Search results

We examine why some groups use violence while others use nonviolence when they push for major political change. Nonviolence can be less costly, but nonstate actors must mobilize a large number of people for it to be successful. This is less critical for violent rebellion, as successful attacks can be committed by a small number of people. This means that groups that believe that they have the potential to mobilize larger numbers of people are less likely to use violence. This potential is related to the lines along which the group mobilizes. Campaigns mobilized along ethnic or Marxist lines have fewer potential members and are most likely to use violence. Prodemocracy campaigns have a higher number of potential members and are more likely to use nonviolence. For movements against a foreign occupation, campaigns in larger countries are more likely to use nonviolence. These predictions are supported in a multilevel logit model of campaigns from 1945 to 2006. The mechanism is tested by looking at the interactive effect of democratic changes on the likelihood of nonviolence and looking at a subsample of 72 campaigns that explicitly draw from certain ethnic or religious groups.

The frequent occurrence of stonethrowing by Palestinian boys presents a dilemma pulling activists in disparate directions, provoking contested interpretations of this tactic and forcing international human rights workers (HRWers) to weigh their relative commitments to nonviolence, noninterference, and solidarity with Palestinians. In tactical discussions, local activists and HRWers often frame stonethrowing by referencing historical nonviolent templates, sometimes to legitimize “limited violence” and sometimes to condemn it. Building from fieldwork and interviews, I argue that memory templates serve as master frames that aid in interpreting protest actions, perhaps especially in settings where heterogeneous teams of international activists seek common frames of reference as they negotiate a developing praxis in a new context. Nevertheless, these templates were sometimes constructed through highly selective readings of the multilayered discourse and complex biographies of such figures as Gandhi and King. While the “hermeneutic circle” anticipates such selective readings, I argue that even the multivocal, sometimes contradictory, Gandhi and King texts can be remembered and applied in patterns that appear co-optive to the opposing camps of principled and pragmatic nonviolent adherents. Grounded in HRWer deliberations in the field, the core theoretical contribution of this paper maps out discursive strategies activists employ as they leverage memory templates in tactical debates.

Though violence is very much prevalent in modern organizations, unfortunately, researchers and practitioners have given very little attention in creating an organizational culture based on nonviolence. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between individual spirituality and non-violence work behaviour. It also investigates the mediating role of four constructs of psychological capital (hope, optimism, resilience and self-efficacy).

Collected data is subjected to rigorous reliability, validity and common method biasness tests. Further mediation is analyzed with the help of hierarchical regression, Sobel test and bootstrapping estimates.

The results show that all four dimensions of psychological capital partially mediate the relationship of individual spirituality and non-violent behaviour at the workplace. The practical and theoretical implications of the study are also discussed.

Although the study produces significant results, it has certain limitations, too, which can be addressed in future research. Firstly, as psychological capital is a state like construct, the responses of the participants may vary from time to time, leading to biases. Secondly, the study is confined only to manufacturing, IT/ITES and financial institutions. It can be duplicated to other sectors as well to assess its generality. Future researchers may adopt both quantitative and qualitative methodology to explore the field. Even experimental research may help to understand these work behaviours. Although the study has been conducted in business organization the purpose is not to limit it to the workplace context. It is relevant to all sectors and across all domains.

The findings have revealed individual spirituality as a significant predictor of nonviolence behaviour at the workplace. Thus managers, leaders, policymakers or organizational development practitioners need to facilitate spirituality at the workplace and introduce spiritual-based interventions such as meditation, yoga and several other mindfulness practices. Even organizational training, which is considered to be essential to human resource development, needs to develop a spiritual development program and also to examine the impact of such programs on organizational outcomes (Dent et al., 2005). Organizational interventions that facilitate mindfulness practices, yoga and meditation will enhance nonviolence communication through empathy and compassion-based listening, meaningful dialogues, through connecting employees with universal human values/needs.

The primary objective of the study is to foster conflict prevention in society rather than conflict resolution. With the help of the study, the authors understand the importance of spiritual intervention and its impact on the elevation of people's values, beliefs and attitudes. Major organisations such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook have already started to develop spiritual interventions at their workplace. It is an excellent time to capitalize on India's rich spiritual tradition that honours unity in diversity. Besides, an organization's facilitation to connect to employee’s actions with spiritual values can overcome cultural conditioning that triggers violence and help in making a more meaningful place to work. Thus, impacting the society from a macro perspective.

This is one of the pioneer studies that tried to unlock the “black-box” of mechanism through which individual spirituality impacts non-violent work behaviour.

Where international nonviolence organizations have increasingly become key players in both the development and evaluation of effective nonviolent movements, little scholarly attention has been given to their role in transnational mobilization. In this chapter, I present new data on a growing population of nonviolent protest INGOs, a transnational nonviolence network, working to globally spread tactical knowledge and resources. To examine determinants of how this population has grown as a whole, I employ negative binomial regression analysis to weigh the effect of nonviolent protest, social movements, and world society theories on nonviolent INGO expansion. I then examine how this network and its ties to different world regions have changed over the latter half of the twentieth century. I find it has been most significantly shaped by the expansion of global political and civil society networks, global human rights work, and a global discourse about nonviolence. The purpose here is to expand knowledge of the global institutional foundations of transnational protest resources, opportunities, and discourse among nonviolent movements.

This paper seeks to analyze instances of nonviolent strategies adopted by a class of stakeholders – the women of the Niger Delta region.

It analyzes their successes and failures in terms of a set of prerequisite conditions that must be met for such strategies to be effective. These prerequisite conditions must be present in the environment, the agent, and the methodology of nonviolent action, for assurance of efficacy.

The experience of the women of Niger Delta with nonviolent action indicates that it is possible to meet the prerequisite conditions for assurance of efficacy and for formulation of nonviolent strategies to conflict resolution. It is, therefore, determined that nonviolent action offers a viable alternative for persuasion of the multinational oil corporations in the Niger Delta region.

This paper would be of value to researchers and practitioners, in the fields of corporate communication, organizational communication, public relations, and strategic management, seeking to promote, practice or otherwise influence socially responsible corporate behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the problems associated with the prevailing rhetoric in corporate communication. It proposes the consideration of nonviolent rhetorical approaches.

This paper explains corporate communication's affinity for aggressive, militaristic language in terms of constraint of time, and expediency and efficiency of standardized communication strategies designed for large‐scale effectiveness. However, such communication strategies run the risk of dehumanizing the intended targets, distancing the individuals, and compromising socially responsible corporate behavior. The recent corporate scandals of unprecedented scale, occurring in spite of vast improvements in communication theory and technology, have highlighted the need for alternative approaches to corporate communication. Further, it examines the prerequisites that must exist for corporate communication based on nonviolent rhetoric to be effective. The conditions that must be present in the environment, in the corporation or its agent, and in the method of communication, for nonviolent rhetoric to prove effective are discussed.

Corporations seek to establish and modify relationships by influencing stakeholder beliefs, values, expectations and needs. Corporate rhetorical success is reflected in enhanced reputation and respectability, which in turn has significant economic consequences. To achieve these ends, corporations expend considerable effort on communication to educate, entertain and inform their stakeholders. Yet, scholars have generally neglected to study role of rhetoric and language in public relations.

This paper would be of value to researchers and practitioners, in the fields of corporate communication, organizational communication, public relations, and strategic management, seeking to promote, practice or otherwise influence socially responsible corporate behavior.

Through an analysis of the leaders of the 1960s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) this paper highlights the importance of individual identity work, and argues for an expanded theoretical treatment of social movement identity processes that takes account of partial identity correspondence (a partial alignment between an individual identity and the movement identity) to include degrees of identity congruence. Actors can embrace a movement, but remain in a state of conflict regarding some dimensions of its identity. Extending James Jasper's ((1997). The art of moral protest: Culture, biography, and creativity in social movements. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) identity classifications, the data suggest that participants engage in identity justification work when incongruence among personal identity (biographical), collective identity (ascribed, i.e. race, gender), and movement identities exist. This work may not reflect the organization's efforts to frame or reframe the movement identity. This study finds that individuals manage incongruence with organizational and tactical movement identities by employing three identity justification mechanisms: (1) personal identity modification of the movement's identity; (2) individual amplification of the common cause dimension of collective identity; and (3) individual amplification of the activist identity through pragmatic politics. Rather than dismantling the past, as Snow and McAdam ((2000). In: S. Stryker, T. J. Owens, & R. W. White (Eds), Self, identity, and social movements (pp. 41–67). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) propose, actors incorporate their biographies as a mechanism to achieve feelings of community and belonging. It is not so much an alignment with the organization's proffered movement identity as it is a reordering of the saliency hierarchy of their identities. Unlike Snow and McAdam's conceptualization of identity amplification, the reordering of an identity hierarchy and the amplification of certain identities is precipitated by the actor's, not the organization's, efforts to align her/his personal identity, collective identity, and movement identities.

While it is generally well known that nonviolent collective action was widely deployed in the US southern civil rights movement, there is still much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on primary data that consist of detailed semistructured interviews with members of the Nashville nonviolent movement during the late 1950s and 1960s, we contribute unique insights about how the nonviolent repertoire was diffused into one movement current that became integral to moving the wider southern movement. Innovating with the concept of serially linked movement schools – locations where the deeply intense work took place, the didactic and dialogical labor of analyzing, experimenting, creatively translating, and resocializing human agents in preparation for dangerous performance – we follow the biographical paths of carriers of the nonviolent Gandhian repertoire as it was learned, debated, transformed, and carried from India to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and Howard University to Nashville (TN) and then into multiple movement campaigns across the South. Members of the Nashville movement core cadre – products of the Nashville movement workshop schools – were especially important because they served as bridging leaders by serially linking schools and collective action campaigns. In this way, they played critical roles in bridging structural holes (places where the movement had yet to be successfully established) and were central to diffusing the movement throughout the South. Our theoretical and empirical approach contributes to the development of the dialogical perspective on movement diffusion generally and to knowledge about how the nonviolent repertoire became integral to the US civil rights movement in particular.

The term “nonviolence” is often misconstrued and misunderstood (Schock, 2003). Some people associate it with passivity, neutrality, or the total avoidance of conflict. Others assume it is a “bourgeois” tactic that entails nothing more than negotiation, compromise, and gentle calls for change. Some believe that nonviolence is only for total pacifists – that is, those who, for religious or moral reasons, refuse to use any form of violence under any circumstances. Another misconception is that nonviolent methods can only be used in democracies, where the state is reluctant to crack down violently on civilian resisters. And many think that nonviolent methods are inherently slow – requiring long periods of time to yield results – and are generally less effective than violence methods.

Peaceful societies, groups of people described by social scientists as experiencing little if any internal or external violence, embrace the need for peacefulness, in contrast to most of the contemporary world, which accepts violence as normal and inevitable. The purpose of this article is to examine the ways that people in those societies view peacefulness, and to compare those ways with more “normal” violent societies.

The approach taken is a literature review of salient trends about anti‐violence among some of the more highly peaceful societies, and comparable trends in two state‐level societies—Norway, a relatively peaceful state, and the USA, a relatively more violent one.

The findings show that some of the peaceful societies avoid violence through nonresistance—not resisting aggression. In addition, many base their commitments to peacefulness on religious and mythological beliefs, though for others, peacefulness is based on cultural values or is seen as a practical, reasonable way to order their lives. The societies that appear to have very firm commitments to nonviolence are the ones where structures of peacefulness thrive.

The practical value of this research is that it points out how the peaceful societies can be contrasted with modern nation states, and it may suggest ways to challenge general patterns of violence.