Photo: TW Collins
Human rights monitoring. Documentation and reporting. Advocacy. Lobbying. Education. Formal complaints. Legal suits. These are useful tools, with proven effectiveness in many countries. But they only go so far. What happens when the usual channels offer little to no recourse, as human rights continue being systematically trampled and violated by ruthless regimes or entities?
When the US civil rights movement undertook transportation boycotts in the mid 1950's to fight segregation, when the People Power movement in the Philippines used human blockades in its overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, when the struggle against apartheid resorted to mass non-cooperation and international divestment campaigns to dismantle South Africa's racist system, all sought to overcome major institutional roadblocks set to protect long-standing injustice and abuse. Major change, through conflict waged outside of official processes, became necessary. Movements had to be built around bold, non-institutional, and extralegal ways of securing fundamental rights. These were part of a vast arsenal of non-lethal weapons, a technique governed by its own set of strategic principles: nonviolent struggle.
Here are five reasons why human rights organizations should actively promote the means of civilian-based nonviolent struggle, as a complement to the work we do.
- Non-institutional means of action may be required. If the job of every self-respecting human rights organization is to help secure all indivisible fundamental rights, then other means of action should be offered when the usual channels systematically fail. Surely, it is not enough to educate people on the right to human rights, just as they suffer from their violation. Nonviolent methods of protest, non-cooperation and intervention have often been used as a means of last resort, when institutions proved incapable of safeguarding and protecting universal human rights. As such, when efforts veer off the institutional course, human rights organizations should at least present the technique of nonviolent action as an option, a potential missing piece along the critical path to human rights.
- Only nonviolent action is consistent with human rights.Violent insurrection inevitably leads to human rights violations, with rape, murder and torture built in, as the dark history of armed movements in the Philippines, South Africa or the Democratic Republic of the Congo can attest. By contrast, because true nonviolent action refrains from injurious force and killing, it can intrinsically comply with all interdependent human rights. The good news is also that nonviolent methods such as boycotts, strikes, blockades and mass civil disobedience are no less powerful "weapons" for that. Nonviolent action is the true continuation of politics by other means. Nonviolent struggle can cause major disruption, and dramatically shift power relations. Gandhi often used military analogies to explain his nonviolent strategy of taking Indian peoples' consent and support away from British rule, because he knew the path he proposed could be so potent and disruptive. Nonviolent struggle offers a credible, radical alternative to murderous methods, and thus should be actively promoted by human rights organizations when social conflicts are headed for full-on confrontation.
- Nonviolent struggle is inherently more democratic. Most guerilla armies and armed militias rely on groups of fit young men because of the physical demands of warfare, and the technology and environments it requires. The need for specialized fighters defined by ability, gender, and age quickly becomes elitist. By contrast, nonviolent movements can enrol the grandmother and the child, the skilled and the inexperienced, the fighting fit and the one with a disability alike in all of its actions. The front lines aren't reserved to an elite group. Because civil resistance allows everyone to play a direct role in the struggle, it offers means of engagement that embody the civic impulse to participation at the root of freedom and democracy. Nonviolent action provides excellent training ground for the full exercise of everyone's human rights.
- Nonviolent struggle is more effective. It is often implied that violent means are more effective. However, such a conventional viewpoint has been empirically disproven, as cases of nonviolent revolutions have proliferated. A recent comparative study of violent and nonviolent struggles over the last century between nonstate and state actors has found that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved a success rate of 53%, compared to 26% in the case of violent resistance campaigns. The change from nonviolent struggle was also found to be more meaningful, and to last longer. The reason human rights improve in more durable fashion in nonviolent change is that it is achieved through wider, empowered sectors of society, which tend to remain organized and thus help keep concentrated power in check long after success has been achieved.
- Nonviolent struggle reduces the scale of repressive human rights violations. Nonviolent means tend to attract lesser levels of repression, and for shorter periods of time, than violent, armed struggles. That is not to say that nonviolent movements are immune or shielded from repression. They are not. Organized and effective nonviolent resistance will always attract some repression from those who seek to maintain their control and privilege. However, when compared to methods of warfare, nonviolent methods do not provide an easy "excuse" or justification for violent repression. As a result, repression on nonviolent activists is much more likely to backfire, which draws support away from the powers-that-be, to the benefit of the nonviolent resistance movement. As disaffection from the regime grows, rates of defection increase in the ranks of the military and the police, who may become unreliable, and fail to fully comply with orders for repression, quickening the pace of change.
Human rights were born of a history of nonviolent struggles. The abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, the elimination of racial prejudice... the quest for these never started, and was not primarily achieved, in the form of a draft international agreement. Long and difficult civilian-based struggles were at the root of every human right known to us. To promote means at the genesis of all major rights-based advances should come naturally to human rights organizations.
Human rights organisations can actively promote nonviolent struggle as a consistent, generic, bottom-up means of securing universal fundamental rights. The human rights community now reaches almost every confines of the Earth, and thus can play a major role in the advancement of human knowledge in the powerful alternative means offered by nonviolent action. Our global network can play a central role in teaching the means of securing human rights through the active nonviolent methods of people power. The first thing it needs to do is become more knowledgeable, and intentional in its willingness to share the fundamental strategic literacy inherent in nonviolent struggle, to people all over the world.
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Philippe Duhamel
interTactica — a liberation blog
To explore nonviolent struggle further, you can start with these resources.
Books
All works by Gene Sharp
A Force More Powerful by Jack DuVall and Peter Ackerman
Unarmed Insurrections, by Kurt Schock.
Websites
The Albert Einstein Institution
The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
These other resources
Audio
Making Nonviolent Struggle More Powerful , George Lakey, visiting professor of issues for social change, Lang Center, Swarthmore College.
Movies
A Force More Powerful PBS Series
Richard Attenborough's Gandhi
