How Nonviolence Protects the State

Paperback, 182 pages

English language

Published Jan. 24, 2006 by South End Press.

ISBN:
978-0-89608-772-9
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OCLC Number:
77830471

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4 stars (6 reviews)

Since the civil rights era, the doctrine of nonviolence has enjoyed near-universal acceptance by the US Left. Today protest is often shaped by cooperation with state authorities—even organizers of rallies against police brutality apply for police permits, and anti-imperialists usually stop short of supporting self-defense and armed resistance. How Nonviolence Protects the State challenges the belief that nonviolence is the only way to fight for a better world. In a call bound to stir controversy and lively debate, Peter Gelderloos invites activists to consider diverse tactics, passionately arguing that exclusive nonviolence often acts to reinforce the same structures of oppression that activists seek to overthrow.

Contemporary movements for social change face plenty of difficult questions, but sometimes matters of strategy and tactics receive low priority. Many North American activists fail to scrutinize the role of nonviolence, never posing essential questions:

• Is nonviolence effective at ending systems of oppression?

• …

5 editions

Interesting, but too polemic and disingenuous

3 stars

I would not recommend this book to people who want to understand the split between advocates for “nonviolence” and advocates for diversity of tactics, because the author sometimes disingenuously puts things in people's mouths. It is however helpful as a reference in arguments, since it contains a lot of recent-historical (USA-centric) examples.

In the first chapters the author attacks, often polemically, “nonviolent” tactics. Some of the convictions he presents as coming from advocates of “nonviolence” are obviously constructed.¹ In the last chapter the author advocates for organizing in small groups and forming temporary alliances and outlines his views on how violence could be used effectively.

In the examples, the definitions of violence of the discussed movements are used (but not always stated), so the definition is constantly changing, which did confuse me at times. Most discussed movements seem to define property destruction as violence. I don't know if he hand-picked …

Review of 'How Nonviolence Protects the State' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Found the arguments convincing and provoked lots of (painful!) self-reflection.
But on the 'provoke' word...polemics have their place, and I appreciated the author's righteous anger and eloquence in getting across the material and epistemic injustices. But I don't know how successful that would be in changing the minds of others fully entrenched in a pacifist worldview - likely it would just result in defensiveness. Some other reviews have picked up on the referencing and use of anecdotes - more thick descriptions / fictionalised autoethnography might have come across more like a composite of Gelderloos's huge experience in activist communities rather than point-scoring.

There are a fair few strawpeople making an appearance, especially in the 'Nonviolence is Patriarchal' - which I found the least persuasive of all (hot topic: don't cite the Hebrew Bible, calling it 'the Old Testament', when you clearly haven't read it), which might bely the air of …

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Subjects

  • General
  • Multicultural Education
  • Political Science / General
  • Political Science
  • Politics / Current Events
  • Nonviolence
  • Politics/International Relations