid means of peacebuilding, the conditions under which civil resistance is successful, and its symbiotic relationship with other traditional and non-traditional peacebuilding methods.
ACT UP
On October 11th, 1988, the Federal Drug Administration’s doorstep was littered with bodies. Cardboard tombstones erected around them read: “DEAD FROM LACK OF DRUGS” and “I DIED FOR THE SINS OF THE FDA.” This was the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s (ACT UP) first staged die-in and act of civil disobedience. HIV/AIDS, which emerged as an epidemic in the 1980s, affected largely gay men, people of colour, and intravenous drug users. Because of the homophobia, racism, and classism ingrained in the United States’ political system, the United States Government failed to adequately acknowledge HIV/AIDS, organise a coordinated response, and fund research. When the FDA finally made drug trials available, people of colour, affected women and children, and drug users, were largely excluded from life-saving treatment. By 1992, HIV/AIDS was the leading cause of death for men between ages 25-44, according to the CDC. When one ACT UP protester was asked why he was willing to be arrested, he called what was happening a “racist genocide.”
ACT UP’s disruptive, media-seeking, creative, civil disobedience fought for the expansion of the HIV/AIDS budget, the expediting of the FDA’s testing process, health care for people living with HIV/AIDS, and largely – the right to be queer or a person of colour, and to live. And they largely succeeded. While HIV/AIDS remains a global crisis, thanks to ACT UP and other organisations, people with HIV/AIDS in the United States were eventually granted access to effective treatment.
I use this example to establish that social oppression is violence, and action to mitigate that oppression is therefore peacebuilding. ACT UP’s slogan was “SILENCE = DEATH.” Both the silencing of marginalised voices, and the voluntary silence of those in positions of power, can be as violent and deadly as the traditional conception of conflict. While there was no militarised conflict, prejudice killed tens of thousands in the 1980s and 1990s. David France, author of How to Survive a Plague, compared HIV/AIDS era New York City to a “war zone.” Contextualising ACT UP’s civil disobedience as peacebuilding is a useful case study to transform how we visualise peacebuilding. Peacebuilding may be directly confrontational and disrupt the peace for those who benefit. It may be gritty, illegal, and angry.
Violent vs Nonviolent Civil Resistance
That anger could easily be channelled into violent forms of civil resistance. The debate as to whether or not violence can ever be a peacebuilding tool has been an undertone of many of our Visualising Peace seminars. The student research team is composed of a diverse set of opinions on the subject, and our guest speakers ranged from a member of the United States’ military, to a volunteer for a pacifist, non-partisan, witnessing organisation in Palestine, so each student researcher’s opinion was evidently challenged.
I was struck by something that Maureen Jack, a visiting EAPPI volunteer, said in her lecture: after World War II, the atrocities of the enemies were tried at the Nuremberg Trials, but the atrocities of the victors were never challenged. While this statement effectively contributed to her case for non-partisanism, I also took it as evidence that there are circumstances in which violence (against other violence), has resulted in a more peaceful outcome. Further to this point, we have countless examples of violent civil disobedience and resistance throughout history to thank for the rights we enjoy today. Take the French’s revolution against their monarchy during the storming of Bastille. Or the bombs or chemicals that suffragettes left in the post. These are examples of violence which were, by definition, offensive, but could be reinterpreted as self-defence in response to structural oppression. It thus seems out of touch for people not directly affected by the injustice being resisted, often academics, to advocate for nonviolence on moral grounds. How can we ask communities to not defend themselves?
That being said, it is more useful, in the context of visualising effective peacebuilding, to ask whether or not violence civil resistance is the most effective means of engendering change. In their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Chenoweth and Stephan assert that the efficacy of nonviolent civil resistance is two times greater than that of violent civil resistance. If the civil resistance is aimed at usurping a government, non-violent struggle and democratic consolidation are strongly linked, and the likelihood that a country will be a democracy five years after the movement ends is far greater if nonviolent means are used. Conversely, if a violent resistance movement is successful, then there is a significant probability that the country will revert to civil war within the decade. Thus, while the authors acknowledge that violent forms of civil resistance can work, nonviolent civil resistance is a far more effective and sustainable peacebuilding strategy.
Therefore, I suggest that when promoting nonviolent civil disobedience and resistance as a peacebuilding tool, it is more compelling to do so on data-based grounds than on moral grounds, even though ethics play an important role. In a 2015 panel conversation, Manal Omar, the Acting Vice Chair for the Center of Middle East and Africa at the United States Institute for Peace discussed the most effective means of education on civil resistance as a peacebuilding tool. The young people who ask Omar for advice are wary of whether nonviolent means can bring about the change that is truly a necessity in their countries – particularly when those in power use physically violent methods to oppress. She advocates for pragmatic education on nonviolent methods as the most sustainable peacebuilding forms of civil disobedience, rather than moral outreach from those who have not experienced what those youth have experienced.
Complementary Civil Resistance and Traditional Peacebuilding Methods
In the same panel discussion, Omar noted that civil resistance is incredibly complicated as a peacebuilding method, and if its transformation of power distribution leaves a vacuum, other more traditional peacebuilding methods should be used in conjunction to achieve stability. To illustrate this, let us use the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt as a case study (I largely pulled my background information on this subject from the 2015 Stanford CISAC Lecture, “The Arab Spring: Focus on Egypt”). The uprisings, beginning on January 25th, 2011, were largely motivated by corruption, abuse of police power, human rights abuses, and income inequality. Protestors disrupted the status quo, but did not instigate the violence at the Day of Rage, the burning of the National Democratic Party Headquarters, or at the Battle of the Camel (direct self-defence against state violence was necessary). The civil resistance uprisings were successful in overturning the authoritarian Egyptian regime under Mubarak and opening the door to transition. However, in 2013, there was a military coup against the democratically elected president, and Egypt reverted back to a military rule comparable to the pre-Mubarak era. According to Omar, traditional peacebuilding and nation building methods should have been used to take care of transitional justice, accountability to the public, and the sociological defaults embedded in Egyptian culture. Civil resistance does not stand in opposition to traditional peacebuilding methods, but instead creates the opportunity for the redistribution of power or for change, after which point, traditional peacebuilding methods are effective. Of course, that is potentially an idealising model of civil resistance; it does not always play out positively in reality (and some resistance movements can be compromised by participants with different, even contrary, agenda).
Complementary Civil Resistance and Inner Peacebuilding Methods
Just as civil resistance sometimes requires traditional peacebuilding methods to achieve a sustainable, stable, outcome, civil resistance often (arguably always) requires inner peacebuilding methods to ward off burn out in a grassroots movement. In October of 2023, I published an article in the Journal of Wild Culture exploring this relationship, particularly in the context of climate activism (the article can be found here: https://www.wildculture.com/article/turning-eco-anxiety-its-head/1989). I experienced activism burnout in 2022, and the number of protests, marches, and engagement projects I was mentally able to participate in dropped considerably. Both my own experience, and interviews with experts at the University of St. Andrews and the Global Climate and Health Alliance, have led me to believe that when desperation and hopelessness – a common feeling in any grassroots social movement – coincide, then people give up. In the context of the climate movement, giving up may look like denial or willful ignorance. In an interview with a therapist in Active Hope, a program which provides strategies for overcoming the hopelessness accompanying many of today’s world issues, she suggested that people who participate in civil disobedience have higher levels of anxiety and burn out than those who engage in legal protesting or voluntary boycotting.
The types of inner peacebuilding and care which will be useful are not universal to every civil resistance movement. From the interviews I conducted, community building and the development of a support system were key strategies to developing inner peace and strength, specifically in the context of climate activism. In other movements, inner peace strategies may look like the celebration of identity and culture through food, song, and dance, or taking time to heal through meditation or journaling. Ensuring inner peace is a top priority allows for civil resistance to be a sustainable peacebuilding method.
Conclusion
My aim is for visualisations of peacebuilding and changemaking to be reoriented to include not just palatable visions of compromise and dialogue, but also more disruptive, grassroots, civil resistance. Successful civil resistance is conditional and thus requires careful planning and understanding of those conditions; acknowledging civil resistance as a type of peacebuilding opens avenues for peacebuilding education to include essential topics on these conditions, like civil disobedience organisation or inner peace for activists.
My hope is that this exploration of civil resistance has challenged, expanded, or inspired your visualisation of peacebuilding.
Sources of Inspiration
Dumont, Marilyn. A Really Good Brown Girl. Canada: Brick Books, 1996.
Marilyn Dumont’s poetry collection, A Really Good Brown Girl, reads as a journey from internalised shame to pride in Métis identity. The coming-of-age text, a combination of both prose and poetry, follows the narrator, a young Métis girl, who is navigating her place in the world while white society teaches her to be ashamed of her identity. As she matures, the narrative voice and content of the poetry changes: the narrator becomes empowered and confident against all odds and is critical of the colonial conditions which censor and oppress Métis women. This transformation is best exemplified in the juxtaposition between the poems, “The White Judges” or “Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl”, and “White Noise.”
Pride in Métis identity is inherently peacebuilding as it stands in direct opposition to the violent colonial eradication of Métis and Indigenous culture across Canada. This text is testimony to the fact that peacebuilding does not mean conforming to, or agreement with, the status quo and systems of power. A Really Good Brown Girl highlights the intersectional barriers to inner peace which exist for Indigenous women in Canada. The way in which psychological trauma of colonial conditions affect the narrator’s identity, confidence, and inner peace are explicitly explored in this collection: the development of inner peace is not the same for everyone. Additionally, by illustrating these psychological impacts, the anthology masterfully develops empathy in the reader, and this collection is thus a tool to encourage and motivate truth and reconciliation.
Pettiford, Jordan, host. “Can Protests Save Lives? How ACT UP helped tame the AIDS Crisis.” UnTextbooked (podcast). October 2021. Accessed November 1, 2023. https://open.spotify.com/episode/3IWRSJ0ncakV3YRhSfxLgY?si=44f1cac3cc9d4c11
This podcast explores the grassroots activism which protested the prejudiced lack of reaction of the American Government to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. UnTextbooked interviews David France, a witness to the epidemic in New York City, and author of How to Survive a Plague. He illustrates to the listener the magnitude of the crisis, and then explains the founding, intentions, and actions of ACT UP – the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. ACT UP was a civil movement, founded on rage, to end the AIDS epidemic, primarily by breaking down homophobic and racist political barriers to research funding and access to treatment. ACT UP protested in a variety of non-violent, creative, illegal ways, such as thematic vandalism. While the HIV/AIDS crisis remains a prominent issue around the world, ACT UP was hugely successful in securing lifesaving treatment for people in the United States.
This contribution to the library is a means of remembering, and learning from, unorthodox LGBTQ+ civil resistance and peacebuilding. The erasure of gay people, particularly gay people of colour, meant that confrontational civil resistance, which forced people in positions of power to listen, was the only effective means of peacebuilding for a generation and place that David France describes in this episode as comparable to a warzone.
Khandaker, Tamara, host. “Do Violent Protests Work?” Wait, There’s More (podcast). June 2020. Accessed November 13, 2023. https://open.spotify.com/episode/5pcPQnpnQBaxvjRi679Ozx?si=a8ecae5588af48fb
This podcast, recorded at the height of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the USA, discusses the merits and limitations of violent protests – past and present – as a transitory means of achieving justice and equitable peace. The interviewee, Omar Wasow, academic and co-founder of Blackplanet.com, was a professor at Princeton University at the time of recording and is now an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. This episode is pragmatic: it does not debate the philosophical argument of whether violence is a morally righteous reaction under a given set of circumstances, instead it covers the proven impacts of violent protest on a larger cause. Since the dawn of TV (coinciding with the civil rights movement of the 1960s), one of the goals of protests and demonstrations has been to attract the media. Wasow asserts that violence is inarguably an amplifier of the amount of media coverage a protest gets, and that because, proportionally, very few people actually witness a protest, media coverage matters. Whether a violent protest causes the general public to lose empathy for the larger cause depends on the language of the media – Wasow explores under what conditions the media uses “resistance,” versus when they use “crime,” to describe comparable violent protests.
This contribution to the Visualising Peace Library is not an attempt to advocate for violence as a peacebuilding method, but as a realistic acknowledgement that violent resistance is one mechanism that grassroots movements can, and do, use in the face of systemic oppression and state-sanctioned violence. This podcast was particularly interesting to me as it offered an alternative perspective to the vast majority of my research (which generally only acknowledges nonviolent civil disobedience as an effective means of peacebuilding), and connected to the influence of journalism on peacebuilding.
Tsilimparis, John, and Daylle Schwartz. Retrain Your Anxious Brain: Practical and Effective Tools to Conquer Anxiety. U.S.A.: Harlequin, 2014.
Retrain Your Anxious Brain: Practical and Effective Tools to Conquer Anxiety is a psychotherapy book which outlines John Tsilimparis’ framework for retraining a fixed mindset, which he suggests is a cause of anxious, spiralling, thoughts. Tsilimparis asserts that individuals, particularly those prone to anxiety, have “dualistic minds”: anything other than confirmation of the norms and values they have internalised over lifetimes, is alarming. This presents itself in automatic thoughts and fixed language (such as “should” or “must”). This book guides the reader through strategies and tools to retrain and recreate their personal belief system and set of internalised norms, in order to halt automatic thoughts; it is a toolbox to alleviate inner turmoil and engender inner peace. Beyond its instructional capacity, I suggest that its emphasis on the social creation of values and reality (what “should” be), and the fact that one can define their own emotional reality, indicates that inner peace can actually be brought about by the act of individually visualising and defining what inner and outer peace looks like to oneself.
Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. U.S.A.: Columbia University Press, 2011.
This book takes an academic and data-based approach to exploring the efficacy of nonviolent civil resistance to transform, and to make more peaceful, societies ruled by tyrannical or authoritarian regimes. Subjects covered include why nonviolent civil resistance works, case studies such as Iranian and Palestinian revolutions, and the conditions under which nonviolent civil resistance fails. Particularly noteworthy is their dive into the merits of nonviolent civil resistance in comparison to the limitations of violent civil resistance; the authors present novel research into the likelihood a society will revert to civil war after a successful violent uprising, and the likelihood of democratic consolidation after nonviolent campaigns. The book’s pragmatism removes the moral or emotional debates between violent versus nonviolent civil resistance, or even legal versus illegal means of peacebuilding, but instead presents a compelling case for nonviolent civil resistance as one of the most effective tools for a disenfranchised population to build sustainable peace. This entry would be particularly helpful for those interested in grassroots peacebuilding, activism, and justice.
Further Bibliography
Bayles, Michael. “The Justifiability of Civil Disobedience.” The Review of Metaphysics 24, no. 1 (Sep 1970): 3-20. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20125721.
Bedau, Hugo. “On Civil Disobedience.” The Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 21 (Oct 1961): 653-665.https://doi.org/10.2307/2023542.
CDC. “Update: Mortality Attributable to HIV Infection Among Persons Aged 25-44 Years — United States, 1991 and 1992”. November 19, 1993, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00022174.htm#:~:text=During%20the%201980s%2C%20human%20immunodeficiency,men%20aged%2025%2D44%20years.
Chijioke, Arinze. “Niger Delta oil spills bring poverty, low crop yields to farmers”. September 9, 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/9/9/niger-delta-oil-spills-bring-poverty-low-crop-yields-to-farmers.
CIFP. “Corporate Crime in a Globalized Economy”. August 27, 2015, https://carleton.ca/cifp/2015/corporate-crime-in-a-globalized-economy/.
Kennedy, Kerri, Manal Omar, and Maria Stephan, “Civil Resistance and Peacebuilding: How They Connect”. (United States Peace Institute, July 16, 2015).
Saint, Ekpali. “Timeline: Half a Century of Oil Spills in Nigeria’s Ogoniland”. December 21, 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/12/21/timeline-oil-spills-in-nigerias-ogoniland.
Stockdill, Brett “ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).” In The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, edited by David Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam, 4-9. Wiley, 2013. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319615307_ACT_UP_AIDS_Coalition_to_Unleash_Power.
Woodcraft, Zoe, and Allison Cagle. “In the Shadow of Big Oil: Neighborhood Drilling in California”. June 11, 2021, https://earthjustice.org/feature/buffer-zones-oil-drilling-california-neighborhoods.