 May 2005
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Sara Burke, Jaime Lederer Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Editorial material in Peacework is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License unless copyright is otherwise specified. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
Reflections on Waging Nonviolent Struggle Elise Boulding is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Dartmouth College, and is the former Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association (www.human.mie-u.ac.jp/~peace/index.htm). She is the author of Cultures of Peace and the Underside of History. Gene Sharp's Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential makes it clear that strategic nonviolence is a critical tool for waging today's struggles. After explaining nonviolence as empowerment through the capacity to struggle, he leads the reader through twenty-three highly diverse historical cases of attempted large scale nonviolent action. Sharp is very clear that one does not have to be a pacifist to choose nonviolent means of struggle. Nonviolence includes an effective set of strategies for bringing power imbalances to an end. The spiritual leadership of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were key factors in the development of the global nonviolence movement, but as Sharp points out, their spiritual grounding was amplified by a keen capacity for strategic thinking. The development of strategic nonviolence will have a key role to play in the evolution of a 21st century culture of peace. Nonviolent skills and strategies are needed around the world. This is a "how-to" book. Theory and practice are well-matched. Therefore, I strongly recommend Sharp's Waging Nonviolent Struggle as the practitioner's handbook for the 21st century nonviolence movement. 
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