PEACE & CHANGE, Vol. 20 No. 1, January 1995 82-93 AUTHOR'S NOTE: An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1992 Intemational Peace Research Association meetings in Kyoto, Japan. The author acknowledges the helpful commnts of LeRoy Moore and members of the Gandhi-Marx Study Group of the Rocky Mountain Peace Center in the writing of this article. Reader commnts may be sent to the author at wehr@spolcolorado.edu or Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder. CO 80309-0327 USA. COMMENTARY: TOWARD A HISTORY OF NONVIOLENCE by Paul Wehr Ralph Summy and Malcolm Saunders have provided us with four credible justifications for peace historians continuing their work. I will present a fifth reason that I hope will be equally persuasive. I beheve that the tradition and the method of nonviolence have merged in the last half of the twentieth century to fortn a social movement distinct from the peace movements historians have documented so thoroughly. Those movements have been largely episodic and reactive to specific wars or threatening periods. True, some historians have profitably studied the continuous peace tradition linking these movements over time, but there would be a brighter illumination still if peace movements and the peace tradition were viewed within a larger context that included what I call in this article the nonviolence movement. It is that movement's contemporary history that we need a subset of peace historians to write. Nonviolence activists would be eager to assist them.' The nonviolence movement focuses on peace in its broadest and most proactive sense, the elimination of structures of violence in general, especially but not exclusively those of war. It is not built around simply the prevention or termination of wars, a condition Johan Galtung and others have called negative peace. The nonviolence movement combines peace and justice as foci for change and builds its approach around a conscious commitment to nonviolence. A number of peace historians, most notably Peter Brock and Staughton Lynd, have written well on the tradition of nonviolence. A few social scientists--Gene Sharp and Joan Bondurant for example--have used the historical perspective to analyze nonviolence as a method of political resistance.' I am suggesting here that we have a third way to study nonviolence: as a social movement that combines tradition and method. The movement would be most effectively analyzed through the conceptual lens of purposive collective action. Sociologists use the term to refer to action taken in concert by substantial numbers of people outside the established institutions in a society. The purpose of such action may be collective defense, or replacement of existing institutions with more just ones, or recognition of the identity and rights of those acting collectively. Using the collective action perspective, can nonviolence be characterized as a social movement by generally accepted criteria? NONVIOLENCE AS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT We are better equipped than ever before to assess the status of nonviolence as a movement. Over the past forty years, our understanding of collective action has grown substantially. Many social movements have been analyzed. Studies of Gandhian satyagraha, civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, peace movements, and antinuclear protest come quickly to mind.(4) A number of theories have also been developed to enhance our knowledge of collective action as a process.(5) In the light of the attention scholars have given in recent years to extra-institutional protest, I am led to wonder why nonviolence has not been studied as an independent movement. It has usually been examined only as a method used by other movements for peace and social change. I suggest, rather, that nonviolence, developing historically as both a spiritual and an ethical tradition in many societies and a method of protest often with no spiritual basis, has since World War II become a movement in its own right. I will first discuss nonviolence as tradition and method, then discuss its status as a movement judged by collective action criteria. I must first state what nonviolence is not. It is often confused with peace action, aimed at the abolition of war as an institution and the avoidance or termination of specific wars. Peace movements are primarily reactive to specific threats and disappear at war's end. Further, action within a peace movement will fluctuate in response to events. For example, John Lofland has characterized the central dynamic of 1980s peace action as "soar and slump."(6) Nonviolence, by contrast, continues beyond individual movements and cycles of protest. It is enduring and constant. Nonviolence is also commonly confused with social change activism. Although the two overlap, they are by no means identical. Some who profess nonviolence are not interested in radical social transformation. Likewise, many who work for radical change are not committed to nonviolence. One is also tempted to see nonviolence as simply one of the so-called New Social Movements (NSMs), the wave of transfor- mative collective action in postwar Europe and the United States that has addressed new grievances with new resources.(7) I would, however, claim for nonviolence a special status among NSMS. Although nonviolence is new as an integral movement, its tradition and method are more firmly set on historical bedrock. NONVIOLENCE AS TRADITION The belief system that Judith Stiehm has called conscientious nonviolence has been forming for many centuries.(8) Its elements derive from Eastern and Western religions, classical literature, and Native American culture. Its clearest lines of development, however, are found in the Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist experience. The second Christian millennium, for example, is punctuated by various sects splitting from the institutional church to practice what we now recognize as core values of nonviolence. This evolution can be traced from the fifth-century Bogomils through the Albigensians, Waldensians, Wycliffians, Taborites, and Czech Brethren, to the Anabaptist groups of sixteenth-century Europe. Within Catholicism, the Franciscan order brought nonviolence from medieval into modern times, where it has been renewed by orders such as the Maryknolls and Sisters of Loretto. Each such separatist group further concretized and advanced the values of nonviolence. For more than two thousand years, then, there has been building a core set of values including love, truth, interdependence of belief and action, primacy of conscience, simplicity and voluntary poverty, rejection of war, and egalitarianism. Within the Hindu tradition, we find a similar line of spiritual and practical development, through Buddhism and Jainism, and most recently in Gandhian satyagraha.(9) With the exception of the Franciscan impact on Catholicism perhaps, such conscientious nonviolence appeared to have had little impact on societal institutions before the late seventeenth century. Then, however, there began a more noticeable institutionalization of nonviolence in the form of religious organizations that survive to the present day. The Quaker theocracy in colonial Pennsylvania represented an institutionalization of the ethical core of nonviolence.(10) By 1760, the "Holy Experiment" had failed politically. As Quaker pacifism was progressively excluded from the institutions of state, however, it was redirected into transformative movements for the abolition of slavery, for women's emancipation, for war prevention, and for the protection of children, prisoners, and the mentally ill. For Quakers, "faith and practice" were one and the same. A belief had to be acted upon to be realized. Although the Anabaptist Mennonites and Brethren did not have this active society-transforming orientation, their tradition of "nonresistance" forced recognition of conscientious objection to war as a civil right. In the nineteenth century, nonviolence became more secular as the state became more intrusive into private life. The tradition became conceptually richer. With his notion of the primacy of individual conscience in struggle with the state and majority opinion, Henry David Thoreau found civil disobedience to be the appropriate citizen response when conscience was contravened.(11) When the state tried to force a citizen to participate in war against his conscience, Tolstoy thought it was a righteous person's duty to refuse. His intervention in support of that conviction permitted the pacifist Doukhobors to emigrate from czarist conscription.(12) Another core value of nonviolence, nonhierarchical social relations, was promoted by Lucretia Mott as she bridged the movements for the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women.(13) The principle of the inviolable humanity and equal worth of all persons was thereafter well seated in conscientious nonviolence. The twentieth century saw increasing interpenetration among the values of nonviolence across cultures. The Quaker view of truth, for example, as a relative and subjective seeking process found harmony with Gandhi's conception of truth as a creative.process unfolding from conflict. His notion of ordinary people as the focus of creative change and of personal suffering as a vehicle for that change resonated with the Quaker emphasis on faith through action in the world.(14) Such complementary ideas produced an ideological amalgam that responded to a new sense of urgency in the cold light of total war, genocide, and the rise of the military-industrial state. Such numbing realities required a broader conception of violence that provided an ideological base for a movement impelled to create institutions as violence-free as humanly possible. NONVIOLENCE AS METHOD A second group of students of nonviolence see it more as a method of protest, pragmatic rather than conscientious in its origin. Gene Sharp suggests that the pragmatic use of nonviolent sanctions is every bit as historical as spiritual nonviolence. For him, one best explains nonviolent action not by the ethical motivation of the actors, but as the collective use of "social power," as people refuse cooperation with the offending institutions.(15) A government's dependence on the obedience of both its agents and ordinary citizens empowers nonviolence as a method of political action. Nonviolent action has often been effective, say the pragmatists, and people continue to use it not so much because it is right but because it works. It should be noted that although it is important to distinguish nonviolent tradition from method conceptually, they often work together. Gandhian satyagraha is an illustration of how conscience and technique, the ethical and the practical, interpenetrate. Even in conflicts in which an explicit nonviolence ideology is not present, one often finds more general religious and humanitarian restraints operating to reduce violence.(16) FORMS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION Practitioners of nonviolence have produced a wide range of techniques, including civil disobedience, conscientious objection, fasting, boycotts, satyagraha, varieties of strikes, squatting, and civil resistance to military occupation.(17) Such techniques might be grouped via the three contexts in which they are normally used: personal nonviolence, resistance movements, and change movements. First, nonviolence has come to be viewed by many as a guide for personal and social policy. People may "use" nonviolence to refuse military service, to practice voluntary simplicity out of ecological and political concerns, to make an organization's decisions, or to raise and educate children.(18) A second major form of nonviolence as method is used in civilian resistance to invasion and coups d'etat. Historical experience with such methods has stimulated research into the feasibility of social defense, or national security policy relying on trained civilian noncooperation.(19) The concept was heavily promoted in the 1980s by various Green parties in Europe as an alternative to military deterrence. The most familiar form of nonviolent technique, of course, is that manifested in social change movements in which collective action has the expressed purpose of addressing a widespread grievance or transforming a sociopolitical system. It is to a discussion of nonviolence as movement that I now turn. NONVIOLENCE AS MOVEMENT From about 1960 on, parts of the tradition and method of nonviolence came together as a discernible movement. It grew initially around a number of religious nonviolence organizations already in place.(20) Those were soon joined by a new generation of secular organizations committed in both structure and program to building nonviolent society. The Movement for a New Society, the Resource Center for Nonviolence, the Plowshares communities, the Rocky Mountain Peace Center, and Peace Brigades Intemational are illustrative of this younger generation. In Latin America, the 1980s witnessed a striking expansion of applied nonviolence through the network of Servicio de la Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ).(21) Such organizations and their counterparts elsewhere in the world provide for nonviolence one of the criteria collective action theorists have set for social movement status: the existence of permanent mobilizing organizations. Such nonviolence movement organizations provide two additional movement criteria. They serve an identifiable constituency having a collective identity: peace churches, pacifist networks within mainstream churches, training centers, alternative publishers, peace studies programs, and activists in other movements who are committed to nonviolence. Like all social movements, nonviolence has an interpretive frame, a statement of perceived reality, that violence is both personal and institutional in its origins.(22) It works to reduce violence through nonviolent direct action campaigns, personal leaming, and institutional transformation. The movement's vision of that transformation is shaped by its "organic intellectuals," as Antonio Gramsci would have described them.(23) The revolution, for the nonviolence movement, is brought about as people refuse to cooperate with armed force, which thus loses its power to coerce. (24) Another social movement characteristic of nonviolence is micromobilization contexts, or the recruiting of and socializing members into the movement. Those contexts are as disparate as a dissident group within the Catholic church in Milan, a family protesting political disappearances in Buenos Aires, and a support group for a physician court-martialed for resisting assignment to the Persian Gulf War. Like other movements, nonviolence has a certain degree of institutionalization. Thus it can survive at low points in protest cycles when resources are scarce. It has, for example, gained a toehold within university peace research and peace studies programs.(25) The movement also relies on institutional allies-individuals and groups within churches and governmental agencies. In fact, much of the movement's leadership is provided through its interaction with these allies. Its leaders compose a sort of "invisible college" scattered throughout a global network. Some are employed in movement organizations. Others are university faculty, religious leaders, and members of the "free professions" whose lack of direct control by superiors permits them such political latitude." They serve the movement with time, expertise, and money. With respect to these several criteria, then-constituency, collective identity, institutional allies, movement organizations, micromobilization contexts, interpretive frame, institutionalization, and leadership-nonviolence does resemble a social movement as social science describes one. In a singular respect, however, it is rather different from the rest. It persists. It does not appear to fluctuate between growth and decline to the degree of other protest movements. Why is that so, and how can historians help explain it? MOVEMENT PERSISTENCE I find several possible explanations for the movement's persistence. Each of them reinforces the arguments made by Summy and Saunders. First, any grievance usually disappears or is ameliorated as a movement grows. Wars do end, rights are recognized, and environmental protection is ensured. Normally, then, a movement's target for change will diminish over time, as the problem in question is partially solved and as its issues are co-opted by the state. The target problem of violence, to the contrary, is so deeply embedded in institutions and wealth patterns that the nonviolence movement is unlikely to succeed and thus lose its challenger role. With structural and behavior violence so widespread, both the nonviolence movement's possible constituency and its mobilization potential are continually expanding. Just as Summy and Saunders comment on the "universal" and "eternal" peace movement, the struggle against violence is ubiquitous and never-ending. A second reason why the nonviolence movement persists may concem its leadership personalities and structure. As we have leamed, nonviolence activists consciously immunize themselves against co-optation by societal control forces.(27) Through voluntary simplicity in their personal lives and low-cost, decentralized organizational structures, they increase the likelihood that the movement can survive with minimal resources.(28) The same unusual qualities that Summy and Saunders attribute to peace movement leaders are also found among nonviolence leaders. A third source of persistence may be found in the several functions nonviolence performs for other social movements. In any cycle of protest, there is always at least one movement using its services. The New Social Movements all use nonviolent direct action and need literature, training, and personnel to do so effectively. Thus emerges a "culture of nonviolence" consisting of historical figures, case histories, methods, theory, and ideology. That culture is expanded as each movement uses it, then returns it enriched by new experience. During low phases in their activity cycles, nonviolence appears to provide other protest movements with a caretaking function: maintaining activist networks and protest potential later reclaimed by movements as they are revived or redirected. Roberto Rabel's study suggests how this might have worked when New Zealand's anti-Vietnam War movement created mobilization potential, protest techniques, and cadres subsequently used by the anti-apartheid and antinuclear movements.(29) Nonviolence, with its continuing target of violence embedded in established institutions, also provides allied movements continuing support for their challenge function. That challenge tends to wane as movements lose their cutting edge to the forces of institutionalization and co-optation. Such a function is similar to that of the "surrogate opposition" Summy and Saunders find to justify peace history. What appears to be operating is a dynamic of alternating functions by which nonviolence in tum serves, then maintains, allied movements, which it overlaps. As there is always one or another movement in slump or ascendancy during a protest cycle, the need for the nonviolence movement remains relatively constant. Summy and Saunders suggest finally that peace history is valuable if only to redress the factual balance in research that so heavily favors war and violence. Precisely the same could be said for nonviolence history. It has suffered the same inattention from historians, despite its rich and interesting development path. IMPLICATIONS FOR PEACE HISTORIANS I have described how the spiritual tradition and the method of nonviolence came together to form a discernible movement after World War 11. I have explained its growth and constancy in recent decades in terms of its seemingly boundless potential grievance constituency, the service and caretaker functions it performs for other movements, and the survival design its leaders use for personal lifestyle and organizational simplicity. Peace historians could contribute substantially to the future of nonviolence. The movement needs a much firmer collective identity than it now appears to have. The foundation of that identity would be a carefully documented history of the tributaries of mainstream nonviolence. My sketchy treatment of it here is admittedly culture-bound. Such a writing project would certainly require the participation of European and non-Westem historians. Such a history of nonviolence would be an additional validation of what peace historians do. NOTES 1. For an illustration of such activist-with-scholar collaboration, see Paul Wehr and James Downton, The Persistent Activist (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, forthcoming). 2. PeterBrockTwentiethCenturyPacifism(NewYork:VanNostrandReinhold,1970); Staughton Lynd, ed., Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History (Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). 3. Gene Sharp, The Politics ofnonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973); Joan Bondurant, Conquest of Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 4. The following are representative of this research: on civil rights, Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Biack Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); on satyagraha, Joan Bondurant, Conquest of Violence; on feminism, Ann Costain, "Representing Women: The Transition from Social Movement to Interest Group," Western Political Quarterly 34 (1981): 100-113; on environmentalism, John McComiiclc, Rec@ng Paradise: The Global Envirvnmental Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); on peace movements, Sam MaruUo and John Lofland, eds., Peace Action in the Eighties (New Bmnswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 5. Among the more prominent theoretical approaches are Neil Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1962); Ted Guff, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Anthony Oberschall, Social Conflict and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973); William Gamson, Bruce Irenian, and Steven Rytina, Encounters with Unjust Authority (Homewood, ]IL: Dorsey, 1982); John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, "Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory," American Journal ofsociology 82 (1977): 1212-41; Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow, eds., International Social Movements Research (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1988); Charles Tffly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1978). 6. John Lofland, "The Soar and Slump of Polite ProtesL" Peace & Change 17 (1992): 34-59. 7. For treatments of these transforrnative movements see Alberto Melucci, "The New Social Movements: A Theoretical Approach," Social Science Infonnation 19 (1980): 199226; Carl Boggs, Social Movements and Political Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 8. Judith Stiehm, "Nonviolence Is Two," Sociological Inquiry 38 (1968): 23-30. 9. For a solid treatment of Hinduism's influence on Gandhi's thinking, see Bondurant, Conquest of Violence, chap. 4. 10. Margaret Bacon, The Quiet Rebels (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1985). 11. Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience," in Lynd, Nonviolence in America,57-82. 12. Koosma Tarasoff, A Pictorial History ofthe Doukhobors (Saskatoon: Modem Press, 1969). 13. Margaret Bacon, "Nonviolence and Women: The Pioneers," in Reweaving the Web of Life, ed. Pam McAllister (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1987), 78-86. 14. Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). 15. Sharp, Politics ofnonviolent Action, chap. 1. 16. I have elsewhere discussed the influence of such constraints on civil resistance in Norway and Poland. See Paul Wehr, "Nonviolent Resistance to Nazism: Norway, 1940-45,"Peace & Change 10 (1984): 77-96; idem, "Conflict and Restraint in Poland, 1980-82," in Global Militarization, ed. Peter Wallensteen, Johan Gaitung, and Carlos Portales (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 191-218. 17. Works on specific nonviolent sanctions include the reverse strike, Danilo Dolci, The Man Who Plays Alone (Garden City, NY. Doubleday, 1970); the civic strike, Patricia Parkman, Nonviolent Insurrection in El Salvador (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988); resistance to military occupation, Don Peretz, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990). 18. For illustrative application of nonviolence to personal relations and lifestyle , see Simple Living Collective, Taking Charge (New York: Bantam Books, 1974; Downton and Wehr, The Persistent Activist. Westview, 1997. 19. Major English language works on social defense include Anders Boserup and Andrew Mack, War Without Weapons (New York: Schocken, 1975); Alternative Defence Commission, Defence Without the Bomb (London: Taylor and Francis, 1983); Gene Sharp, Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1990). 20. Such U.S. organizations include the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American nFriends Service Committee, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom,the Catholic Worker, and the Congress on Racial Equality. 21. Perhaps the best treatment of the spread of nonviolent action through SERPAJ is Gerald McManus and Ronald Schlabach, Relentless Persistence (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1991). 22. The application of frame analysis to collective action is presented in David Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Steven Worden, and Robert Benford, "Frame Alignment Processes,Micromobilization,andMovementParticipation,"American SociologicalReview5l(1986): 464-81. 23. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and G. N. Smith (New York: International Press, 1971). 24. For explication of the theory of nonviolence underlying the movement's interpretive frame, see Doug Bond, "The Nature and Meanings of Nonviolent Direct Action," Journal of Peace Research 25 (1988): 81-89; David Albert, People Power Applying Nonviolence Theory (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1985). 25. In North America, there are currently one hundred such programs of varying size and emphasis, connected through the Peace Studies Association. 26. Anthony Oberschall examines the important role of "free professions" for social movement leadership in Social Conflict and Social Movements, chap. 5. 27. Wehr and Downton, Persistent Activist. 28. Although a comparative study of pacifist and nonpacifist peace movement organizations did not reveal great differences in organizational structure, I believe that nonviolence groups are generally characterized by simplicity and economy. See Sam Manfflo, Alexandra Chute, and Mary Anna Colwell, "Pacifist and Nonpacifist Groups in the U.S. Peace Movement of the 1980s," Peace & Change 16 (July 1991): 235-59. 29. Roberto Rabel, "The Vietnam Antiwar Movement in New Zealand," Peace & Change 17 (January 1992): 28-30.