01 March 2009
About This Issue
Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and their followers did not accept oppression and second-rate status. They actively pursued practical, nonviolent ways to free their people.
The past 30 years have seen a surge of nonviolent, “people power” movements around the world advancing human rights and toppling repressive rulers. Using information campaigns, boycotts, demonstrations, and other tactics, protesters have shown that nonviolent actions can be more powerful than armed insurrections in bringing about social change.
An Anglo-American intellectual tradition of nonviolent thought goes back centuries, spreading to communities large and small in the United States and beyond. Today community organizers in the United States help people assert their rights before local elected governments. Individuals around the world lead nonviolent movements in a great variety of campaigns to save local forests from destruction, local villagers from death by landmine, and local children from lives of ignorance.
Internet-based social networking technology promises to give people even more powerful tools to promote change, as President Barack Obama demonstrated in his 2008 election campaign.
“Whenever you improve a group’s ability to communicate with one another, you change the things they are able to accomplish together,” Internet consultant Clay Shirky writes in this issue of eJournal USA.
A well-known example is a Facebook.com group started by young people from Bogota, Columbia, called No Mas FARC. Online they organized protest demonstrations against the FARC, a Colombian terrorist organization, turning out 12 million people in 190 cities around the world. In December 2008 the leaders of the anti-FARC group met with other youth groups from 15 countries in New York and formed the Alliance of Youth Movements, which is dedicated to helping these groups use online technology to counter violence.
Recent science suggests that these movements are rooted deep in the human psyche. War, for example, may not be a genetically determined part of human nature. Game theory suggests that getting along is not natural either, but that under certain conditions people do learn to cooperate to make everyone better off.
The contributors to this publication show collectively that armed violence is not always necessary to achieve positive change. All they are saying is give nonviolence a chance.
-- The Editors
