The Georgia Tech Symposium on Nonviolent Conflict was held on January 27, 2004, and featured Jack DuVall, President of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, as well as Professor Hugh Gusterson of Public Policy and Professor Sylvia Maier of International Affairs. There was also a moderator, but I didn’t catch his name. His contributions were minor in any case.
The symposium kicked off with a screening of the one-hour film, Bringing Down a Dictator, about the resistance effort that eventually led to the removal of Slobodan Milosevic from power in Serbia. Afterward, the participants each gave a short presentation about nonviolent conflict (which turned out to be mostly a nonviolence-hugging agree-fest, with one exception) followed by a question and answer session.
Mr. DuVall, as the President of the ICNC, was very adamant about the use of nonviolent conflict. Generally, I found myself persuaded, but his assertion that any oppressive regime is in some way susceptible to nonviolent methods of conflict seems fishy to me. Looking, for example, at Soviet Russia under Stalin, it is nearly impossible for nonviolent resistance to get off the ground. One of the keys to nonviolent conflicts, it seems, is good organization of the movement. This doesn’t mean structure as a matter of necessity, and in fact, structure is best avoided (to improve the resilience of the organization to attack) but in order to be effective, the group must be able to meet together. The Serbian resistance groups were aided by what freedom they had to assemble, something that a quickly quashed early East German resistance never would have been able to start.
As an extreme case, we can look at the oppressive regime presented by George Orwell in 1984. Though purely hypothetical, it does expose as incorrect this idea that nonviolent resistance can always be effective. The sheer impossibility of organizing such a resistance in the 1984 world, Emmanuel Goldstein notwithstanding, shows that it is possible to quench all resistance given the right attitude and tools.
When the question and answer session came along, the very first question, which I thought a perceptive one, was “What role does a preexisting democratic structure play in the success of nonviolent conflict, even a heavily broken one?” I was worried by the fact that Mr. DuVall’s response failed entirely to answer the question. It seems that many of the successful nonviolent conflicts of the past century, including the Indian independence movement, the American civil rights movement, the South African anti-apartheid movement, and the Serbian resistance all depended heavily on some form of free or democratic structure to achieve their goals, especially regarding the freedom of assembly (or at least a governmental apathy towards assembly). I am rather curious about how important it is for nonviolent resistance groups to leverage existing freedoms to gain more. Is such a foothold needed? If so, what freedoms (or apathies) are prerequisite to effective nonviolent conflict?
I was left with a few questions I didn’t have the opportunity to ask, though I hope to have them answered at least in part if I ever get Mr. DuVall’s book (we were supposed to be comped a copy, but I haven’t heard from the ICNC since I sent the email two weeks ago). First, is there a dependence on the oppressive leadership being rational? Saddam Hussein is often referred to as irrational, and it seems likely that he had little to lose by violently reacting to a nonviolent conflict situation. Dr. Maier indicated that a leader with nothing to lose such as Stalin or Kim Chong-Il might in fact be immune to nonviolent attacks, though I do not know if the other panelists shared her opinion.
Second, hypothetically speaking, is it possible to have a nonviolent response to nonviolent conflict? What would happen if a government were to somehow respond to the conflict in a nonviolent manner? I’ve tried to think about this one, but I can’t wrap my brain around a possible nonviolent governmental response to a nonviolent conflict. Obviously the second part of the question is moot until the first is answered in the affirmative.
Third is a follow up to the last question asked of the participants. The final question asked what long-term benefits there were from using nonviolent conflict rather than violent conflict. The response was that violent revolution tended to lead to the replacement of one repressive regime by another. For example, the Russian, French, and Cuban revolutions all led to authoritarian systems, while the nonviolent revolutions in Poland, the Czech Republic, East Germany, and India all brought about democratic forms of government. Prof. Gusterson brought up that the psychology of violence means that it tends to “stick,” that is, once the goal of a violent resistance is achieved the resistance still tends to want to be violent, and when the resistance becomes the new government it in turn tends to be more authoritarian and violent. While these cases provide good evidence, I came up with one good counterexample: the American Revolutionary War. Was the American Revolution a fluke where violent conflict led to a democratic government? Or was it just a careful balance of violent and nonviolent forms of conflict (think Boston Tea Party, among others) such that the net result was that violence did not dominate the conflict? Why did the United States turn out so well when our genesis was in fact violent?
The film and subsequent discussion were enlightening, and very provocative. I am very much looking forward to reading Mr. DuVall’s book, A Force More Powerful, as soon as I get my hands on a copy. And clear out the rest of my reading list.
