Lester R. Kurtz

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at George Mason University

Nonviolent civil resistance—and some aspects of peace studies—were born in Africa with Mahatma Gandhi’s campaigns against South Africa’s pass laws for Indians in the country. Three components or stages characterize Gandhi’s African Satyagraha: listen, analyze, and mobilize, which can also be applied to peace studies more generally. Gandhi took thos...

Few individuals have captured the collective imagination as Mohandas K. Gandhi. In addition to his most well-known role as the leader of the Indian Independence Movement, which helped to end colonialism, Gandhi also inspired subsequent generations of nonviolent activists and movements. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the US Civil Rights Movement t...

Political repression often paradoxically fuels popular movements rather than undermining resistance. When authorities respond to strategic nonviolent action with intimidation, coercion, and violence, they often undercut their own legitimacy, precipitating significant reforms or even governmental overthrow. Brutal repression of a movement is often a...

The idea of women's rights as human rights can facilitate our identifying the causes, consequences, and potential remedies for the current quagmire in which we find themselves, but it needs some reformulation. To the traditional understandings of human rights, I add four conceptual tools: (1) Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of the counterparts of rights and...

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, often known as Mahatma Gandhi, is widely cited by contemporary activists as a source of inspiration and strategies. Gandhi was arguably unparalleled at mobilizing resources, taking advantage of—and creating—political opportunities, and effectively framing such messages as justice, equality, and independence or freedom (S...

The dominant model of development, characterized by large-scale industrialization and neoliberal policies, is unsustainable in terms of its role in the marginalization of many segments of human society and the exploitation of nature. This article presents the imperative need for a development model that is sustainable, arguing that it is important...

Whereas conventional wisdom assumes that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, or is given to those who steer a course down the mainstream, Gandhi's success lies in not accepting dominant paradigms but in challenging them. Gandhi synthesizes the two contradictory teachings in the world's religious and ethical traditions about violence in the nonv...

The 2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict provides timely and useful information about antagonism and reconciliation in all contexts of public and personal life. Building on the highly-regarded 1st edition (1999), and publishing at a time of seemingly inexorably increasing conflict and violent behaviour the world over, the Enc...

The iconic struggle between the apartheid regime of South Africa and those who resisted it illustrates the complexity of some cases of civil resistance. The decades of struggle saw the ebb and flow of a wide variety of strategic actions within the anti-apartheid movement. American theologian Walter Wink (1987: 4) suggests the movement was “probably...

While a military junta ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, dissent was silenced. The silence was broken by a brave group of mothers, searching for their missing children, who at first were motivated by family rather than politics. The Mothers of The Plaza de Mayo (“The Mothers of the Disappeared”) empowered others to speak out about human rights abu...

When a group of students founded the new organization Otpor (“Resistance”) in October 1998, the regime of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic seemed firmly entrenched. Only two years later, he was driven out of office after a massive mobilization of civil resistance inspired and in many ways shaped by Otpor organizers. The Democratic Opposition of...

Following General Augusto Pinochet's 1973 accession to power in a bloody military coup, a movement in opposition to the dictatorship gained momentum over the next 15 years despite assassinations, torture, and the "disappearance" of over 3,000 political opponents and officials of the previous democratic government.

Only eleven days after 17 November 1989, when riot police had beaten peaceful student demonstrators in Prague, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia relinquished its power and allowed the single-party state to collapse. By 29 December 1989, the so-called Velvet Revolution, led by the nonviolent coalition Civic Forum, transformed Václav Havel from a...

The 2nd edition of Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict provides timely and useful information about antagonism and reconciliation in all contexts of public and personal life. Building on the highly-regarded 1st edition (1999), and publishing at a time of seemingly inexorably increasing conflict and violent behaviour the world over, the En...

A special issue of Peace Review on ?Third World Peace Perspectives? presents a profound paradox because the title is both important and problematic. It suggests, on the one hand, that the Third World exists as a category and that people who live there have a distinct perspective on peace. Various questions immediately emerge from the publication of...

Not all deterrence is a consequence of violent threats, despite the tendency to equate the two. It is time to rethink this crucial form of social life if we wish to reduce violence in the world. The problems of crime and violence are not simply at the margins of modern societies, but also at the core. Deterrence is a complex form of social interact...

This article examines the nuclear arms race as ritualized behavior and evaluates characteristics of ritual to comprehend the dynamics of the arms race. Following a review of the literature and statements of those participating in, conducting, examining, and opposing the arms race, the authors find the analogy of the ritual appropriate. They find th...

The Zald and Berger model of “bureaucratic insurgency” is assessed in light of data of the “modernist movement” in the Roman Catholic Church. Our historical case study of this movement produces evidence that generally supports the model but that also indicates the need for some important modifications. In particular, we find that the Zald and Berge...

The Zald and Berger model of “bureaucratic insurgency” is assessed in light of data of the “modernist movement” in the Roman Catholic Church. Our historical case study of this movement produces evidence that generally supports the model but that also indicates the need for some important modifications. In particular, we find that the Zald and Berge...

Robert Park's „Notes on the Origins of the Society for Social Research” represent an important document previously published only in the in-house Bulletin of the Society for Social Research. They are presented here, along with an introduction which indicates the generally unacknowledged importance of the society and suggests five themes in Park's „...

A study of the Garden of Eden mythology as it appears in three cultural contexts—ancient Jewish, early Christian, and early American—sheds light on the relationship between cultural forms and social organization. The paper argues that cultural expressions play a definitional role in boundary maintenance at times of social crisis. The Garden of Eden...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Sociology, August 1980. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 315-338).

Mohandas Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement of 1930-1931—launched by the Salt March—is a critical case for understanding civil resistance. Although by itself it failed to bring Indian independence, it seriously undermined British authority and united India’s population in a movement for independence under the leadership of the Indian National Con...

In 1929, the Khudai Khidmatgars (“Servants of God”) movement, led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, nonviolently mobilized to oppose the British in India’s Northwest Frontier Province. Ghaffar Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement inspired thousands of Pashtuns (also called Pathans), who were known as fierce warriors, and others to lay down their arms...

Peaceful relationships are sustained interactions characterized by the absence or low levels of violence. Easier to theorize or write about than to sustain in practice, from interpersonal interactions to relations at the global level and among states, institutions, and social groups, peaceful relationships are the building blocks of a more peaceful...

From the authoritarian’s perspective, internal dissidents are easy to deal with – put them in jail, have them disappeared, exiled, or executed. It is not so easy to silence the prestigious Nobel committee, however, let alone the international community. Of course, that is exactly why Professor Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.