Nonviolence

China is changing world geography, or at least trying to do so. Not in the sense of land and water like the Netherlands, but in the sense of weaving new infrastructures on land, on water, in the air, and on the web. It is not surprising that a country with some Marxist orientation would focus politics on infrastructure–but as means of transportation-communication, not as means of production. Nor is it surprising that a country with a Daoist worldview focuses politics on totalities, on holons and dialectics, forces and counter-forces, trying to tilt balances in China’s favor. How this will work depends on the background, and its implications. Two recent books, Valerie Hansen, Silk Road: A New History (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Knopf, 2015) see them as arteries connecting the world, globalization, before that term became a la mode....

Dear Members of the Iceland Allthing Foreign Affairs Committee, I have been asked to come to Iceland to answer that question; thanks indeed for inviting me to address you. And to apologize, as a Norwegian, for our occupation of Iceland 1262-1386 instead of sending mediators to help settle your civil war. Our century long colonization does not become better because Denmark colonized you five centuries, 1386-1918; and more deeply. But you are now your own, with a wonderful language and literature; right now with a problematic economy and polity. Reykjavík has a very good name internationally as the venue of the 11-12 October 1986 summit meeting of the Cold War superpowers. The meeting of US President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev at Höfdi did not by itself end with an agreement. But it was the beginning of the end of the Cold War three years later,...

Nobel Peace Laureate, Mairead Maguire, co-founder of The Peace People and TFF Associate, says from Rome: “I believe we are at an important and hopeful turning point in human history – from violence to nonviolence and from war to peace” Laity and religious meeting in Rome appeal to Pope Francis to share with the world an encyclical on nonviolence and just peace and for the church to no longer use or teach ‘Just War theory’ It was a joy for me to join eighty people from around the world meeting in Rome 11-12th April, 2016, to contribute to the important discussion ‘Nonviolence and Just Peace Contributing to the Catholic Understanding of and Commitment to Nonviolence’. Members of the three day event co-hosted by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the International Catholic Peace Movement Organization, Pax Christi, strongly called on Pope Francis ‘to share with the world an...

Address by Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate and TFF Associate, to Rome Conference on NATO Friday 29th January, 2016. Dear Friends, I believe we, the human family, have no less a task before us, than transforming our thinking and mind-sets of violence and war, and moving to a demilitarized Europe and World. Einstein once said that everything has changed but our thinking. However, there is hope as indeed our thinking is changing and there is a growing consciousness that violence, whether it comes from State or non-state actors, is wrong, violence does not work, violence is not the way. However, around the world, we, the people, are in danger of being overpowered and dis-spirited by increasing violence, militarism and war. Many people can see that many Political Leaders can no longer imagine a just peace, and under the guise of allegedly ‘just wars’ and unbounded preparation for war, they are...

When the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, the Irish Military, Government Members, and many Irish people gathered in Dublin, on Easter Sunday 27th March, 2016 to remember the Easter Rising of l9l6, some of his challenging words were addressed to the young generation. He encouraged them ‘to imagine and to dream‘ and he said ‘we wish them well as they make music and continue to dream’. The Leaders of l9l6 had political hopes and dreams. President Higgins said ‘For the leaders of l9l6, their political hopes and aspirations for what a free Irish Republic might be, were linked to a rich Irish culture which they cherished and promoted. Within that vision, their ancient Irish language and culture, informed by our history and migration, was central to everything for which they hoped and fought.’ I believe the men of l9l6 had a democratic right to their dreams of Irish self-determination...

Alfaz, Spain Police? The judges have more social status but the police know better the local situation and possible lawbreakers.logo mediation desk What is happening right now, in front of our eyes, for instance in Vila Real, north of Valencia, 13-15 April 2016–“II Ibero-American Conference on Police Mediation” is police revolting against the judges. “We use force to arrest the suspects, deliver them with evidence to the courts, many are found guilty, sentenced to prison, after some time released, presumably born anew–and after some more time we have to rearrest them; old or new crimes, same people. “The theory of individual and general prevention does not work. We must remove the roots, in them and in the local context causing the crimes. We want to add mediation, prevention, to force and arrest”. What happens in prisons? This author spent half a year in prison in Oslo many years ago; connected...

Upon receiving the Gandhi-King-Ikeda Community Builder Prize Atlanta Dear President, dear Dean of Morehouse College, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am deeply honored by the prize from a college in Georgia, in the US South, that has been and is a beacon in the struggle from dominion to dignity in race relations. The civil rights movement is an American Revolution, like the feminist movement it inspired–aiming at parity and dignity for all. To refuse sharing the spoils of exploiting Reds and Blacks and poor Whites with London was far from a revolution. This college shaped Dr Martin Luther King Jr. I had the honor of meeting him twice here in Atlanta in 1960–working on desegregation without violence in Charlottesville, VA–and in 1964 in Oslo when he received the Nobel Peace Prize. This College made him use Gandhi’s clinging to truth through nonviolent struggle, satyagraha, lifting 20 million Blacks into dignity. There...

The Telegraph’s Raf Sanchez in Jerusalem. The only other media carrying the story is Russia Today and Vigilant Citizen and MintPress News also carries the story and offers a wider background What is this about?A new coalition? So the usual Western media filter, meaning it must be interesting. And it is a quite sensational story: Saudi Arabia and Israel are up to a nuclear mischief against a country that has just been prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons by means of a huge legally binding document, UN Security Council endorsement and extremely tight monitoring mechanism. What’s it about? It’s about Israel’s defence minister Moshe Ya’alon saying in public at the recent Munich conference that Arab states are “not willing to sit quietly with Iran on the brink of a nuclear bomb”. He thinks that Iran was liable to break the agreement as their economic situation improves with the lifting of international...

The first editorial here at Transcend of March 3 2008, “50 Years of Fidel Castro” celebrated a political revolution that changed the world, and spelt the end of US-Western imperialism. This editorial celebrates a spiritual revolution that may also change the world, spelling the end of Western materialism, and spread from there. We are talking about processes, not events, and of structures and cultures more than of actors. Again, Cuba played a major role, as meeting place between two major parts of Christianity, Catholic and Orthodox. In the Great Schism of 1054 they had excommunicated each other; and the Roman empire had split Catholic/Orthodox in 395. Fidel’s Catholic brother and successor Raúl was a condition for this historic meeting for peace; so was the meeting between Putin–an Orthodox Christian–and Francis in June 2015. However, not many pairs of brothers rival the two Castros in shaping history. They met, Pope Francis...

By Jonathan Power Is Islam violent? ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In Pakistan, there is Lashkar-e-Taiba and the attempted murderer of the schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai. Immigrant Moroccan men roughly pushing women and fondling them in the crowd in Cologne. Murderous bombs in Paris. Ayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali female author who was raised a Muslim, writes, “Violence is inherent in Islam- it’s a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder.” The late Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, argued that in the later years of the last century and the early years of this an uncannily high percentage of the world’s violent conflicts took place between Muslims and non-Muslims: Turks versus Greeks, Russians versus Chechens, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians versus Serbs, Armenians versus Azeris, Uighurs versus Han Chinese, Indian Hindus versus Muslims, and Arabs versus Jews. Yet most Muslims don’t commit acts of violence. If Islam is intrinsically violent then roughly...

Five years ago In 2011 when it all began, an educated conflict analyst or otherwise conflict competent person would have said about the conflict in Syria that it was a very complex thing, caused by history, environment, traumas, external factors, the economic situation, etc. And that al-Assad and his government was certainly an important reason but far from the only one. The conflict expert would have warned against at last four ways of thinking: a) any interpretation that put all the good people on one side and all the bad people on the other – because there are no conflicts in the world with only two such parties; b) any idea that the conflict could be solved by siding with the presumed good ones and going against the bad one(s); c) every attempt to ‘weaponise’ the conflict and increase the level of violence, the duration of the conflict and the human...

To navigate these difficult conceptual waters we need some rules. Here are three suggestions (the violence can be direct – as sometimes prescribed by the Abrahamic religions – or structural as by Hinduism): 1. Anchor “religious fundamentalism” in religious scriptures taken literally according to the fundamentalists, not as “interpreted”; 2. Anchor “extremism” in violent action, verbal or physical; 3. Anchor “religious extremism” in violent action justified-legitimized by religious scriptures, by fundamentalists or not. Fundamentalism has to do with inner faith, belief. Extremism has to do with outer violence against Other, and against Self (like flagellation for being a sinner). Keep them separate. And be careful. We can have fundamentalism without extremism. The fundamentalist may believe much, beyond the beliefs of others, yet not cross the border to violence. We may say: let him-her do so; it is not obvious that fundamentalists are more violent than non-fundamentalists. We can have extremism...