Peace is a process; nonviolence is action

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By Tim Hollo • July 26, 2024 from The Green Institute

Nonviolence is a powerful, active, creative and generative form of resistance to violent systems.

Every act of violence creates a more violent world. Nonviolence refuses to accept the self-perpetuating logic of the inevitability of violence, and demands of us that we cultivate space for peace-making. In this way, peace can be seen as on ongoing process, needing constant tending and renewal.

This attempt at defining terms is necessary because of what we here at the Green Institute are calling “The Missing Peace”. The language of peace is starkly missing from our politics. It has been knocked to the ground by violently coercive systems of power that are older, and even more entrenched, than capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, but darkly pervade all of them.

In this worldview, peace is defined in the negative – the absence of war, where war is the more natural state. Nonviolence, similarly, becomes seen as passive, inactive. Nonviolent protest is so outside the norm that powerholders insist on characterising it as violent – partly because they don’t understand it could be otherwise, and partly as a way to reject it as a breach of their own monopoly on violence.

Pacifism – the belief in nonviolent resolution of interstate disputes – is derided as a naïve pipe dream, while security is promised (ironically) through the violence of the state. Similarly, nonviolence is derided as a foolish desire for decorum, a tool of privilege that relies on the goodwill of powerholders to work.

Fuck decorum. Nonviolence has no time for polite acceptance of the status quo. It is historically a tool of the oppressed that assumes the ill-will of those in power and seeks to undermine the very source of their power – violence itself.

So what, then, is nonviolence? What is peace? How can we define it in the positive?

Is it a moral commitment? A philosophy? Is it a utopian vision, or a strategy based on a pragmatic assessment of asymmetric power?

In Living Democracy, I came to see it as all of the above, fundamentally defined by the concept of coexistence.

Martin Luther King defined it beautifully in these terms in his Letter From Birmingham Jail: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Hannah Arendt and David Graeber both invert the negative definition by articulating nonviolence as creating space for connection and communication, where violence disconnects us.

Similarly, First Nations thinkers like Mary Graham and Kirli Saunders, who we will talk with later in The Missing Peace, understand peace as part of their philosophy of deep relationality and entanglement, and nonviolence as an active and ongoing process of living into being this relational, entangled world.

This beautiful, ecological understanding of peace and nonviolence is brought home by Judith Butler: “Nonviolence as a matter of individual morality thus gives way to a social philosophy of living and sustainable bonds”. Nonviolence, for Butler, is all about appreciating our inextricable entanglement with one another, and living as though that actually matters.

Butler also gives us the key insight – so important for us to keep top of mind right now, in this volatile, scary world – that nonviolence becomes most necessary when it feels most difficult.

“Nonviolence is perhaps best described as a practice of resistance that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious. In this way, it can be understood as a practice that not only stops a violent act, or a violent process, but requires a form of sustained action, sometimes aggressively pursued. So, one suggestion I will make is that we can think of nonviolence not simply as the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence, but as a sustained commitment, even a way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom.”

Nonviolence as active, aggressive, creative resistance to a violent system! Really grappling with this idea is a core goal of the project of The Missing Peace – to encourage us to understand violence as structural and systemic, in the same way we have come to understand capitalism as systemic, and to understand the necessary responses in the same way.

What would it mean to understand structural resistance to violence as like structural resistance to capitalism?

I believe it can help us to see how nonviolence is a crucial tool of resistance that we can and must use, as well as recognising that, just as we can’t simply step outside capitalism as individuals, we can’t immediately always do so with violence, either. In resisting capitalism, we do everything we can to refuse to use its primary tools – market domination, abuse of workers, rampant competition – and to live into being non-capitalist modes of economic activity – sharing and repairing, commons economies, etc. But we don’t demand purity of each other, as we recognise that is impossible. Our response must be systemic, not individual, and yet what is the system if not an entangled collective of individuals?

We cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, as Audre Lorde taught us. The master’s house was built through violence, so violence can never dismantle it. And, at the same time, we can’t judge individuals for personal failures within an overpowering and overwhelming system. And, at the same time, at its core, we can and must support each other and hold each other to account as we live into being the new world together.

Peace is a process. Nonviolence is action. It’s all coexistence.

more from The Green Institute…

Protecting Our Right To Peaceful Dissent In The Face Of Climate Breakdown

| 26th September, 2019

Protecting Our Right To Peaceful Dissent In The Face Of Climate Breakdown

It is difficult to overstate the importance and influence of disruptive, peaceful protest and non-violent direct action in social change.

On countless issues like women’s rights, LGBTIQ+ rights, justice for First Nations people, rights for workers, or campaigns against racism and xenophobia, large-scale protest, including disruption and direct action have been an essential ingredient of success. Globally, recent months have seen major wins as a result of protest, specifically in the withdrawal of Hong Kong’s extradition bill. Within the environment movement, most major wins have been thanks to direct action. Within the Australian context, some examples include the iconic campaigns to stop the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania, the battle to stop uranium mining at Jabilukain Kakadu National Park, and the Bentley Blockade against unconventional gas exploration in NSW’s Northern Rivers.

It should come as no surprise that these same tactics are coming to the fore again today, as governments continue to steer us ever closer to a catastrophic climate future and a deepening global extinction crisis. We’ve seen this in Brisbane in recent months, as climate campaigners have brought large-scale disruptive actions that force these issues into the limelight. The very targeted ‘Stop Adani’ campaign – the face of the climate movement in recent years – appears to have broadened in the wake of the recent Federal election, and the Queensland Government’s decision to back in Adani and other Galilee coal projects.

But recent disruptive protests and direct action are not only in response to this change of position from the State Government. They are a last resort. They follow years of petitioning, letter writing, rallies, marches, campaigning around elections, and directly lobbying MPs. And they are necessary – when it comes to action on climate change, we are at a tipping point. We don’t have long to turn the ship around before our chance to meet even the 2°C target vanishes.

New anti-protest laws in Queensland

The labour movement, and members of the Labor party, have historically been instrumental in movements for social change. Whether it be by strike, street marches, occupations or other confrontational tactics, large scale social change like the five day work week, or women’s right to vote can be directly attributed to more disruptive tactics.  Against this backdrop, it is particularly shocking that Queensland’s Labor Government has announced legislation to crack down on protesters.

Labor’s proposed laws would extend police search powers and introduce a new offence that criminalises the use or possession of so-called “dangerous devices” with sentences of up to two years imprisonment. The exact definitions and details are yet to be released, but it seems the laws are intended to target “lock on” devices such as barrels, pipes, bike locks and superglue. In practice they could give police a wide discretion to stop and search anyone suspected of attending a peaceful protest.

The supposed justification appears to be a complete fabrication. The Premier and the Police Minister have described “booby trapped” devices, that are intended to harm emergency services personnel cutting protesters free. Yet participants in such activities are staunchly non-violent, and have refuted the Premier’s allegations, pointing to the fact that booby trapping devices would put their safety at the most risk. You’d think too, that if such allegations were true, both police and the Murdoch press would’ve been all over it for months. No such allegation has been made in Queensland, and police have never charged someone with such an offence.

Further, the law as it stands does not need to be expanded – laws already exist to deal with protest actions intended to cause harm to another, or that use tactics like blocking roadways. Rather than to deter, or protect, these proposed laws are designed to dehumanise, vilify and criminalise peaceful protesters, so that Governments can continue to justify ignoring their entirely reasonable policy demands.

Along with this announcement, we’ve seen a shift in the language used by both Labor and the LNP designed to do the same. Peaceful protesters are being impugned with inflammatory language like “extremists”, “danger”, “terrorise”. This language, and other imputations about protesters impeding fireys, ambos and police helping others, serves to pit protesters against the “common good” in an attempt to justify limitations on civil liberties and extended police powers. It’s a really concerning path for the Government to go down.

Perhaps even more concerning is the way Labor’s announcement has created the political space for even more drastic proposals from the LNP, which is unconstrained by any internal opposition to this kind of erosion of civil liberties. This risk has already materialised, with Brisbane’s LNP Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner having proposed changes to the Peaceful Assembly Act 1992 (Qld), and pressuring the Premier to limit street protesting at peak hour.

The Queensland laws as part of a broader anti-democratic crackdown

It’s important to understand these proposed “crackdowns” in the broader context of the democratic challenges Australia is facing right now. There’s the recent example of the Federal Government’s new legislation targeting animal activists. Or the Espionage and Foreign Interference Act, introduced by the LNP and rubber stamped by Labor in 2018, that impacts on freedom of speech, public interest journalism and non-violent protest, with penalties of up to 25 years in jail. Beyond specific legislative proposals, we’ve seen quite shocking encroachment on freedom of the press (think the raid on Annika Smethurst), and the enforcement of incredible penalties for whistleblowers.

I’m left wondering whether this kind of government response reflects the reality that, perhaps now more than ever before, we need dissent and peaceful protest to strengthen our democracy.

The vast majority of Australians want our Government to take action to curb the catastrophic impacts of climate change. Peaceful protest is about using what little power individuals or groups of people do possess, in the most effective way possible. It’s part of the political process; campaigners are marginalised while taking action, until the perspective somehow changes. Activists’ values are co-opted once they’ve succeeded in shifting the norm.

The idea that democracy is something that only happens every couple of years at your local voting booth is a dangerous proposition. Yet this is increasingly the way it appears to play out, with corporate interests and media moguls doing their darndest in the intervening years, both behind the scenes and in the headlines, to drive politics and policy in the interests of profit.

Murdoch & Co. are quick to label everyday people as “dangerous, reckless, irresponsible, selfish and stupid” for protesting governments’ reckless and immoral inaction. They are quick to criminalise their actions and label them terrorists. Yet when huge mining corporations like New Hope drill illegally at 27 sites they’re fined just $3,152. When Adani spews coal-laden sludge into the Great Barrier Reef world heritage area they were fined just $12,000. There’s no doubt our democracy is sick.

Protesting is a necessary mechanism for civic engagement and pressuring change when governments are no longer listening to their constituents. We have doubtlessly reached the point where that’s necessary in the face of inaction on climate change: the politics of self-interest and and the ever revolving door between politics and big business will leave the most ardent optimist with little hope that the necessary change will come from Governments.

The pushback on scrutiny and civil disobedience from governments at all levels represents not only a further alignment of government and corporate interests. It’s also a truly scary demonstration of government’s willingness to subjugate our right to fight against those interests, even where our collective future depends on it.

Back to the Bjelke-Petersen era?

Queenslanders are rightly terrified about this recent turn in our Labor Government’s policy and rhetoric, given our State’s historically brutal, racist policing, and entrenched poor democracy. With just one house of representation, the potential for poorly thought out proposals is significant.

The parallels with Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland cannot and should not be ignored. In 1967 civil liberties movements formed in protest against the Traffic Act, under which a permit was required to march on the streets or roadways. Queensland now has the Peaceful Assembly Act, which enables groups to apply and have their assembly approved automatically unless the police or government authority successfully challenges the permit.

In the lead up to Extinction Rebellion’s recent Rebellion Day in Brisbane’s CBD, the police attempted to quash their permit, but were unsuccessful because they failed to follow the appropriate procedures. Following this, Brisbane City Council challenged another permit, taking Greens Councillor Jonathan Sri to court in an attempt to stop a 15 minute march from going ahead. The march was about the right to peaceful protest. The Council lost the challenge, but the fact they even attempted such a move is a scary sign of where we are at.

Since declaring my public condemnation of these news laws, I’ve heard from a lot of folks unhappy with my support of disruptive protest and those who say they’re doing more harm than good to the movement.

But the reality is we have never before seen climate protest and surrounding issues saturate Queensland’s mainstream media the way it has in recent weeks and months. Non-violent protest, including direct action, is most effective when it’s attention-grabbing and cannot be ignored. Despite what many might argue, disruption is attention grabbing. Directly stopping or slowing work is attention grabbing. Indeed, if the critics (many of whom don’t dispute the motives of these protests) think they have a better way, I’d invite them to try it.

Because right now, with Governments at all levels supporting new thermal coal mining and gas exploration against the urgent pleas of the scientific community, we cannot afford not to try everything. Our current climate trajectory will condemn our Pacific neighbours, and First Nations people on the front lines, to climate chaos, and our children to an unsafe, unlivable world. That is extreme, that is unjust, and it is unbelievably negligent.

As far as I’m concerned, politicians and big business who have knowingly gotten us to this point, and continue to do nothing are the true criminals and extremists here.

————

Dutton Nukes Democratic Climate Debate

By Tim Hollo • June 21, 2024

Dutton Nukes Democratic Climate Debate - Green Institute

Here we go again.

A decade ago, I wrote this piece in The Guardian explaining why the right keeps returning to nuclear power like a dog to a puddle of vomit. It fits their worldview: the “dominion mandate” that says God gave “man” the Earth to dominate; the belief in centralised corporate control; and the idea that nothing real should ever change.

That explains Dutton’s announcement this week. But it doesn’t tell us what to do with it.

My fear is that this lets Labor off the hook on climate and energy. Their stench of gas becomes less noticeable within a thoroughly radioactive discourse.

What it boils down to, in my opinion, is that the so-called “climate wars” are clear evidence of the failure of our entire political system. The binary adversarial nonsense; the exclusion of voices outside the mainstream; the corporate capture; the inanely superficial media “analysis”. This system is incapable of solving the crises it has created.

Our task, as Greens, as environmentalists, as people who believe in a better future, is to point to the failure of the system as an exciting and liberating opportunity to reinvent it. To rebuild it from the grassroots up. We can create a political system where genuine, inclusive, deliberative democratic debate is the norm. But we have to do it ourselves. We can’t rely on the system to replace itself.

As I keep muttering, this is the end of the world as we know it. Or at least, we’d better make it so. Or it could well be the end of the world.

Which reminds me…

It’s the end of the year as we account for it 

The Green Institute is an incredibly lean operation. I’m proud of the work we do with virtually nothing. But that means our three staff work far more than we’re paid for, and we have to say no to more things than we’d like. So we need your support.

If you have the capacity in these times, please consider making an end of financial year tax deductible donation to the Green Institute to help our work.

Facilitating difficult conversations

Relatedly, in terms of living into being the democratic system we want and need, and in terms of supporting the Green Institute, I’m delighted to share with you a new page on our website setting out the facilitation services we can and do provide.

If you’d like help with deep strategic planning, or with getting through tricky issues, our team of staff and volunteers – me, Elissa Jenkins, Becc Galdies, and Huong Truong, are available to help. Please bear that in mind!

Workshop in Bathurst

And I’m doing a workshop THIS SATURDAY in Bathurst, for those who might be in the NSW Central West. You can book here to come along and discuss living democracy, and how we live into being the world we need!

Natalie Bennett webinar

I’m delighted that there’s already been so much interest in the webinar on July 9 with Baroness Natalie Bennett of the Green Party of England and Wales!

There’s still time to register here to come along and discuss how to Change Everything with Natalie, Christine Milne and me.

Green Agenda

Our magazine, Green Agenda, has published a series of excellent pieces recently on the how and what of change-making in the face of climate and ecological and social and economic crises.

Check out Marci Webster-Mannison’s discussion of cranking air-con and architectural, design and planning alternatives. In a touching and beautifully written piece, Linda Cockburn explores her personal journey along different paths of individual, family and communal change. Have a read of Jonno Sriranganathan’s post-election analysis, challenging us to consider, among other things, the need to do far deeper community organising than simply saturation doorknocking. And read Simon Copland on how to shift the transport debate from EVs into active travel.

End update! Not end of world. End of financial year. Please donate 🙂

Thanks,

Tim

PS: I also wrote this more light-hearted piece 5 years ago, asking whether nuclear powered electrons have “balls”. And, remember, if you want more from the Green Institute and Green Agenda, please make an EOFY donation today!

Do Nuclear-Powered Electrons Have Balls? Hyper-Masculine Domination VS Ecological Politics

| 30th August, 2019

Do Nuclear-Powered Electrons Have Balls? Hyper-Masculine Domination VS Ecological Politics

There’s been a flurry of stories recently about men apparently choosing not to recycle, or carry reusable shopping bags, because they’re worried people might question their sexuality.

The reporting is based on research by Janet K. Swim, a professor of psychology at Penn State University, studying the perception of certain pro-environmental behaviours as having a particular gendered nature. She did indeed find that different behaviours were identified by both men and women as being somehow more masculine or more feminine, and there was a weak aversion to associating with people whose behaviour was seen as gender non-conforming.

While the reporting of this research has been generally light-hearted, there’s a serious issue behind it with deep repercussions not just for pro-environmental behaviour, but for ecological politics as a project. Beyond the reminder of quite how far we have to go still in moving beyond damaging gender stereotypes and prejudices, it reveals how the hyper-masculinist, dominance-driven nature of our politics is thoroughly intertwined with anti-environmentalism.

 

Reading the reporting of Swim’s research, I was reminded of the bizarrely gendered nature of the energy debate that reared its ugly head in the recent election campaign, in which I ran as a candidate. After Prime Minister Morrison rubbished Labor’s (actually quite weak) support for electric cars on the basis that Australians want cars that have “a bit of grunt”, I had numerous conversations with male voters who shared with me their belief that petrol engines have somehow “got balls”, while electric engines, despite in reality being on various measures stronger than internal combustion engines, are, in their view, weaker. This particular red-blooded male stereotype wouldn’t be seen dead driving an electric vehicle. Indeed, the idea that we might seek to phase out internal combustion engine cars becomes a threat to their conception of masculinity.

The same gendered construction can be seen in the question of electricity supply. In the minds of a certain cross-section of the community I spoke to, the electrons produced by burning coal are stronger, more masculine, than electrons produced by solar or wind power. It’s no longer a question of supposedly more variable generation. In this cultural view, some electrons have “balls” and others don’t.

Fascinated and horrified – like passing the scene of a car crash and craning your neck to see more – I dug deeper in some of these conversations, and found that this view is bound up in ideas of domination. There is actually something in the very destructive nature of digging great big holes in the ground, pulling up rocks and burning them, consequences be damned, that suggests greater strength and power to some people than harnessing the energy of the wind and sun. From this perspective, a plan to phase out coal and power Australia 100% with renewable energy is seen as a challenge to the view of this country as a place of rugged masculinity.

This goes even more for nuclear power. In this understanding of the world, what could be stronger, what could demonstrate “man’s power over nature” more than our ability to split the atom? The idea that this is dangerous and has the capacity to make great big explosions is part of the attraction, not a mark against it. The fact that it’s the most expensive technology to boil a kettle ever invented is irrelevant.

Now this is all rather anecdotal. I have had enough conversations that reflect these views to make it worth remarking on, but I haven’t done actual publishable research in this space. That said, there has long been evidence of something of a gender divide in energy, and in environmentalism more broadly. There’s a consistent pattern of women being both more concerned than men about climate change and more supportive of the transition to renewable energy (see, for example, the 2017 Climate of the Nation report). And there is a measurably higher vote for the Australian Greens amongst women than men (see, for example, the Australian Electoral Study).

The polling trends, and my conversations during the campaign, both reflect something much deeper and older.

Ecological politics has long been characterised as feminine / feminist world-view. Ariel Salleh and Val Plumwood have developed theories of eco-feminism, exploring not just its nurturing nature, but more deeply the way it respects fragility and embraces cooperation, complexity and connection. A basic understanding of ecology leads to a recognition that over-dominance of one species often leads to collapse, and that true strength and resilience comes from coexistence, from interconnected diversity. Ecological politics, consequently, recognises human dependence on the natural world, rather than separation from and dominance over it. This clearly parallels the feminist critique of patriarchy’s principle of domination. Plumwood ties them together in her phrase, “the mastery of nature”.

One of the founders of the German Greens, Petra Kelly, explicitly drew on these concepts in her early thinking on Greens politics.

“Feminism, ecology and nonviolence belong together and are interrelated… Resistance to war, to the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, is impossible without resistance to sexism, to racism, to imperialism, and to violence as an everyday pervasive reality. There is a very profound relationship between the fact that many women and children are commonly attacked, beaten up, and raped, and that a nuclear war as well as a nuclear catastrophe threatens this entire planet Earth.”[1]

Indeed, the link between a certain type of masculinity, domination and anti-environmentalism that I found in my conversations during the election was drawn out in one recent qualitative study of the language of climate deniers. Two Swedish researchers found that “for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”

Not coincidentally, a one-eyed reading of the Bible, in its early industrial and extremely patriarchal King James translation, led to this view entering the catechism in what has become known as the “dominion mandate”:

And God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The American Christian right has long promoted this line from Genesis 1:28 as a biblical critique of environmentalism. God is telling them, they believe, that we humans are entitled to do whatever we like with the Earth and its resources. Industrialists in the US, Australia and beyond have found this a handy way to tie their desire for profits and lack of care for the environment to a religious imperative. It sits behind the politics of the Institute of Public Affairs, Tony Abbott, George Pell and many others.

Nuclear power fits perfectly with this world view. Splitting the atom is the apogee of human dominance over nature. And, given its enormous and persistent waste problem, nuclear power is only acceptable if you believe that it is our right to pollute as we please.

There is, of course, a very different Biblical view. Thea Ormerod, Elenie Poulos and the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change, among others, talk of the concept of “stewardship of creation”. Plumwood and Salleh’s analysis shows why we shouldn’t be surprised by the gender split for and against dominion theology.

Following the thread of gendered domination, we can point to the role of women in the peace movement, from the Ancient Greek story of Lysistrata, through the founding during World War I of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, to Jo Vallentine, Australia’s first Greens Senator, first elected for the Nuclear Disarmament Party. Patriarchal domination is closely interlinked with imperialism, colonialism, industrialisation and, of course, capitalism, with its gendered primacy of competition and erasure of cooperation.

This, too, brings us back to nuclear power. The privatisation of profit and socialisation of risk inherent in nuclear power only makes economic sense if you believe in the dominance of corporations. With multi-billion dollar cost blowouts in construction and decommissioning, the refusal of private insurance companies to cover risk, and a waste stream that will need to be managed for many times longer than our civilisation has so far existed, it’s basically a complex wealth transfer from citizens to corporations. In this context, the very democratising, decentralised nature of renewable energy is a direct threat to a philosophy based on “might makes right”.

This isn’t about making some spurious gender essentialist argument, condemning all men on the basis of a narrow conception of masculinity. It’s important because we need to understand the deep motivations and values behind ideas in order to work out how to combat them. If indeed it is the case that the push for nuclear power and the rejection of renewable energy are driven in no small part by a patriarchal, dominance-driven philosophy, we will need to consider the implications for how we argue, how we frame, and quite how much we need to change. Apart from anything else, this view is, perhaps unsurprisingly, hugely over-represented in positions of power – in corporations and in both the Liberal National coalition and the Labor Party. It is embedded in power, both as it is conceived and, bluntly, as it is currently held and wielded.

At its heart, this is a clear demonstration that, as I’ve put it, “everything is connected”. If environmental behaviour and politics are deeply intertwined with patriarchy, we need to be even clearer that we’re not simply trying to replace energy sources; we’re not simply trying to save species; but we’re working to shift very deep cultural ideas and material realities of gender and power in order to drive the systemic change necessary to protect the natural world which we are part of and which is our only home.

The flipside is that, when we work in that way to build ecological understandings of connection and coexistence, we get to the heart of many issues in one, and we begin to create a society which will be a far better place for us all.

 

[1] Petra Kelly, in Gail Chester, Articles of Peace: Celebrating Fifty Years of Peace News, Prism Press, Bridport, 1987.

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