The title of this book is deliberately ambiguous. It is intended to convey the notion that the achievements of nonviolence in the twentieth century pose a challenge to accepted ideas about dealing with conflict in both domestic and international politics. But it is intended equally to indicate that nonviolence theory faces major challenges in a world that has changed beyond recognition since the downfall of Soviet communism and the demise of the Cold War.
The project developed from two earlier ones, also based at Bradford University and co-sponsored by Peace Studies and LHTF. The first of these was the Alternative Defence Commission, set up in December 1980 to look into defence options for Britain and Western Europe without nuclear weapons. The Commission produced two major studies: Defence without the Bomb, (Taylor and Francis, London, 1983), and The Politics of Alternative Defence (Fontana, London, 1987). It also produced several shorter studies, and in 1986 held a European Consultation on alternative defence.
The Commission completed its work and dissolved itself in December 1988, but the following year the Social Defence Project, with some overlap of membership from the Commission, was set up to consider in greater depth one of the options ADC had put forward, that of unarmed civil resistance as a form of national defence. In the ADC reports social defence, or what it termed 'defence by civil resistance',2 figured essentially as a fall back option, complementing a broad military strategy of 'non-offensive' defence. The Commission recognized, however, that there might be particular circumstances where it would be more sensible and efficacious to use this form of defence in the first instance rather than resorting to military resistance.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the overthrow of communist rule across East Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 was a spectacular demonstration of the potential of this form of resistance. These events, and others such as the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines by 'People Power' in 1986, showed that civil resistance could achieve success even against repressive authoritarian regimes of right or left, and have a strategic significance at the international level. Not surprisingly, then, the main study to emerge from the work of the Social Defence Project focussed on the political and security implications of events in Eastern Europe. The study, which I wrote with much input and support from members of the project, was published under the title People Power: the building of a new European Home (Hawthorn Press, Stroud, 1991).
At the final meeting of the Social Defence Project in January 1994, the group considered the case for continuing to meet whilst broadening the remit to include consideration of other aspects of nonviolent thought and action. Much time at this meeting, and during the early meetings of the new group which was formally established in March 1994, was spent considering what might be the focus and goals of the project. There was a general recognition that nonviolence faced difficult new challenges in the post-Cold War world. The threat of nuclear war had receded - though it had far from disappeared. But wars within and between the successor Soviet and Yugoslav states, and horrendous ethnic conflicts in Africa, amounting in the case of Rwanda to premeditated genocide, shattered the hopes that the world was entering a more peaceful era. These developments posed particularly difficult problems to those of us who had hoped that the events in Eastern Europe in 1989 when communist regimes were overthrown in largely peaceful revolutions would lead to ‘social defence’ or ‘defence by civil resistance’ being taken more seriously and adopted at least as a complementary strategy for national defence and collective security. But while the seriousness of the challenge to strategic nonviolence could not be ignored, it was equally important that the extraordinary achievements of civil resistance or ‘people power’ in a variety of social and political contexts should be studied and propagated. This, essentially, was the motivation for the setting up of the Nonviolent Action Research Project. To quote from the Statement of Aims adopted in September 1994, its aim was: `To establish a British based forum and network for study, debate and enquiry into nonviolent action: its use for social and political ends within a society or for defence of a state against foreign occupation or coup d’etat, and the contexts and cultures giving rise to nonviolence.' The full text of the Statement is printed at the end of the Introduction.
The choice I faced as editor of the book was whether simply to reproduce the papers and presentations on their own, or to publish in addition either a summary or a fairly extended version of the subsequent discussions. To have published only the presentations, I felt, would have meant losing the critical evaluation of them that occurred during the discussions, and much material that was of interest in its own right. However, to have included the bulk of the discussion, even in edited form, would not only have made the book unduly long but rather unfocussed.The discussions often ranged widely even within individual meetings and sometimes took off at a tangent from the original topic. After discussing the problem with colleagues on the project, and the Department of Peace Studies, I therefore decided upon a middle course of using the papers and presentations together with edited extracts of part of the discussions.
Members of the Core Group (at various times) were: Tricia Allen, Christina Arber, John Brierley, Howard Clark, Annie Harrison, Bob Overy, Lindis Percy, Michael Randle, Carol Rank, Andrew Rigby, Walter Stein.
Contributors: Felicity Arbuthnot, Roberta Bacic, Alex Begg, Bela Bhatia, April Carter, Howard Clark, Lynne Jones, Kate McGuinness, Richard Norton-Taylor, Fionnuala O’Connor, Ciaron O'Reilly, Bob Overy, Bhikhu Parekh, Lindis Percy, Michael Randle, Andrew Rigby, Tariq Shabeer, Nick Wilson, Angie Zelter.
Tricia Allen was an active supporter of the three Ploughshares actions which took place in Britain between 1990 and 1996 ‑ organising public meetings, producing information about the actions, mobilising support in different towns, and arranging media coverage of the actions and court cases. As a result of one of the actions, she started a local campaign in Lancashire in 1994, targeting British Aerospace’s production factory for Hawk aircraft, due for export to Indonesia, which later grew to be a significant national campaign across Britain. In the mid‑90s she started work with Friends of the Earth as a climate campaigner, and developed campaign projects for FOE’s 250 local groups across the country. In 1999 she moved to New Zealand, where she is currently Campaign and Communications Director for Greenpeace.
Chris Arber organized Bradford events for Pax Christi in the 70s. She wrote about Nonviolence in Pax Christi’s Newsletter JustPeace and the Peace Education Newsletter. She did her MA Dissertation on ¡Nonviolent Civilian Resistance in Czechoslovakia and Hungary' and her Ph.D. on Gandhi. She has taught evening classes on Peace Studies and Nuclear Weapons, and taught in the Department of Peace Studies on Gandhi, Peacemaking, and Nonviolent Action. She has been a Trustee of the Commonweal Collection, an independent library focussing on nonviolent social change, for eleven years. Since summer 1999 Chris has been Outreach Worker for Commonweal.
John Brierley worked for fourteen years for the Yorkshire Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as a development worker and then fundraiser. In 1997 he was part of the organising group for the first Gathering Visions, Gathering Strength ‑ an event initiated by the Nonviolent Action Research Group and which drew together nonviolent activists from across movements and generations. He now works as the publicity and marketing officer for the Hebden Bridge Alternative Technology Centre.
Annie Harrison has been involved over a long period in the peace movement in Britain and in human rights work amongst indigenous peoples in North America - both the USA and Canada. She has run training workshops on Nonviolent Direct Action and Conflict Resolution and is a qualified counsellor and massage therapist. She lives in Manchester where she now works as a drug counsellor with probation clients.
Carol Rank has taught Peace Studies at universities in the U.S. and Europe, and has worked for a range of grassroots organisations involved in community development, mediation, and peace education. She is currently teaching at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University.
Walter Stein, writer, critic and prominent Catholic moral philosopher, he held a Research Fellowship at Liverpool University, and was a Lecturer in English Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Extramural Studies at Leeds University. He was a member the Alternative Defence Commission, 1980-1988, and subsequently of the Social Defence Project and the Nonviolent Action Research Project from its inception in 1993 until his death in 1996. He edited and contributed to Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, Merlin Press 1961 and 1981 and Peace on Earth: the Way Ahead, Sheed & Ward, 1966. He was for many years an adviser on drama to the Arts Council and contributed the chapter on drama to C.B.Cox and A.E.Dyson (eds) The Twentieth Century Mind, OUP, 1972. He was the author of Criticism as Dialogue, Cambridge University Press, 1969, and a regular contributor to The Tablet and other publications.
1. The other principal way in which the group succeeded in reaching out to a wider audience has been through a series of conferences entitled Gathering Visions, Gathering Strength which brought together nonviolent direct actionists from different campaigns and different generations to discuss principles, strategy and tactics. The meetings took place in Leeds in April 1997, Manchester in April 1998, and Hebden Bridge in 1999. They have been organized on a co-operative basis by people from various bodies, but it was the Nonviolent Action Research Project which took the initiative in setting up the first gathering.
Special thanks are due to the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust for their generous support and funding; to the Lansbury House Trust Fund which supported and co-sponsored the project and to the other co-sponsors, the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University. Special thanks are due also to Mandy Oliver and Carol Hutson of Peace Studies for typesetting, proofreading and help and advice on layout and other matters, to Robin Pritchard who designed the cover, and to Richard Finder of the Printing Department at Bradford University for his suggestions and help. We would like to thank, too, all the contributors who agreed to the publication of their presentations; to the Journal of Peace Research which first published Kate McGuinness's paper; to Lynne Jones and Peace and Democracy News which carried the articles on the pros and cons of intervention in Bosnia by Lynne Jones and Michael Randle; to New Routes for permission to reproduce Michael Randle's article on 'Strategic Nonviolence Post-Bosnia', and to Fontana and Harper-Collins for permission to reproduce a chapter from his Civil Resistance. Finally I would like to express my special personal thanks to Anne, my wife, for her support and help during the long gestation period of this project.