This article creates the false impression that the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) may be “training dissidents to overthrow dictatorships,” in the words of a businessman it quotes who has had no contact with the Center. In fact, ICNC does not now “train dissidents” and has not supported workshops abroad for nonviolent activists since 2009.

The article also claims that ICNC’s founding chair, Peter Ackerman, “has funded workshops for dissidents from Central Asia, Iran, Iraq and North Korea,” and leaves the impression that ICNC may have supported “civil resistance training” for “members of Egypt’s April 6 movement” through the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Belgrade. None of this is accurate. The real facts are as follows:

- Between 2002 and 2009, ICNC supported workshops done by independent trainers in nonviolent action for civil society activists living in a number of countries, none of which were in Central Asia.

- The workshop for Iraqis was done by independent trainers for expatriate Iraqis in Europe in 2002, who wished to help Iraqis undertake nonviolent struggle in that country; many of them wanted to preclude a then-rumored American invasion of Iraq.

- In 2005, ICNC supported a seminar in South Korea for a diverse group of Koreans interested in learning about nonviolent resistance and its possible use in North Korea.

- In 2005, ICNC was asked by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center at Yale University to furnish a brief ancillary workshop on nonviolent action to Iranians who were attending a course of that Center on human rights.

- From 2006 to 2008, ICNC supported specific workshops on nonviolent resistance conducted by CANVAS, for activists from the Maldives, Palestine, Vietnam, West Sahara, and regional workshops in Jordan and Uganda.  ICNC has not supported or worked with CANVAS since 2009.

The writer of this article was briefed on what ICNC does: We furnish a wide range of educational materials and information to educators, journalists, international institutions, civil society groups, and people involved in campaigns or movements for rights and justice, who request that information. It does this work primarily through seminars at universities, presentations and briefings, graduate and undergraduate curricula, online learning platforms, and webinars, as well as direct and indirect dissemination of books, reports, articles, audio files, films, videos and a video game, “People Power: The Game of Civil Resistance.”

Among the educational institutions with which ICNC has collaborated or conducted events in the past three years are the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, Collegium Civitas (Warsaw), the Council of Europe Summer University (Strasbourg), Central European University (Budapest), Euro-Mediterranean University (Slovenia), the Fletcher School at Tufts University, George Mason University (Virginia), Hong Kong University, L’Académie Diplomatique Internationale (Paris), Portland State University (Oregon), Rutgers University (New Jersey), Universidad de Concepción (Chile), Universidad del Rosario (Colombia), the University of Notre Dame, Virginia Tech University, and Wesleyan University (Connecticut).