A nonviolent response is the only way forward
The politics of violence is pervasive and corrosive, stretching from the Middle East to the streets of Los Angeles. The reckless and unnecessary military attacks by Israel’s Netanyahu government on Iran, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the deployment of U.S. National Guard troops and Marines to silence largely nonviolent protests, and the growing militarization of immigration policy are not isolated incidents. This violence is not about defense or security. It’s about domination and control and it puts us all in danger.
None of this makes us safer. The militarized response to political protest in the U.S., including the deployment of Marines to Los Angeles, reveals how the Trump Administration views domestic dissent through a lens of war. Immigration continues to be governed by policies that treat people as threats, not neighbors. These policies have enabled masked government agents to abduct individuals from streets, homes, and workplaces. Those are practices that Americans more often associate with authoritarian regimes than with a functioning democracy.
Our communities are called to action
We are committed to challenging the norms, narratives, and systems that uphold and legitimize militarism. Across organizations, borders, and movements, we join global calls and efforts to:
- Condemn militarized aggression and invest in nonviolent, diplomatic alternatives.
- Protect dissent and end the use of military force against protesters.
- Demilitarize immigration policies and restore the dignity of people regardless of their legal status.
- Reallocate military spending to meet human and planetary needs.
- Resist euphemisms that obscure violence and cultivate a new language of peace.
Our partners are acting
- The Center for International Policy is providing insightful education and advocacy to advance a more peaceful, just, and sustainable U.S. foreign policy.
- Win Without War offers tools and actions to challenge militarism.
- Waging Nonviolence brings people power news and analysis, offering critical and useful lessons for keeping people safe in the streets, as well as guidance on what to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked.
- The Feminist Peace Playbook offers a visionary framework for building safety through justice, care, and collective power.
⚠️ On Nonviolent Resistance against Authoritarianism
Ahead of No Kings Day on Saturday, June 14, we applaud the extraordinary nonviolent discipline of protesters around the country. It is critical to remember some key insights from peace research on nonviolent resistance—and the dynamics between resistance movements and security forces—to increase the effectiveness of resistance and decrease the likelihood of violent escalation:
- Media narratives shape how the public responds to protests. The extent to which different segments of the public are moved to support a resistance movement has a lot to do with the message coming out of whatever media they consume—and this messaging is closely tied to nonviolent discipline. Wasow (2020) found that when a campaign remains nonviolent and has a powerful, compelling message that speaks to the injustice at hand, the reporting tends to be about that injustice. When a movement devolves into vandalism or violence, the reporting becomes about that. Furthermore, the emerging narrative then has an impact on how much or how little public support a campaign gains (or loses). What this means is that resistance campaigns need to be extremely careful about any small nugget of vandalism or violence they hand to reporters and talking heads. Those predisposed to oppose the resistance campaign will take whatever image or story they can—no matter how anomalous it is within a broader context of largely nonviolent demonstrations—and use it over and over to paint a picture of violent mayhem that needs a heavy-handed response.
- Armed groups, police forces, and militaries are not monolithic institutions. They are made up of regular individuals with different motivations for being in whatever uniform they are in. We must always remember that there are some individuals in security institutions who have doubts about what they are being asked to do. Kaplan (2013) reminds us of this in the context of his research on communities facing armed groups during the Colombian civil war. The challenge is to create conditions that will encourage and enable these individuals within armed groups to act on their misgivings. He finds that collective nonviolent resistance is particularly good at creating the sorts of dilemmas that make it difficult for armed actors to decide how to respond. By collectively resisting certain policies or practices, activists make it hard to ignore their discontent and the injustice they are resisting and, by doing so nonviolently, they make it more uncomfortable for armed actors to respond with violence. By disrupting a business-as-usual response (like violent repression against violent rioters who can be easily cast as a threat), collective nonviolent resistance can instead spark reflection and questioning—and maybe even refusal to carry out orders or defections—among armed actors.
- Defections from the opponent group, especially among regime security forces, are one of the determinants of a successful resistance campaign. Chenoweth, E., & Stephan, M. (2011) find that nonviolent resistance campaigns are more often successful than armed resistance campaigns in part because they are more attractive to a broader, more diverse swath of the public, and they are therefore more likely to elicit defections. Ultimately, resistance movements that can attract a bigger, broader body of public support are more likely to succeed.
- Finally, to any police officer or National Guard soldier or Marine who feels uneasy carrying out orders that might at some point be given to use violence against protesters, know that overtly refusing those orders—or even subtly not complying with those orders—is the most powerful thing you can do. In Syria, as noted by Wallace (2018), some security forces who defected from the Assad regime back in 2011 went a step further and decided that, to protect protesters who were being violently targeted by regime forces, they then had to turn their weapons around against the regime through forming the Free Syrian Army. Rather than protecting civilians, this response—however well intended—ended up having the effect of pushing the country off the brink and into a civil war that lasted for 13 years, killing many more civilians than were being killed in the initial months of one-sided repression against nonviolent protesters (Wallace 2018). For a country as polarized and as heavily armed as the United States in 2025, descending into civil war is not an impossibility. Police and military forces in the U.S. who feel moved to side with the Constitution and the people rather than carry out the will of an authoritarian must remember that their real power and protective capacity lies not in their weapons but in dropping those very weapons when ordered to do something they find unconscionable.
Works Cited:
Chenoweth, E., & Stephan, M. (2011). How civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kaplan, O. (2013). Nudging armed groups: How civilians transmit norms of protection, Stability: International Journal of Security & Development, 2(3), 1-18. https://account.stabilityjournal.org/index.php/up-j-sijsd/article/view/sta.cw
Wallace, M.S. (2018). Standing “bare hands” against the Syrian regime: The turn to armed resistance and the question of civilian protection, Critical Studies on Security, 6(2), 237-258. https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2017.1367359
Wasow, O. (2020). Agenda seeding: How 1960s Black protests moved elites, public opinion and voting. American Political Science Review, 114(3), 638–659. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542000009X
