Comment archive

Monday, 13 Oct 2025
María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize captures the spirit of our age

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is a reminder that the future of democracy rests on those who dare to protest without violence.

Wednesday, 1 Dec 2021
The New Pattern of Conflict in Myanmar

A new conflict pattern has appeared in Myanmar. Amidst a spiraling economic, social and health crisis, armed fighting is no longer confined to ethnic minority areas but has cropped up in cities and regions where the ethnic Bamar are in majority. They see themselves as pursuing a nation-wide resistance. Preventive ...

Tuesday, 8 Sept 2020
Book review: The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political

Judith Butler. New York: Verso, 2020; pp. ix – 209. $26.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781788732765 In its shift away from traditional approaches to security studies that implied work done through the frame of war and a state-centric approach, debates regarding the discursive and theoretical implications of the concepts, grammars, methodologies, and ...

Sunday, 5 Jul 2020
Oppression and Regime Survival: Will Trump’s reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement bring about his exit?

Since George Floyd’s brutal killing by the police in May, demonstrations have spread to more than 2,000 major cities and villages in the United States. Black Lives Matter (“BLM”) is probably the most widespread movement in the country’s history. In addition, we have seen huge global support, with demonstrations in ...

Monday, 9 Mar 2020
PRIO Has the Leading Experts on Protests

How does a country’s security apparatus react to a protest movement? And what happens in the aftermath of successful protests? PRIO is conducting three major research projects about protest movements, securing its position as an international leader in this field. In 2019, the world experienced a surge of non-violent protest ...

Tuesday, 7 Jan 2020
The Rise and Fall of the Twitter Revolution

The year 2019 ended with a new wave of non-violent protests. In every corner of the world there have been huge movements gathering. This marks the end of a decade that opened with the Arab Spring; a decade that might go down in history as the decade of mass protests. ...

Tuesday, 6 Feb 2018
From Wales to Catalonia and Beyond: Gene Sharp and Non-Violent Nationalism

Gene Sharp – a pioneer in the study of non-violent action – died peacefully at the age of 90 on 28 January 2018. Obituaries in many newspapers have highlighted his contributions to the study of non-violent resistance against dictatorial regimes, pointing to how his work inspired the Arab Spring and ...

Wednesday, 31 Jan 2018
Gene Sharp Has Died and the World Has Lost a Global Educator

Just a week after his 90th birthday, Gene Sharp passed away 28 January. The magazine New Statesman once described Gene Sharp as the “Machiavelli of Nonviolence” and Thomas Weber labelled him “the Clausewitz of Nonviolent Action.” Who was this man, and what did he contribute to our understanding of the ...

Thursday, 20 Jul 2017
Rudy Rummel – a Many-Faceted Scholar

From mathematics to democide Rudolph J Rummel always published just as RJ Rummel but was well known in the profession as Rudy. He was a man of many talents, and to some of his readers he may also have seemed to present many different faces. He came from a broken ...

Wednesday, 3 Feb 2016
Seeing Flight as a Non-violent Option: One Way to Change the Discourse about the World’s 60 Million Refugees

Today, one in every 122 humans living on the planet is a refugee, an internally displaced person, or an asylum-seeker. In 2014, conflict and persecution forced a staggering 42,500 persons per day to leave their homes and seek protection elsewhere, resulting in 59.5 million total refugees worldwide. According to the ...

Thursday, 29 Oct 2015
Unarmed Protests Force Leaders from Power Twice as Often as Violent Uprisings

Research lends support to the Nobel Committee’s rationale for its award of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2015; the revolution in Tunisia shows how non-violent protest can assist in democratization. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet came as a surprise to most observers. ...

Tuesday, 29 Sept 2015
Non-violent Resistance and Double Repression

January 12, 2013: Israeli armed forces dismantle a peaceful Palestinian sit-in in the West Bank, arresting several of the organizers. July 6, 2012: the Palestinian Authority’s security forces violently attack a peaceful demonstration against normalization with Israel in Ramallah, the West Bank. These episodes illustrate the predicament of Palestinian non-violent ...

Monday, 29 Jun 2015
The "Resister’s Toolkit"

In his article in the May 2015 issue of APSR, Evgeny Finkel makes a splash by arguing that exposure to “selective repression” (such as surveillance, beatings, arrests, and torture) helps dissidents to develop a robust skill set with which to maintain enduring resistance later on. He supports this argument with ...

Sunday, 8 Mar 2015
Fifty Years Since the Selma March

Yesterday, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, President Obama and over 100 members of the US Congress celebrated the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights march in Selma, a turning-point in the non-violent civil rights movement. President Obama was introduced by John Lewis, who with Hosea Williams and others led ...

Tuesday, 17 Feb 2015
Who’s Afraid of “Waging Nonviolence”?

Since at least 2011, the Chinese government has censored numerous websites on the topic of nonviolent resistance, including websites for the Albert Einstein Institution, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, an online bibliography of scholarship of nonviolent action, and the website for the NAVCO data project, among others. A month ...

Friday, 18 Jul 2014
The Paradox of 2014

In recent weeks, a number of people have asked me whether I think we’re headed for World War III. Maybe it’s the intense media coverage of the centennial of WWI. Maybe it’s all the violence heating up in Israel & Gaza, Iraq, and Ukraine, and wars raging in Syria, Nigeria, ...

Monday, 24 Feb 2014
Violence and Non-Violence in Ukraine

​​​The Ukrainian opposition is more likely to succeed if its campaign remains primarily non-violent, writes Marianne Dahl, Doctoral Researcher at PRIO. ​This is not the first time that Kiev’s streets have been filled with demonstrators wanting to end Viktor Yanukovych’s days in the presidential palace. In 2004, the Orange Revolution ...

Wednesday, 28 Sept 2011
Leading the Charge Against Injustice

Abraham Lincoln once said: ‘It is hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.’ It takes belief and faith, it takes self-confidence and persistence, to lead a cavalry charge against injustice – and John Lewis has displayed all of those qualities. He has ...

Wednesday, 28 Sept 2011
Non-violent Struggles: Scholarship, Policy and Realities

Thank you to PRIO for the opportunity to join you today and to Congressman John Lewis for his insights into the use of nonviolence in the American civil rights movement. [This text is a transcript of Kathleen G. Cunningham’s comments to John Lewis’ PRIO Annual Peace Address]. What I hope ...

Wednesday, 28 Sept 2011
The Role of Non-violence in the Struggle for Liberation

US Congressman John Lewis gave the PRIO Annual Peace Address 2011. Lewis has been a Member of the US House of Representatives for the Fifth congressional district in Georgia since 1987. He was a prominent leader in the nonviolent civil rights movement in the early 1960s and President Obama has ...