by Daniel Hunter, Feb 2009

With the US Empire suffering economically and otherwise, it's a great time (as I have written repeatedly) to learn from cultures outside of our own. It's not easy, but there's tremendous value and challenge in learning from indegenous peoples, people from occupied lands, and others who suffer at the ends of Western domination. At a recent training in Rome, Italy, I had the opportunity to both model this and promote this to a group of international nonviolence peacemakers. Here are some highlights.

THE CONTEXT

Myself and Akum Longchari (a Super-T graduate of Training for Change) teamed up to provide a training on "Nonviolent Struggle." The training was part of a larger conference called the Global Baptist Peace Conference.

The conference was largely organized by Reverend Dan Buttry, a long-time ally to Training for Change. Years ago Dan and I teamed up for trainings in West Africa; before that we co-facilitated in Nagaland (a lesser-known hot conflict in the world where people have been struggling for independence for over 50 years).

Akum is an indegenous trainer from Nagaland, where he has played a key organizing role in his country. He has helped move the armed struggle faction groups closer to reconciliation, while also propping up the human rights organizations to take a stronger lead in grassroots organizing. Meanwhile, I am coming off a series of successful campaigns with Casino-Free Philadelphia (www.CasinoFreePhila.org) where we have been fighting billion dollar corporations and the government with huge success.

Akum and I were both psyched to offer lessons from their struggles. We wanted to offer a nonviolence training session. But, as we talked, we also wanted to push. Given the highly international conference -- 59 countries were represented -- we wanted to offer a challenge, too, and address some of the challenges of working together globally. Two aspects of that challenge became clear: talking about structure and talking about imperialism.

POWER AND STRUCTURE

In our preparation session, Akum said, "We need to talk about power and structure." Power of nonviolence, of course, has become a standard for me. I am tired of people using nonviolence to mean witnessing or applied to strategies merely of self-expression. It's about power: making social change by leveraging the power of the grassroots.

Power we planned to address through the chair power exercise: set up some chairs and have people think about which one is the most "powerful." We got people's brains stretched to look at the different dynamics of power: power through relationship, through institution, through isolation, through violence, through internal attitude, etc.

But what did we want to do with structure?

We decided to extend the chair power, by turning them into sculptures. People occupied chairs and over a series of iteration crafted a sculpture that was supposed to represent society structure: someone with a foot on their stomach, someone pressing their foot down, and a third person on the top pressing both down. The symbolism was clear.

Where, then, does nonviolent action occur?

We talked about how nonviolence has regularly been used for structural changes. But more and more, argued Akum, people are using it for issue-based campaigns alone or for "winning" without any dimensions of power. They are addressing the outcomes of a violent society, but not addressing the structures that create it.

A Filipino participant raised the Philippines as an example. There, people have repeatedly dislodged unwanted political leaders through grassroots campaigns. They have gained in a sense of power. But they have been unable to dislodge much of the corruption that is implicit in the structure. Removing the president does not mean the new president will be less corrupt.

We left the structure conversation with a series of challenges for people: what are the ways your work goes further in addressing structure? What are ways you hold back on it?

IMPERIALISM IN WHO TALKS AND INTERVENES

And then we looked at another theme: who gets to decide where to intervene on issues. For example, why was the Western war to oppose the Iraq war when it's not the most violent or even the one that grassroots people may have less influence on? Who decides which human rights campaigns get the most attention? How does East Timor get more well-known than West Papua? We raised many questions, encouraging people to look at them.

There was a parallel process going on in the group. Even during our group discussions, the dynamics at play globally were at play locally. Even when we started the dynamic showed up: When we came in the room I briefly introduced Akum and myself. And Akum began launching into an agenda review, setting the context. He was immediately interrupted by a Western participant.

I almost laughed. Here we were, spending some time thinking about nonviolent struggle and ways empire affects its work, and we had it demonstrably in the room: the confidence with which Westerners can take over a room.

The dynamic repeated itself throughout the morning and into the afternoon. Akum's style is relaxed, self-effacing, and humble. He was not glamorous, snazzy, or exuding energy, unlike the Western style I tended to be trained into. ("Show confidence," a remember one mentor telling me.) And Westerners felt fine interrupting him.

Of course, that was not the only example of imperialism. Ways of speaking, how ideas moved through the group, and so on were all live to group. Should we intervene on them? Akum gave me a good lesson on this point.

At one point, just after our lunch break, Akum mentioned that he was from Nagaland, which has been under Indian, Burmese, and Chinese occupation.

"That's the problem," interrupted an Indian man. "You should say you're from India."

The room snapped with tension. As I had often done during the day, I looked to Akum to gauge his reaction. He didn't flinch or say anything to defend his right to decide where he is from.

Normally, I would have jumped in a while ago. But I could tell from the way Akum was operating, that he was actively in intervention mode -- doing a different kind of intervention. I watched and waited. Akum nodded and looked at the man, almost inviting him to say more.

And more he did. The Indian man continued talking about why Nagaland was part of India. And then he moved topics to talk about something else. He talked for maybe five more minutes before pausing long enough for us trainers to return focus to the work at hand.

Later I asked Akum about what he was doing. I told him my instinct was to interrupt and challenge him. "I wasn't worried about him," said Akum. "I wanted everyone in the room to see his ignorance. He was speaking well on my behalf because he was allowing everyone to see the rightness of our position that we should be free."

It was a different style. It surely wouldn't work everywhere, but at the moment I wondered: did my high-interventionary facilitation style sometimes miss offering this kind of in-the-moment teaching opportunity? I also appreciated that I knew enough, at that moment, to not intervene which would have stopped his intervention. How often do high-ranked people overshadow the interventions of others with less rank? All these thoughts went through my head.

And like much of our training on empire and nonviolence struggle, we did not give answers but instead raised more questions, encouraging people to go deeper. The workshop ended with a few choice comments: "This was deep, and raised up some serious questions I need to bring back to my community" and from one participant from Zimbabwe: "If people in the West took these questions seriously, we might be in a different position in my country." I certainly hope we do.

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