The Long and Complex Story of Global Nonviolence

Rarely does a conflict appear on the contemporary world stage without being closely followed by a global call to nonviolence. From an advocate’s perspective, nonviolence is both the desired outcome and also the necessary method by which to arrive at peace. As renowned global nonviolence organizer A.J. Muste once reflected, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”  Over a century of scholarship has been dedicated to understanding how nonviolence works as a form of power without (violent) coercion and how nonviolence can successfully affect political and social transformations. In my new publication in the Cambridge Elements in Contentious Politics series, Have Repertoire, Will Travel: Nonviolence as Global Performance, I put forward a sociological account of how nonviolence has come to constitute a world movement of movements, mobilizing transnational support for a universal method for ending violent conflict. Through a global and historical account of this movement, I offer a nuanced understanding of the successes and failures of different nonviolent movements and the nature of claims-making as an institutionalizing process, as institutionalization impacts vision, practice, allegiance, oversight, and implementation.

My sociological approach to nonviolence draws on Charles Tilly’s concept of the collective action repertoire, a “limited set[s] of routines that are learned, shared, and acted out” (Tilly 1993, 264). This understanding emerged out of Tilly’s research into the long transition into contemporary national and parliamentary politics in Western Europe, in which he noted an evolution in collective action: protests emerged as specific, locally organized and often violent events, and developed into nationally-oriented and general-issue-driven nonviolent events. By rooting this book in Tilley’s concept, I highlight that the nonviolence repertoire, while considered universal, is in fact one particular expression of the ways social movements institutionalize through patterned strategic and tactical choices.   

My study of the long and complex history of nonviolence begins with its conceptualization in the late nineteenth century, as the term and the idea gained special significance. While the story of the nonviolence movement tends to center on famous leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., I also bring attention to the thousands of advocates on the ground who labored to develop nonviolence through trainings and tactical demonstrations. In tandem, global spread and institutionalization occurred through the proliferation of knowledge in academic institutions as well as the growing number of print publications praising the efficacy of nonviolence, interrogating how nonviolence works across unique political and cultural contexts, and offering formal instruction in best practices.

Another significant social force in this global history that I bring to light was the movement of nonviolence emissaries carrying nonviolence around the world, many of whom operated through formal nongovernmental organizations. A proliferation of congresses and gatherings helped this population to mushroom into hundreds of funded bodies with the goal of spreading knowledge and skills, each within networks of thousands of local activists and transnational allies who carried their solidarity and resources across borders. By the late twentieth century, the repertoire’s recognition and authority grew through the support of global leaders in the United Nations and corollary inter and nongovernmental networks, formal governmental leaders, and a slew of nonviolent peace and practice awards, campaigns, and programs created to honor, enshrine, and incentivize the repertoire’s spread around the world.

Critically, I also show how, underlying these multiple efforts at diffusion, shifts in the formal structure of political power forever changed the world polity over the course of the long twentieth century. The emergence of an inter-state system, the spread and authority given to a particular form of democratic statehood, and the expansion of international mechanisms for cooperation at the end of the World Wars have enabled the global institutionalization of nonviolence as best practice and as the most legitimate way of making citizen claims. But since then, changes in the world polity have ushered in the emergence and crystallization of nonviolence as “people-power.” Thus, it is easy to celebrate movements led by people on the ground without understanding the large-scale social and historical forces or the hidden networks of powerful actors all shaping the stage upon which such contention can occur.

This is not to understate the phenomenal lifetime investments that countless advocates have made to developing people-power; rather, it is to assert that just as people live in and are constrained by the social world, so too has people-power been born of a family of social ideals in a field of political forms of action. If we really want to understand what makes nonviolence work, when it works, and how it works, we must take this global and historical picture into account.

Finally, as a social movements scholar working in the framework of neoinstitutional theory, I urge movement scholars and organizers alike to give greater consideration to the impact of institutionalization on movements. As is evident in the long global history of nonviolence, institutionalization leads to a script for action, and this comes with many benefits for diffusing and growing nonviolence as an action form. But it also comes with the costs of predictability, lending more easily to cooptation and manipulation by those who would seek to demobilize nonviolence and the power of nonviolent people.

Selina Gallo-Cruz is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University.