Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788732782
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.
Author: Mark Christian Thompson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503632083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
How does Martin Luther King, Jr., understand race philosophically and how did this understanding lead him to develop an ontological conception of racist police violence? In this important new work, Mark Christian Thompson attempts to answer these questions, examining ontology in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s philosophy. Specifically, the book reads King through 1920s German academic debates between Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Jonas, Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, and others on Being, gnosticism, existentialism, political theology, and sovereignty. It further examines King's dissertation about Tillich, as well other key texts from his speculative writings, sermons, and speeches, positing King's understanding of divine love as a form of Heideggerian ontology articulated in beloved community. Tracking the presence of twentieth-century German philosophy and theology in his thought, the book situates King's ontology conceptually and socially in nonviolent protest. In so doing, The Critique of Nonviolence reads King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963) with Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" (1921) to reveal the depth of King's political-theological critique of police violence as the illegitimate appropriation of the racialized state of exception. As Thompson argues, it is in part through its appropriation of German philosophy and theology that King's ontology condemns the perpetual American state of racial exception that permits unlimited police violence against Black lives.
Author: Peter Gelderloos
Publisher: Left Bank Distribution
ISBN: 9780939306183
Category : Arab Spring, 2010-
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
From the Arab Spring to the plaza occupation movement in Spain, the student movement in the UK and Occupy in the US, many new social movements have started peacefully, only to adopt a diversity of tactics as they grew in strength and collective experiences. The last ten years have revealed more clearly than ever the role of nonviolence. Propped up by the media, funded by the government, and managed by NGOs, nonviolent campaigns around the world have helped oppressive regimes change their masks, and have helped police to limit the growth of rebellious social movements ... The Failure of Nonviolence examines most of the major social upheavals since the end of the Cold War to establish what nonviolence can accomplish, and what a diverse, unruly, non-pacified movement can accomplish. Focusing especially on the Arab Spring, Occupy, and the recent social upheavals in Europe, this book discusses how movements for social change can win ground and open the spaces necessary to plant the seeds of a new world.
Author: Brad Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1783602406
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.
Author: Richard Bartlett Gregg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108575056
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
The Power of Nonviolence, written by Richard Bartlett Gregg in 1934 and revised in 1944 and 1959, is the most important and influential theory of principled or integral nonviolence published in the twentieth century. Drawing on Gandhi's ideas and practice, Gregg explains in detail how the organized power of nonviolence (power-with) exercised against violent opponents can bring about small and large transformative social change and provide an effective substitute for war. This edition includes a major introduction by political theorist, James Tully, situating the text in its contexts from 1934 to 1959, and showing its great relevance today. The text is the definitive 1959 edition with a foreword by Martin Luther King, Jr. It includes forewords from earlier editions, the chapter on class struggle and nonviolent resistance from 1934, a crucial excerpt from a 1929 preliminary study, a biography and bibliography of Gregg, and a bibliography of recent work on nonviolence.
Author: Peter Gelderloos
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781948501019
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"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."--Back cover.
Author: Erica Chenoweth
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231527489
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 451
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Book Description
For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.
Author: Robert L. Holmes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623565804
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 540
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Book Description
Robert Holmes is one of the leading proponents of nonviolence in the United States, and his influence extends to the rest of the world. However, he has never presented his views on nonviolence in full-length book form. The Ethics of Nonviolence brings together his best essays on the topic, both classic works and more obscure pieces, as well as several important essays that have never been published. Holmes started his career by following Dewey and James, and then turned toward metaethics. The Vietnam War finally led him toward moral problems related to war and violence. For the last forty years he has been a great proponent of nonviolence and pacifism in the style of Tolstoy and Gandhi. If ethics is meant to be more than a purely academic exercise, the theoretical ethics of philosophy must be shown to be relevant to applied morality; the ongoing process of making moral judgments must add value to the world we live in. For Robert Holmes, no aspect of reality is more in need of ethical thinking and reform than the culture of war and violence that cannot be ignored. There are morally viable alternatives to this violence, Holmes argues, and he scrutinizes the sources and implications of such positions. Holmes shows that nonviolence and pacifism can lead us toward a more peaceful and humanely dignified world.
Author: Domenico Losurdo
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498502202
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
We know of the blood and tears provoked by the projects of transformation of the world through war or revolution. Starting from the essay published in 1921 by Walter Benjamin, twentieth century philosophy has been committed to the criticism of violence, even when it has claimed to follow noble ends. But what do we know of the dilemmas, of the “betrayals,” of the disappointments and tragedies which the movement of non-violence has suffered? This book tells a fascinating history: from the American Christian organizations in the first decades of the nineteenth century who wanted to eliminate slavery and war in a non-violent way, to the protagonists of movements—Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Capitini, M. L. King, the Dalai Lama—who either for idealism or for political calculation flew the flag of non-violence, up to the leaders of today’s “color revolutions.”
Author: Todd May
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745690491
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 124
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Book Description
We see nonviolent resistance all over today’s world, from Egypt’s Tahrir Square to New York Occupy. Although we think of the last century as one marked by wars and violent conflict, in fact it was just as much a century of nonviolence as the achievements of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and peaceful protests like the one that removed Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines clearly demonstrate. But what is nonviolence? What makes a campaign a nonviolent one, and how does it work? What values does it incorporate? In this unique study, Todd May, a philosopher who has himself participated in campaigns of nonviolent resistance, offers the first extended philosophical reflection on the particular and compelling political phenomenon of nonviolence. Drawing on both historical and contemporary examples, he examines the concept and objectives of nonviolence, and considers the different dynamics of nonviolence, from moral jiu-jitsu to nonviolent coercion. May goes on to explore the values that infuse nonviolent activity, especially the respect for dignity and the presupposition of equality, before taking a close-up look at the role of nonviolence in today’s world. Students of politics, peace studies, and philosophy, political activists, and those interested in the shape of current politics will find this book an invaluable source for understanding one of the most prevalent, but least reflected upon, political approaches of our world.
