We need to talk about peace and nonviolence. Urgently.

In an increasingly unstable and volatile world, facing the climate crisis, the rise of the extreme right’s politics of hate and exclusion, spiralling economic inequality, and rampant misinformation, it is deeply troubling that commitment to nonviolence as a strategy, a tactic, and a philosophy is weaker right now than it has been for generations.

Webinar #1: 8pm AEST, Wednesday 7 August 2024
Webinar #2: 8pm AEST, Thursday 12 September 2024
Webinar #3: 8pm AEST, Wednesday 2 October 2024
Webinar #4: 8pm AEST, Wednesday 6 November 2024

The language of peace is starkly missing from politics. Practices of nonviolence, from the interpersonal to the global, are less and less part of the way we act. And governments are smartly accusing nonviolent protesters of being violent, deliberately confusing the issue as a way of delegitimising protest and making their own use of violence invisible.

Because the language of peace is missing, we’re not able to fight back with a coherent argument and clear critique.

We no longer have at our fingertips Martin Luther King’s cry that “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.”

We don’t remember the great Greens founding philosopher, Petra Kelly, calling on us to “find a way to demilitarise society itself” and “to build and develop communities of peace everywhere”, and reminding us how violence by the state against its citizens, violence by states against each other, violence by people against each other, and violence against the Earth are intertwined.

We’ve lost Hannah Arendt’s extraordinarily powerful insight that “violence can destroy power. It is utterly incapable of creating it.”

Blog post: Peace is a process; nonviolence is action

It is crucial that we reclaim the language of peace. We must talk about nonviolence, read brilliant works seeing to understand it, work to define and articulate it as an active, even aggressive (as Judith Butler says), force for change.

If we dig deeply into the philosophy and practice of nonviolence, we will find brilliant strategies that will not only help us to achieve our goals, but teach us crucial lessons in how to make decisions together better, how to disagree better, how to do democracy better, and, crucially, how to cultivate the entangled world we want to live in together. The opposite of violence, as I argue in Living Democracy, is the hard work of coexistence.

Nonviolence is the path to transformation, to system change – living into being the world we need. If we understand change as emergent – that what comes next grows from what we do now – we recognise that only through nonviolence can we create a world of peace. It’s this transformative, eco-feminist understanding of nonviolence which saw the principle embraced by environmentalists and Greens from the earliest days of the movement.

This is why the Green Institute is launching a program of work on peace, nonviolence and demilitarisation.

We’re starting with a series of webinars and heading towards a reading and discussion group, to rebuild engagement with this crucial philosophy and practice, and to create spaces for informed, thoughtful discussion, teasing out questions around responses to violent oppression, how to define violence and nonviolence and where the edges lie, and much more.

Join us for the conversations.

Webinar #1: 8pm AEST, Wednesday 7 August 2024
Webinar #2: 8pm AEST, Thursday 12 September 2024
Webinar #3: 8pm AEST, Wednesday 2 October 2024
Webinar #4: 8pm AEST, Wednesday 6 November 2024

Blog post: Peace is a process; nonviolence is action

Register below for Webinar #2: The Power of Nonviolence – experiences in war and revolution.