ReligionDispatches.org

Members of Veterans for Peace at an October 5 protest in DC.

Sharon Nepstad is a sociologist, and director of the religious studies program at the University of New Mexico. Her most recent book, Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement, tells the story of the Plowshares Movement, an international activist effort begun in 1980 when a small group of Catholic pacifists broke into a weapons plant, poured their own blood on documents, and attacked nuclear missile parts with hammers: swords into plowshares.

Almost thirty years later, Americans are waging two wars that have dragged on almost a decade. Strong voices of opposition to the wars are typically framed as morally pure, but politically irrelevant. Violence is regrettable, but necessary, and nonviolence is morally admirable but unrealistic in our deeply conflicted world. Are these the only two options?

Nepstad thinks otherwise, and her research into faith-based pacifist movements in the United States and Central America shows how nonviolence can be an effective strategy and policy in a violent world. In so doing, she cracks open the imaginative paralysis that has kept nonviolence outside our repertoire of realistic policy options. —The Eds.

RD: What got you into peace studies?

SN: It started when I was a freshman in college and I took a course called “Christian Perspectives on Peace and War.”  I went in not necessarily knowing what my position was, and through the course of the class I watched a couple of films that profoundly shaped my thinking. One of them was a film that showed a lot of footage of Vietnam War victims and the effects of Agent Orange and napalm; the other one was a film about Hiroshima and what happened after we dropped nuclear bombs. And when I watched those films, it was clear to me that this is not a morally acceptable way to deal with conflict. It is not ok to say that we have a disagreement so we are going to kill a hundred thousand of your people in one bombing. That was the starting point, just acknowledging that the use of massive violence is a morally unacceptable means of dealing with conflict.

So then I asked, “What is the alternative?” If you can’t use violence, which has been our societal standard, what alternatives are there? That got me into reading Gandhi and King, and what impressed me about them is that they were so practical. We tend to think nostalgically about Gandhi and King, viewing them as these idealized saints. But if you read about their lives, you see that they were brilliant strategists who knew how to make nonviolence work. As King put it, “You don't have to be a pacifist to be in this movement. But nonviolence is the only viable path for us. It’s our only chance of winning.”

This was in the 1980s when there were a lot of civil wars in the world. I was particularly watching the conflicts in Central America and in the Philippines and I began wondering: how do you take Gandhian nonviolence and apply it in that context? How do you take King’s strategies and adapt them to another cultural situation? Then in the late 1980s, I ended up working for an international peace organization in West Germany that was supporting the peace initiatives of the East German churches. At that time, nobody thought things would change because this was the center of the Cold War, the battlefield between East and West. There were so many nuclear bombs stationed in East and West Germany that a nuclear war felt like a real possibility. But then, very unexpectedly, the Berlin wall fell. We watched this happen, and it was at that moment that I realized that we have to figure out how nonviolence works and how it can be adapted to other countries. I realized that nonviolence was a practical option but people did not consider it very often because there were a lot of misconceptions about it. The more I researched nonviolence, the more convinced I became that this is something that people need to learn.

What do we need to know to make nonviolence a viable option?

We need a better understanding of how power operates. On this point, the work of Gene Sharp has been extremely helpful. We tend to think that all the power is concentrated in the government, but in fact the population has numerous forms of power. And once we figure that out and claim it, then we can use this power nonviolently to transform our societies. Peace activists have to think strategically. People don’t think of peacemaking as a strategic phenomenon. They think of activists carrying signs that state: “We’re against the war.” Yet peacemaking must be as strategic as military actions are; otherwise it will be unsuccessful. Generally, regimes don’t fall because you hold up a sign. So I think there has to be more research into the strategic approach to peacemaking. My own research interests deal with the factors and conditions that make nonviolent struggles succeed.

What is violence?

The most prevalent form of violence is structural violence. Certainly, there is physical violence such as spouse or child abuse. But structural forms of violence systematically affect whole groups of people. This type of violence occurs when structures—such as an authoritarian regime, a patriarchal system, or racial segregation laws—limit a group’s opportunities and life chances. Such structures do violence to people by systematically oppressing them, by treating them in a degrading manner, and by obstructing their chances for success. I think it is important that we conceptualize violence in a broad way. Violence is not just restricted to physical or verbal forms; whole societal structures can be violent.

To what extent are certain strategies used in protest violent?

The question of the line between violence and nonviolence is an ongoing debate within peace movements. My own research on the Catholic Left-inspired Plowshares movement is an example of a group that really pushes the boundaries by destroying and damaging military equipment. The debate over property destruction has not been settled within the peace movement.

But what I respect about the Catholic Left is that in the 1960s they were ones who began to say that sometimes protest is not enough. There had been hundreds of protests against the Vietnam War but the government didn’t change its policy or position. So the Catholic Left started to call on people to interfere with the government’s capacity to wage war. These activists asked: “Would it be violent if people dismantled the gas chambers in Auschwitz?” Some activists were still opposed to property destruction as a resistance tactic, but the Catholic Left activists argued that they were saving lives by destroying draft cards or by attempting to disarm weapons of mass destruction.

Even traditional Gandhian tactics can be violent if they are used in a coercive manner. The Gandhian concept of satyagraha emphasizes that we ought to search for the good in our opponents; we ought to persuade them as we implement nonviolent acts of noncooperation. But if a nonviolent tactic is carried out in a coercive way, or if it is done with the view that the opponent should be humiliated or degraded, then it becomes a violent form of resistance. It is something that I think activists have to be constantly reflecting upon. The division between violent and nonviolent tactics isn’t always as clear-cut as we think. In my opinion, it has a lot to do with the spirit in which a campaign is conducted.

What are the main goals of your work? Are you trying to create activists? 

My primary goal is not to make students into activists, but that may happen when students read about some of these cases and movements. I would like to see people acting on their convictions but, of course, that could take a lot of different forms. I see my role as a combination of a storyteller and a social analyst. In the movements that I have written about, there was always an important story to tell. My early work focused on the Central America Solidarity Movement and the role of churches in challenging US military involvement in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Tags: catholic left, daniel berrigan, gandhi, martin luther king, nonviolence, peace studies, plowshares, satyagraha

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