The power of nonviolence by Karuna Mantena
Nonviolent politics have unique power to change the world, but they require strategic suffering and ascetic self-mastery
No political
action seems to enjoy greater moral authority than the nonviolent methods
Mahatma Gandhi inaugurated more than a century ago. Gandhi’s neologism for
nonviolent direct action wassatyagraha, which roughly translates to
‘holding fast to truth’. While this term itself never caught on, in principle
or form, nonviolent models of organising protest did. For decades,
pro-democracy movements in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe have
conspicuously embraced nonviolent politics to express mass dissent and topple
authoritarian governments.
Time and again,
activists around the world have turned to mass boycotts, strikes and collective
vigils, techniques Gandhi pioneered and practised on the world stage with
historic results. More recently, protestors in the Occupy movements and the
Arab Spring successfully put to use nonviolent tactics of disruption.
Similarly, activists for issues including the environment, corruption, refugee
and immigrant rights, racial exclusion and violence are taking up and adapting
nonviolent protest to meet new challenges. This Is an Uprising (2016)
by the political analysts Mark and Paul Engler promises to show how nonviolent
politics can force political change on the most intractable issues of the day,
from climate change to rising inequality.
Nonviolence’s evident
authority, however, belies a more chequered history. Over the course of the
last century, the popularity and attraction of nonviolent politics has waxed
and waned. Its long-term resilience requires explanation and can provide clues
to nonviolence’s purpose and power. Plenty of activists
and observers have doubted the effectiveness of nonviolent politics. Suspicions
of naiveté and weakness, in particular, have shadowed the history of
nonviolence from its very inception. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, the
leading figures of nonviolent politics, both faced criticism along these lines.
Skeptics viewed nonviolent methods as timid and sluggish, at best, capable of
winning only small reforms. Gandhi and King’s moral commitment to nonviolence
was seen to hinder the hard choices necessary for radical change.
The moral superiority
of nonviolence is often evoked to condemn violent resistance and discredit
unruly activists. States regularly conscript the language of nonviolence in
this way, adding to worries that nonviolence carries risks of cooption and
compromise. The wars and occupations of the past two decades seem unlikely
portents of a new era of nonviolence. The enthrallment of force and violence
seem as overwhelming as ever. And yet the encircling violence – from state
violence and increasingly deadly military technology, to global terrorism and
asymmetrical warfare – seems to be self-defeating at best, nihilistic at worst.
That is, there is little prospect that all this violence has or will achieve
its purported ends. This fact – and reckoning with it – holds out the promise
of nonviolence.
For both Gandhi and
King, transformative politics was a difficult road – full of disappointments
and reversals. Lasting change required patience and determination, and
nonviolence was the most potent and reliable means for achieving it. Far from
signalling acquiescence, nonviolence was a resolutely active politics. It
required the cultivation of disciplined fearlessness and moral courage to face
the demands of political action...
*******
Gandhi and King’s nonviolence required the
repression of resentment and anger to garner the right political effect.
Neither of them denied anger was a justified response to the experience of
oppression, but they saw that it would not be, in Niebuhr’s terms, ‘morally and
politically wise’ to make resentment the face of political action. Resentment,
anger and indignation arouse opponents’ egoism and hostility, and tend to
alienate bystanders. This was why, for Niebuhr, ‘the more the egoistic element
can be purged from resentment, the purer a vehicle of justice it becomes’.
The history of
nonviolent politics has revealed and confirmed the transformative power of
coordinated mass action. It has also shown that force alone can neither induce
popular consent nor reliably secure political victory. In line with these
findings, the political scientists Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in their
award-winning book Why Civil Resistance Works (2011) show
nonviolent collective action to be especially effective against authoritarian
governments, overturning a longstanding assumption that nonviolence can be
viable only in and against liberal regimes.
These findings might
also point to qualifications of nonviolence as collective power. While such
protest can topple governments, it is less clear how it can sustain a new
democracy. The superiority of numbers that so potently expressed mass dissent
risks turning into majoritarian displays of power. Ironically, nonviolent
politics can actually face more hurdles in democracies. Authoritarian
legitimacy has proved to be a brittle façade, easily exposed as such by
nonviolent tactics of disruption and provocation. Democratic publics, however,
are surprisingly hostile to these same kinds of tactics. Democracy by
definition provides institutional channels to express dissent and effect
political change. When these channels and institutions are seen to be
legitimate, insurgent politics are readily branded as extreme and tend to
elicit polarising and passionate responses... Read the whole article:
see also
