There are at least three conditions necessary for a nonviolent movement to be successful.
Success, I am taking as, the outcomes’ consistency with the principles of nonviolence, and not just political expediency. In game theory this outcome might be described as win/win rather than win/lose.
There has to be a historical-cultural context. This usually means a religious moral framework that organizes the minds of people. Some groups can be influential, such as the Quakers or the Jains. Some people have had to have gotten their heads around a different way of relating to the world, to other beings and to human beings, and they perhaps are not part of institutions conditioned by the political struggle for power, resources and prestige. These attitudes do not make sense unless they resonant with the human mental processes. They might, for example, fire up the mirror neurons. M K Gandhi was a westernized Indian, but his westernization was superimposed on family practice and belief. Martin Luther King was from a religious tradition, that like the Quakers, had drawn from the nonviolent script of the New Testament.
Secondly, it is useful, depending on the scale of the campaign, it is useful to have knowledgeable, even charismatic, leadership. For example, in the recent demonstrations in Tehran and other Iranian cities, masses of people turned out, but the process stalled because there was no direction so lots of time was spent trying to decide what to do next. Fragmentation, confronted by a determined, organized and brutal agencies, reduces the democratic effectiveness of the campaign. The problem then is that hierarchical structures are created which have long term consequences, such as in the Union Movement.
Thirdly, nonviolence has shown to be an effective political means, provided the participants understand the relationship between means and ends. For example, the people sitting at the lunch counters in Virginia over the river from Washington DC were directly confronted by violence. The natural thing, I believe for most of us, is to fire up and get caught up in a violent response or the flight syndrome. What do you do if somebody comes at you with a knife or a gun? The people in Virginia felt fully justified, legitimated by their violence. One of the means of nonviolence is courage.
By way of a provisional summary, it seems to me that raises two fundamental issues: humanity and localism. All human beings have ‘wired responses” and capacities. These attributes are socially conditioned, and they can be both rediscovered and broken by individual practice. People can only act with regard to what is in front of them, and behavior, especially institutional behavior, is conditioned by unfolding historical context.
Everybody can chose between violence and nonviolence. The problem is that people may not understand this is an effective choice they can make. Many people are able to act nonviolently intuitively. We have a problem, I understand, in our society of domestic violence, but we do not take into account social conditioning, especially for males, but not excluding females, the adversarial legal system originally modeled on conflict (and the method of dialectic), and the structural violence of institutions, in particular the work place.
(These are just some jottings to help me get my thoughts together to try to bring together the logic and evidence of nonviolence. I assume either my readers knows far more than I do, or has not really heard about nonviolence. A peaceful world, especially in the anthropocene age, remains a pre-eminent human aspiration. We have to master the details and the practicalities.)
ELSEWHERE:
Cynthia McKinley explains her reasons for supporting the people of Gaza with video of the arrest of “The Spirit of Humanity”.
The Heathlander discusses the application of Gandhian principles of political action, and the likelihood of success with respect to a march on Gaza.