Nonviolence is a powerful, active, creative and generative form of resistance to violent systems.

Every act of violence creates a more violent world. Nonviolence refuses to accept the self-perpetuating logic of the inevitability of violence, and demands of us that we cultivate space for peace-making. In this way, peace can be seen as on ongoing process, needing constant tending and renewal.

This attempt at defining terms is necessary because of what we here at the Green Institute are calling “The Missing Peace”. The language of peace is starkly missing from our politics. It has been knocked to the ground by violently coercive systems of power that are older, and even more entrenched, than capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, but darkly pervade all of them.

In this worldview, peace is defined in the negative – the absence of war, where war is the more natural state. Nonviolence, similarly, becomes seen as passive, inactive. Nonviolent protest is so outside the norm that powerholders insist on characterising it as violent – partly because they don’t understand it could be otherwise, and partly as a way to reject it as a breach of their own monopoly on violence.

Pacifism – the belief in nonviolent resolution of interstate disputes – is derided as a naïve pipe dream, while security is promised (ironically) through the violence of the state. Similarly, nonviolence is derided as a foolish desire for decorum, a tool of privilege that relies on the goodwill of powerholders to work.

Fuck decorum. Nonviolence has no time for polite acceptance of the status quo. It is historically a tool of the oppressed that assumes the ill-will of those in power and seeks to undermine the very source of their power – violence itself.

So what, then, is nonviolence? What is peace? How can we define it in the positive?

Is it a moral commitment? A philosophy? Is it a utopian vision, or a strategy based on a pragmatic assessment of asymmetric power?

In Living Democracy, I came to see it as all of the above, fundamentally defined by the concept of coexistence.

Martin Luther King defined it beautifully in these terms in his Letter From Birmingham Jail: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Hannah Arendt and David Graeber both invert the negative definition by articulating nonviolence as creating space for connection and communication, where violence disconnects us.

Similarly, First Nations thinkers like Mary Graham, who we will talk with later in The Missing Peace, understand peace as part of their philosophy of deep relationality and entanglement, and nonviolence as an active and ongoing process of living into being this relational, entangled world.

This beautiful, ecological understanding of peace and nonviolence is brought home by Judith Butler: “Nonviolence as a matter of individual morality thus gives way to a social philosophy of living and sustainable bonds”. Nonviolence, for Butler, is all about appreciating our inextricable entanglement with one another, and living as though that actually matters.

Butler also gives us the key insight – so important for us to keep top of mind right now, in this volatile, scary world – that nonviolence becomes most necessary when it feels most difficult.

“Nonviolence is perhaps best described as a practice of resistance that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious. In this way, it can be understood as a practice that not only stops a violent act, or a violent process, but requires a form of sustained action, sometimes aggressively pursued. So, one suggestion I will make is that we can think of nonviolence not simply as the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence, but as a sustained commitment, even a way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom.”

Nonviolence as active, aggressive, creative resistance to a violent system! Really grappling with this idea is a core goal of the project of The Missing Peace – to encourage us to understand violence as structural and systemic, in the same way we have come to understand capitalism as systemic, and to understand the necessary responses in the same way.

What would it mean to understand structural resistance to violence as like structural resistance to capitalism?

I believe it can help us to see how nonviolence is a crucial tool of resistance that we can and must use, as well as recognising that, just as we can’t simply step outside capitalism as individuals, we can’t immediately always do so with violence, either. In resisting capitalism, we do everything we can to refuse to use its primary tools – market domination, abuse of workers, rampant competition – and to live into being non-capitalist modes of economic activity – sharing and repairing, commons economies, etc. But we don’t demand purity of each other, as we recognise that is impossible. Our response must be systemic, not individual, and yet what is the system if not an entangled collective of individuals?

We cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, as Audre Lorde taught us. The master’s house was built through violence, so violence can never dismantle it. And, at the same time, we can’t judge individuals for personal failures within an overpowering and overwhelming system. And, at the same time, at its core, we can and must support each other and hold each other to account as we live into being the new world together.

Peace is a process. Nonviolence is action. It’s all coexistence.