the missing peace: talking about nonviolence green insititute webinar series 

By  Tim Hollo, Executive Director, Green Institute 

We need to talk about peace and nonviolence. Urgently.
 
We’re living in an increasingly unstable and volatile world. It’s been obvious for a long time that the climate crisis and spiraling economic inequality would feed the rise of the extreme right, the politics of hate and exclusion, rampant misinformation, and political violence. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and the genocides in Gaza and Sudan, make this horrifyingly real and immediate.
 
In order to face this rising chaos, we need a positive vision of peace. We need the transformative strategies of nonviolence that have been proven to work. We need the understanding that, just as violence only destroys, only leading to ever more violence, only nonviolence can create, and make the space for the hard but crucial work of coexistence that is peace.
 
But, right now, commitment to nonviolence as a strategy, a tactic, and a philosophy is weaker than it has been for generations.
 
The language of peace is starkly missing from politics, across the board. Practices of nonviolence, from the interpersonal to the global, are less and less part of the way we act. In no small part this is because governments attack the right to protest, smartly accusing nonviolent protesters of being violent, deliberately confusing the issue as a way of delegitimising protest.
 
Governments also make their own use of violence invisible, leading to the bizarre spectacle of Joe Biden asserting that the USA does not have a history of political violence – something that would surprise First Nations people, African Americans, workers and protesters, and the many politicians who have been assassinated. They normalise violence and war, promoting weapons manufacturing as high tech jobs and an opportunity for economic growth instead of an evil industry of death and destruction.
 
And this trickles down into society, where interpersonal violence is performatively reviled as an individual failing, rather than a result of systemic disconnection and dehumanisation.
 
Because the language of peace is missing, we're not able to fight back with a coherent argument and clear critique.
 
We no longer have at our fingertips Martin Luther King's cry that "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones."
 
We don't remember the great Greens founding philosopher, Petra Kelly, calling on us to "find a way to demilitarise society itself" and "to build and develop communities of peace everywhere", and reminding us how violence by the state against its citizens, violence by states against each other, violence by people against each other, and violence against the Earth are intertwined.
 
We've lost Hannah Arendt's extraordinarily powerful insight that "violence can destroy power. It is utterly incapable of creating it."
 
It is crucial that we reclaim the language of peace. We must talk about nonviolence, read brilliant works seeing to understand it, work to define and articulate it as an active, even aggressive (as Judith Butler says), force for change.
 
If we dig deeply into the philosophy and practice of nonviolence, we will find brilliant strategies that will not only help us to achieve our goals, but teach us crucial lessons in how to make decisions together better, how to disagree better, how to do democracy better, and, crucially, how to cultivate the entangled world we want to live in together. The opposite of violence, as I argue in Living Democracy, is the hard work of coexistence.
 
Nonviolence is the path to transformation, to system change – living into being the world we need. If we understand change as emergent – that what comes next grows from what we do now – we recognise that only through nonviolence can we create a world of peace. It’s this transformative, eco-feminist understanding of nonviolence which saw the principle embraced by environmentalists and Greens from the earliest days of the movement.
 
This is why the Green Institute is launching a program of work in August on peace, nonviolence and demilitarisation, to rebuild engagement with this crucial philosophy and practice, and to create spaces for informed, thoughtful discussion.
 
We're starting with a series of webinars and heading towards a reading and discussion group, teasing out questions around responses to violent oppression, how to define violence and nonviolence and where the edges lie, and much more.
 
Our first webinar, in the week of Hiroshima Day, brings you two of the Greens’ founders and magnificent elder statespeople, Bob Brown and Jo Vallentine, coming together to discuss why peace, nonviolence and demilitarisation were core to the Greens’ founding ideology, how this has played out over 40 years, and why it is as crucial as ever in the 2020s.
 
Bob and Jo both launched their political careers with protests against US militarism, and have always understood how ecological wisdom, economic justice, democracy, and peace are intertwined. 

This conversation will be a brilliant introduction to a series that will bring you discussions with: 

Mary Graham and Yin Paradies on decolonalism and nonviolence, 
Janet Rice and Giz Watson on how nonviolence and consensus decision-making are both about learning to coexist better,
Vesna Cerroni and Felicity Gray on their personal experiences of the power of nonviolence to bring down dictatorships and protect the most oppressed people, and more.
 
Register for the first webinar, sign up to our mailing list, and don’t miss The Missing Peace.