In early May 2017, in a small bookstore in Caracas, people from all walks of life and ages gathered to talk about protesting the Venezuelan government’s kidnapping of human rights and democracy. Within days, the Civic Laboratory for Active Nonviolence was founded—a space for ordinary people to express their disapproval, not through violence and destruction but through creative, innovative, nonviolent civil resistance. […]

A year before he was assassinated, Dr. King delved into the highly charged debate over the Vietnam War, taking a firm and unequivocal stance in opposition. Many supporters, including some of his closest advisors, had practically begged him not to speak out against the war and risk alienating President Lyndon Johnson, who had ushered the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts through a fitful Congress. The press weighed in too. But Dr. King took care to protect the integrity of the movement, even if it entailed risk and cost. […]

King had never imagined himself as a prominent civil resistance leader in Montgomery, let alone the U.S. Yes, he had experienced racism, and hated it, but all black folks in the country had experienced racism and hated it. He had also read a bit of Gandhi and Marx at Boston University and written several thoughtful papers about social gospel movement theologians who challenged the Church to take up the fight for social justice. Yet, in December 1955, all these ideas were mostly academic concerns for King. […]

As governments and communities seek the right combination of methods to halt terrorism, one that we too often miss is nonviolent resistance. It’s not that we haven’t seen the power of protest movements that use mass marches, sit-ins, boycotts and other forceful but nonviolent tactics. To the contrary, people worldwide have been moved by watching such movements sweep aside the walls of apartheid, the tanks of dictators or the impunity of kleptocracies. […]

Since 1992, Ekta Parishad has organized marches totalling 20,000 km as part of our struggle to keep land rights for marginalized populations on the Indian government’s agenda. Why marches? Because they serve as constant headaches for the government while simultaneously strengthening solidarity and re-energizing people suffering from landlessness and homelessness. Every action is a step on the ladder toward a just society, where recognized inclusiveness brings change first within us and ultimately beyond us, in the society and nation.

Most activists and other practitioners of civil resistance realize that governments can use various methods of digital surveillance to find and silence dissenters. The question of how to protect ourselves can seem overwhelming. Wherever you look there are different and often contradictory recommendations. It can all seem too complicated, just impossible to keep up with. What you need is a framework to help you make good security decisions […]

“The place doesn’t matter. Nor the food, nor the rain. What matters is that we have made ourselves heard. The revolution doesn’t happen in 5-star hotels with buffets of food and it doesn’t happen in the springtime when everything is beautiful. It happens in the moments of crisis,” said 15-year old Alfredo Turqui about demonstrations in La Paz, Bolivia. […]

In my June 2017 “Let’s Get Strategic” post, I explained my disagreement with the conclusion of Ben Case’s “Beyond Violence and Nonviolence” article, in which he promotes the idea that violence can be strategically effective for grassroots movements. There’s a further claim in Case’s article, which I did not address previously, but which merits an additional response. […]

Given the scale, intensity, and compounding effects of climate change, it has never been more important to defend the environment. To make matters more urgent, resource conflicts are becoming increasingly deadly in the past couple of decades. This is why people refer to environmental activism nowadays as a “suicide mission,” especially in countries that emerge from colonialism with commodity-dependent economies and weak political institutions. […]