A rejuvenated green movement is needed now more than ever

A rejuvenated green movement is needed now more than ever
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
21 May 2018

Looking back from today, we can now see the mid to late 2000s marked a high point in activism, media interest and government action regarding climate change in the UK.

Increasingly large and prominent Climate Camps, drawing attention to climate endangering infrastructure, were organised every year between 2006 and 2010; the direct group Plane Stupid occupied runways and the roof of parliament to highlight the danger of airport expansion; and Climate Rush, inspired by the Suffragette’s campaign for the women’s vote, carried out media-friendly actions including a picnic at Heathrow departures and dumping a pile of horse manure on Jeremy Clarkson’s driveway.

With documentaries like 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth and 2009’s The Age of Stupid attracting huge audiences, David Cameron’s Tories sensed the shift in public opinion and rebranded themselves as an environmentally-friendly party. The slogan “vote blue, go green” was adopted and famously the old Etonian hugged a husky.

Ridiculous and shameless as this PR campaign was, the political arms race created by Cameron’s supposed green shift both proved the power of the green movement, and produced the political landscape it needed to win several important victories for the climate. Driven forward by a huge Friends of the Earth campaign, the 2008 Climate Change Act legally bound the UK to making 80 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2050. The Coalition government scrapped the expansion of Heathrow after the 2010 general election, and, following actions and campaigning by a coalition of groups on coal, analysis by Imperial College London showed the dirtiest fossil fuel dropped from generating 40 percent of the UK’s electricity in 2012 to just 2 percent in the first half of 2017.

Zoom forward to today and the climate crisis that green activists devoted their lives to averting in the late noughties has only become more urgent.

For example, whilst senior climate scientists have repeatedly explained carbon admissions need to fall immediately and rapidly to avert climate catastrophe, the International Energy Agency reported that carbon emissions hit a record high last year, increasing by 1.4 percent. The New Yorker’s David Wallace-Wells provides some much need reality to the 2015 United Nations Paris climate agreement, which committed the 195 signatories to keeping the global temperature increase to below two degrees, and ideally under 1.5 degrees.  “Not a single major industrial nation was on track to fulfil the commitments it made in the Paris treaty”, Wallace-Wells notes, citing a November 2017 New York Times report based on data from Climate Action Tracker. “To keep the planet under two degrees of warming – a level that was, not all that long ago, defined as the threshold of climate catastrophe – all signatory nations have to match or better those commitments.”

Speaking to the Morning Star after the Paris Agreement, Professor Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said it was “reasonable to say 3-4oC is where we are heading, and probably the upper end of that” – by 2100, if not before. The corporate world has already come to terms with this likely future, with an internal Shell planning document predicting a 4oC increase in the short term. Similarly in 2012 PricewaterhouseCoopers told businesses and governments that they “need to plan for a warming world – not just 2C, but 4C or even 6C.”

“What we are talking about here is an existential threat to our civilisation in the longer term”, Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, recently noted in an Environmental Justice Foundation report. “In the short term, it carries all sorts of risks as well and it requires a human response on a scale that has never been achieved before.” Speaking in 2011 about the risks climate change poses to Australia, Professor John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, was even more direct: “the difference between two and four degrees is human civilization.”

As these warnings highlight, the importance of the looming climate chaos is hard to overestimate. “Every single day, climate change is the most important thing happening on the planet—there’s nothing even remotely close”, argues US climate activist Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, writing in the New Yorker magazine.

In contrast to this urgency, with a few important exceptions (e.g. the nationwide anti-fracking movement) the green movement in the UK seems to have been in a serious rut since 2009/10. The failure of the 2009 Copenhagen United Nations climate summit was a massive blow to the green movement’s morale, while the Coalition Government’s austerity programme led many activists to move from climate-specific work to campaigns such as UK Uncut and housing battles. In addition, since 2015 it is clear many activists on the Left who are concerned about climate change have put their time and energy into supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, many joining Momentum.

Indeed, Corbyn’s environmental policies have broadly been positive. Friends of the Earth graded Labour’s 2017 election manifesto 34 points out of 48, behind the Green Party on 46 but above the Liberal Democrats (32) and Conservatives (11). That Morning Star columnist Alan Simpson is advising Corbyn on environmental issues is welcome, as is Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s recent announcement that Clive Lewis MP had joined his team to “drive the climate change issue into the heart of Treasury policy making, and therefore into the centre of government policy making”. However, there are still huge problems within the Labour Party when it comes to creating and pursuing effective policies on climate change. Many Labour MPs are still wedded to the ideal of a corporate-dominated neoliberal economy. The GMB union supports fracking. And, most importantly, Labour under Corbyn is still a pro-economic growth party – the word “growth” is mentioned 15 times in the election manifesto – despite this economic dogma being exactly the thing that is driving the planet over the climate cliff.

Rather than this old, 20^th century thinking we desperately need new, radical ideas and action. We need, as Sir David King notes above, a wholesale transformation of our economies, which will only be possible with a profound shift in our politics and societal values. “Has an economic shift of this kind ever happened before in history?”, worries Canadian writer Naomi Klein in her essential book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. She cites the historical examples of the Civil Rights Movement, the campaign against Apartheid, the abolition of slavery and the New Deal to give an idea of the scale and influence of the mass movement that is now needed to defend the climate. Others have suggested the societal mobilisation that occurred during World War Two is closer to the level of change that we need to aim for.

This, then, is why a reinvigorated green movement is needed now more than ever – to pressure the current Tory government and Corbyn’s Labour Party to take proactive and effective steps to deal directly with the threat of climate change.

And we need to act now. As McKibben notes in his New Yorker article: though “it feels as if we have time to deal with global warming… In fact, climate change is the one problem that the planet has ever faced that comes with an absolute time limit; past a certain point, it won’t be a problem anymore, because it won’t have a solution.”

Follow Ian Sinclair on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Book review: Media, Propaganda and the Politics of Intervention by Florian Zollmann

Book review: Media, Propaganda and the Politics of Intervention by Florian Zollmann
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
June-July 2018

‘The biggest immediate single problem we face… is mainstream media reporting’, British historian Mark Curtis recently argued in an Open Democracy interview about UK foreign policy.

Florian Zollmann’s deeply impressive first book – which expands on his PhD, supervised by Professor Richard Keeble – goes a long way in engaging with this long-running issue for peace activists.

‘The news media in liberal democracies operates as a propaganda system on behalf of state-corporate elite interests’, he argues, using Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model as the foundation of his study.

Analysing elite newspapers in the UK, US and Germany, Zollmann, a lecturer in journalism at Newcastle University, compares and contrasts nearly 2,000 news, editorial and comment items covering human rights abuses in Kosovo (1999), Iraq (2004), Libya (2011), Syria (2012) and Egypt (2013).

Zollmann’s findings are deeply worrying, with huge ramifications for journalists, activists and British democracy itself. ‘If countries designated to be “enemy” states of the West conduct human rights violations, the news media highlights these abuses and conveys demands for action to stop human rights abuses’, he notes. ‘If, on the other hand, Western states or their “allies” are the perpetrators of human rights violations the news media employs significantly less investigatory zeal in its reporting and virtually no measures to stop abuses are conveyed.’ The level of indignation, the seniority of the officials blamed, and whether the media call for sanctions, action from the United Nations or so-called humanitarian military intervention – all largely depends on the identity of the perpetrators. It isn’t included as a case study, but the media’s (lack of) coverage of the Western-backed assault on Yemen is a further damning illustration of Zollmann’s thesis.

In addition to extensive quantitative and qualitative evidence, a wealth of references and an in-depth bibliography, the book also includes important accounts of the two devastating US-led assaults on Fallujah in Iraq, as well as critical facts and arguments effectively excluded from the mainstream media’s reporting of the West’s interventions in Libya and Syria.

At £29, this is a pricey purchase, and though it is clearly written and logically argued, the academic style may make it a little dry for some readers. However, I would strongly recommend peace activists get hold of a copy of Media, Propaganda and the Politics of Intervention as it is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the media’s propagandistic role in the West’s often deadly and counterproductive foreign policy.

Sustainable diets: Interview with Dr Pamela Mason and Professor Tim Lang

Sustainable diets: Interview with Dr Pamela Mason and Professor Tim Lang
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News blog
30 April 2018

Last year public health nutritionist Dr Pamela Mason and Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at the Centre for Food Policy, City University of London, published their book Sustainable Diets: How Ecological Nutrition Can Transform Consumption and the Food System with Routledge.

After reviewing the book for Peace News, Ian Sinclair asked the two researchers what they mean by sustainable diets, what role veganism can play, and what concerned people can do to quicken the transformation to a sustainable food system.

Ian Sinclair: What is your definition of a sustainable diet?

Pamela Mason and Tim Lang: A sustainable diet has often focused on a diet that is protective for the planet, particularly for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGEs). Given that food systems account for 25-30% of GHGEs, this is an essential consideration for sustainable diets, but we believe that a sustainable diet should be defined more broadly to include public health, cultural acceptability, accessibility, safe and affordable food, and the health and welfare of all who work in the food system. We are in agreement with the definition of the FAO and Bioversity (2010) which defined sustainable diets more broadly than nutrition + environment (or calories + carbon), as “Sustainable Diets are those diets with low environmental impacts which contribute to food and nutrition security and to healthy life for present and future generations. Sustainable diets are protective and respectful of biodiversity and ecosystems, culturally acceptable, accessible, economically fair and affordable; nutritionally adequate, safe and healthy; while optimizing natural and human resources”.

IS: You note that standard Western diets are far from sustainable – causing obesity and non-communicable diseases, with the rich world “eating as though there are multiple planets”. How do our diets in the West need to change for them to become sustainable?

PM and TL: The main change required to make Western diets sustainable (and increasingly the diets of well-off people across the world) is to reduce meat intake. Livestock production is responsible for a third of all agriculture’s GHGEs and 70% of agricultural land use globally. Nearly half of global agricultural land is used for livestock feed production. Some 36% of the calories produced by the world’s crops are used for animal feed. Only 12% of those feed calories ultimately contribute to the human diet as meat and other animal products so animals are relatively inefficient in terms of feeding people. In practical terms, a sustainable diet is therefore one based on plant foods (i.e., vegetables, fruits, wholegrains, beans and pulses and nuts) with animal foods (meat and dairy), if liked, consumed in small to moderate amounts. Although meat is a source of nutrients (e.g. iron, zinc, vitamin B12 and protein) in the human diet, these nutrients, with the possible exception of vitamin B12, can be obtained from plant foods. Meat is therefore not an essential component of the human diet. Fish is more difficult. Several authorities around the world, including the UK, specifically recommend the consumption of oily fish for reduction of cardiovascular risk due to its omega-3 fatty acid content, which is problematic when 80-85% of global fish stocks are fragile. Moreover, fish is an important source of income and indeed of protein in some small communities throughout the world. Of note is that some specific communities such as Seventh Day Adventists and also people who choose to follow a vegan diet and consume no fish enjoy good cardiovascular health.

IS: Many people see a vegan diet as the best diet in terms of climate change, the environment, human health and animal welfare/rights. However, in the book you note a vegan diet may not be sustainable. Why?

PM and TL: Compared with a traditional Western meat containing diet, a vegan diet containing no animal food is associated with reduced GHGEs, reduced land use and reduced water use. However, a vegan diet that simply contains no animal food is not necessarily healthy in that a vegan diet could focus on foods such as white bread, jam and chips.  It is important to distinguish between a healthy vegan diet or a healthy plant-based diet as being one which focuses on whole unprocessed foods, including vegetables, fruit, grains and pulses.

In terms of environmental and socio-economic impact, vegan diets are not necessarily 100% good news. This is a highly complex picture. Processed vegan foods may, for example, contain palm oil, which is associated with deforestation. It is not clear the extent to which ‘certified’ palm oil reduces deforestation. However, use of olive oil and sunflower oil require much more land to produce than palm oil. Workers producing coconut oil are often paid abysmally. Replacing meat with processed soya foods such as tofu and also Quorn would, with current practices, require large amounts of land to be used overseas. Some plant-based milks like almond milk require large amounts of water in their production and are to some extent nutritionally inferior to dairy milk. A vegan diet could potentially be all fruit, likely containing lots of tropical fruit, some of which again requires a lot of water in its production. People growing avocados in Mexico cannot afford to eat them any more as they are grown on a mass scale for Western consumers, with a similar situation existing for growers of quinoa in Bolivia and Peru.

A healthy sustainable vegan diet will likely depend on increasing the use of British grown field crops, such as root vegetables and brassicas as well as orchard fruits. Some pulses, beans and seeds (quinoa, lentils, peas, fava beans, haricot beans, flax) are increasingly grown in the UK and their use would reduce the use of water in water thirsty regions of the world. Soya beans can be grown in the UK too.

IS: A shift to sustainable diets seems to be a win-win – better for people’s health and for the environment. However, we are still very far from achieving this. Who or what is impeding the move to a sustainable food system?

PM and TL: Policy makers are not significantly engaging with the need for diets to become more sustainable. Partly this is due to a fear of consumers and the mantra of consumer choice. To recommend dietary change is not something that policy makers (with some exceptions) want to do. Consumers are increasingly interested in their diets, often from a health perspective, but also in terms of animal welfare, sustainable fish and to some extent from an environmental perspective. However, dietary advice is often confusing and consumers may not be clear on how they could best be eating for their own health and that of the planet. Marketing of less healthy foods high in fat and sugar and salt at the expense of healthier foods adds to consumer confusion. The food industry may resist change as it may compromise their bottom line, although some companies acknowledge the need for change because of growing consumer interest and concern that unless they make production changes ingredient availability may become fragile due to climate change, lack of water and so on.

What is needed to contribute to dietary change is for every country to develop Sustainable Dietary Guidelines with leadership and commitment from government, usually the Ministry (or Department) of Health. Such guidelines would provide a steer to both consumers and food producers. If consumers began to choose more sustainable diets, this would send a signal to food producers leading to a more sustainable food production. In short, we need sustainable diets from sustainable food systems. It is not an either/or but a both/and.

Some countries, notably Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Qatar and Brazil have produced Sustainable Dietary Guidelines, whilst others such as Australia and the United States have been thwarted in their attempts largely by private sector interests. The UK’s dietary guidance is in the form of the Eatwell Guide, which was revised in 2016 with some mention of sustainability issues such as reducing red meat consumption, but it does not go far enough.

IS: What do you think are the most important actions concerned citizens can take to help quicken the transition to sustainable diets?

PM and TL: Actions that concerned citizens can take include making a dietary shift to a more plant based diet. This can be done gradually by, for example, reducing the amount of meat and increasing vegetables in composite recipes and aiming for one or more meat-free days or meals in the week. The advantages lie in terms of health and the environment and if the food is cooked from scratch in the home meals containing less meat can be cheaper. People need to gain confidence in changing methods of food preparation and food shopping. Our ‘meat and two veg’ meal culture needs to change to a ‘vegetable and grain with meat as a condiment’ approach and this can take time. Most dietitians, for example, acknowledge that dietary change is difficult, but if the whole household can get involved this helps enormously. It is also important to learn more about food, how it can be cooked and combined. Shop in places where there is a high proportion of fresh unprocessed foods and ask food retailers and producers how they produce their food (e.g. animal welfare, use of pesticides and so on). Eating together with family, friends, neighbours and community is also important as this usually contributes to enjoyment of food, learning more about it and sharing of ideas for action. Of note here are the Brazilian Sustainable Dietary Guidelines, which focus on food culture, highlighting where and how to shop for food and so on.

Concerned citizens can also form groups or join groups that are interested in issues related to food and consider lobbying town, city and county councils about issues such as land use, spaces for community vegetable growing projects and so on. Such food activist groups can also draw up strategies to help towns and cities move towards more sustainable diets and help everyone whatever their income to have access to a healthy sustainable diet. Organising food events can also highlight sustainability issues in an area, highlight local supply chains and availability of vegetables and fruits (or lack of them) and can help to develop skills in food knowledge and food preparation.

The strategic and tactical genius of the US Civil Rights Movement

The strategic and tactical genius of the US Civil Rights Movement
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
25 April 2018

The recent death of American nonviolence guru Gene Sharp and the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King provide a good opportunity to reflect on the key role nonviolent action has played in winning progressive change.

Sharp, whose extensive writings have influenced many of the campaigns that have overthrown governments across the world, repeatedly emphasised the importance of planning and strategy in carrying out effective nonviolent action. Indeed, strategy is “probably more important in non-violent struggle than it is in military conflict”, he told me when I interviewed him in 2012 for Peace News newspaper. For Sharp, those wishing to understand nonviolent struggle needed to research the topic in depth – reading, at a minimum, his lengthy studies on the subject – rather than basing their opinion on “superficial impressions”.

Even though his birth is marked by a national holiday in the US many people – including myself have a very superficial understanding of the US Civil Rights Movement King led in the 1950s and 1960s. This ignorance is frustrating because the movement is one of the best known and most successful nonviolent campaigns in recent history.

Like Sharp, King and the wider leadership of the Civil Rights Movement were incredibly smart strategists and tacticians, with a good knowledge of the theory behind nonviolent struggle, especially the movement Mahatma Gandhi led in India which forced out the British imperialists.

Two fascinating documentaries highlight the detailed understanding and use of strategy and planning by the movement that rocked the Deep South in the post-war period. Though they have largely been forgotten they are both available on Youtube.

Released in 1999, A Force More Powerful tells the story of the movement to desegregate the city of Nashville, Tennessee in 1959-60. Having spent three years in India studying the work of Gandhi, Methodist minister James Lawson was invited down to Nashville by King to train local Black students and citizens to fight for their civil rights.

Lawson set up and led a series of evening workshops in a small church near Fisk University where, he explains, he “took the whole group through a holistic view of nonviolence – its history, its roots in the bible, its roots in Christian thought, the methods of nonviolence.”

After considering the situation, Lawson remembers the group decided to target the lunch counters and restaurants in downtown Nashville and start to research the issue. To prepare for the struggle the workshops included role play with activists ‘sitting’ at lunch counter while being racially abused and physically attacked, and low-key, small scale ‘test’ sit-ins were conducted.

For Lawson, successful nonviolent action necessitated “fierce discipline and training, and strategizing and planning” which “can’t happen spontaneously, it has to be done systematically.”

The sit-ins began in February 1960, and following mass arrests, violence against the activists and a series of escalations by the movement including a consumer boycott by the Black community, the city has agreed to desegregate lunch counters by May 1960.

“We were warriors. We had been prepared”, notes one activist in the documentary. “This was like a nonviolent academy, equivalent to West Point [military academy].”

Despite many successes, the Civil Rights Movement did not simply steamroll over the racist establishment in the Deep South but suffered many difficulties and defeats during the period, all of which had to be recognised and learned from.

The late-1980s 14-part US documentary series Eyes On The Prize tells of one such setback. Like Nashville, Black people in Albany, Georgia had been campaigning to end segregation. In late 1961 the local leadership of the Albany Movement invited King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to the city to energise the campaign.

Keen students of Gandhi, the SCLC understood a central strategy in the successful campaign in India had been the staging confrontational nonviolent protests with the understanding the oppressor would react violently, creating media-friendly drama and sympathy for the nonviolent protestors. Movement organisers “expected the same reaction” in Albany that they “encountered in most southern communities: police brutality”, the documentary’s narrator explains. However, they didn’t reckon with Chief of Police Laurie Pritchett, who had researched SCLC’s ideas about nonviolent struggle. “Pritchett was a thoroughly professional law enforcement officer who had the acumen to realise police brutality or violence from white mobs, would draw newspaper reporters to Albany and create sympathy for the movement”, Professor Adam Fairclough notes in his 2001 book Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000. “Pritchett trained his men to employ a ‘nonviolent approach’ toward demonstrators.”

With the internally divided movement fighting for the broad goal of ending segregation in the city, King began serving a 45-day sentence in July 1962, determined to stay in jail, as this would draw attention to, and increase support for, the cause. Conversely, Pritchett “understood that it was better to have King outside than inside jail” and secretly arranged for King’s bail to be paid, according to Fairclough. Having been forced out of prison, a depressed King left the still segregated city in August 1962.

Writing in his autobiography, King admits “The mistake I made there [Albany] was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair.”

Having learned some heard lessons in Albany, King and the SCLC decided their next target would be Birmingham, Alabama, a Klu Klux Klan stronghold and powder keg of racist oppression. Though there are, of course, many factors behind the success or failure of any campaign, one central factor in Birmingham was likely the presence of Commissioner ‘Bull’ Connor – “the antithesis of the calm, professional Laurie Pritchett… a vain, short-tempered, publicity-seeking bully, with a notorious reputation for racial extremism”, writes Fairclough.

“We knew that when we came to Birmingham that if Bull Connor was still in control, he would do something to benefit our movement”, Wyatt Tee Walker, the first executive director of the SCLC, is quoted as saying in US historian David Garrow’s 1986 book about the SCLC, Bearing The Cross.

Beginning in early 1963, the initial protests made little impact, receiving criticism from some Black businesses and a number of local (white) clergymen. In response the leadership of the movement escalated the campaign. King was jailed for several days, and – controversially – Black school children were mobilised, with marches organised. With tensions mounting, events came to a head, with Connor turning water canon and police dogs on the protesters. The violence gained national attention, the news coverage shocking the American public and wider world. “It was a masterpiece of the use of media to explain a cause to the general public of a nation”, local attorney David Vann explains. The campaign continued, with thousands more arrested, and desegregation was eventually won in May 1963.

The movement employed similar strategies in Selma, Alabama, focusing on one goal – winning a strong voting rights law. The 1965 campaign was dramatised in the award-winning 2014 film Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay.

In one gripping scene showing the movement’s leadership discusses the campaign, King (played by David Oyelowo) explains the problems in Albany – that the SCLC made many mistakes, while Pritchett didn’t: “There was no drama”, and therefore no media coverage, he says.

One of the central aims of the Selma campaign is to the attention of an inattentive President Lyndon Johnson, King continues. The only way of doing this “is by being on the front page of the national press every morning and by being on the TV news every night”, he argues. “And that requires drama.”

Turning to the young activists who have been coordinating the campaign in Selma so far, King asks about local sheriff Jim Clark: “Is he Laurie Pritchett, or is he Bull Connor?”

Told Clark is like Connor, one of King’s SCLC colleagues shouts “Bingo!”

 

Why are we so ignorant about the rich history of nonviolent struggle?

Why are we so ignorant about the rich history of nonviolent struggle?
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
26 April 2018

Writing about the recent death of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch made an extraordinary claim about the ending of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994.

“Columnists did not cut it. Activists could not have done it. Peaceful protest did not do it. Sports boycotts, books, badges and car boot sales did not do it”, she argued. “It took revolutionaries, pure and simple. People willing to break the law, to kill and be killed.”

Fellow Guardian writer Owen Jones tweeted in support: “Apartheid was brought down by revolutionaries, not peaceful protest. Brilliant piece by @afuahirsch.”

Despite these dismissive assertions by two of the most influential voices on the British Left, in reality “nonviolent action proved to be a major factor in the downfall of Apartheid”, as Stephen Zunes, a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, wrote in the Journal of Modern African Studies in 1999.

Professor Lester Kurtz, a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University, summarises the key events in a 2010 article for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. Founded in 1912 the African National Congress (ANC) protested non-violently against white supremacist in South African for several decades with few gains. Frustrated by this failure Nelson Mandela and others established and led an armed resistance (Umkhonto we Sizwe), which was also unable to bring down the oppressive system. “In the end a concerted grassroots nonviolent civil resistance movement in coalition with international support and sanctions forced the white government to negotiate”, Kurtz explains. Writing in 1987, American theologian Walter Wink argued the 1980s movement to end Apartheid was “probably the largest grassroots eruption of diverse nonviolent strategies in a single struggle in human history.” If you are looking for a short and accessible account of the campaign check out the brilliant 2011 book Counter Power: Making Change Happen by grassroots activist Tim Gee.

That Hirsch and Jones could get it so wrong highlights the tragic failure of proponents and scholars of nonviolent action to educate progressives and the wider British public about the rich and impactful history of nonviolent struggle across the world.

Yes, there is a certain level of awareness about famous instances of nonviolent resistance such as the campaign Mahatma Gandhi led that helped to end British rule in India, and the Civil Rights movement in 50s and 60s America. Yet our knowledge of even these struggles is often sketchy and superficial. More broadly, many associate nonviolence with passivity and moderation. Hirsh incorrectly assumes one cannot be both nonviolent and “willing to break the law… and be killed”. In practice the key to successful nonviolent campaigns is their ability to confront and coerce centres of power – in short, to seek out conflict. Writing about the portrayal of US civil rights leader Martin Luther King in the 2014 film Selma, Fast Company magazine’s Jessica Leber notes the nonviolent campaign he led “was incredibly aggressive, brave, and strategic – in many cases aiming to force the state into violent opposition.”

For anyone wishing to understand the power of nonviolence the seminal text is 2011’s Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by US academics Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. The book does two important things: First it shows that campaigns of nonviolent resistance have been twice as successful as their violent counterparts in achieving their goals. And second, the huge database (comprised of 323 campaigns between 1900 and 2006) that their findings are based on provides the bones of what is effectively a secret history of successful nonviolent struggles.

Who knew about the mass nonviolent campaigns that overthrew dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador in 1944? Or that people power put an end to President Marcos’s oppressive 20-year reign in the Philippines in 1986? Large scale nonviolent struggles also brought down Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1990 and played a key role in the ousting of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Mali, Kenya, Nigeria and Malawi have all experienced successful nonviolent struggles against dictatorships. The campaigns that won independence from the British in Ghana and Zambia were largely nonviolent, as was the protests that toppled Tunisian Ben Ali’s government in Tunisia and kicked off the so-called Arab Spring.

Writing on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog in 2016 Chenoweth and Stephan highlight an important historical shift: “The success rates of nonviolent resistance peaked in the 1990s, but the current decade has seen a sharp decline in the success rates of nonviolent resistance”. They suggest a few reasons for this change, including the likelihood state opponents of nonviolent campaigns may be getting smart to nonviolent strategies and tactics, and cleverly adapting their responses to minimise the movements’ challenges to the status quo.

This is certainly concerning. However, Chenoweth and Stephan highlight that though their effectiveness has waned, nonviolent campaigns are still succeeding more often than violent campaigns.

And with violent resistance turning out to be so disastrous in Libya and Syria, it is more important than ever for nonviolent action to receive the recognition it deserves.

Want to find out more? Search Swarthmore College’s extensive Global Nonviolent Action Database https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/ and read Peace News https://peacenews.info/.