Nonviolence as a Discursive Struggle

In the last issue of Nonviolence Today (#38 May/June 1994) Robert Burrowes
presented a convincing case for pursuing nonviolence as a way of life.  I
would like to suggest here that in addition to practices at this crucial
personal level, the role of nonviolence must also be considered as part of
what could be called a discursive struggle.  It is of utmost importance to
examine how dominant societal opinions judge the morality, usefulness, and
applicability of violence and nonviolence respectively.  These issues are
more than just exercises in abstract theorizing, they are of seminal
practical importance to activists and provide valuable guidelines about how
to fight oppression and how to work towards a more just and nonviolent
society.

I will try to illustrate this claim by presenting Michel Foucault's concept
of discourse in a langauge that is, hopefully, accessible to readers who do
not have a philosophical background.  In one of his early lectures at the
College de France, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault
presented discourses or discursive practices as mechanisms that set the
boundaries to our thought processes.  In any society, no matter how
democratic, there is always a process of exclusion going on.  Some ideas
prevail over others.  Some actions are considered legitimate and moral, some
not.  Although for us the boundaries between them seems objective, they are
in fact arbitrary and in constant flux.  It is the existing dominant
discourse, the most widely accepted way of looking at the world, that decides
through what lenses we look at the environment that surrounds us.

Why is such an insight important to the study and practice of nonviolent
resistance?  Dominant discourses not only influence the way we look at the
world, they also construct it.  Practices of domination and patterns of
conflict are not immutable facts of life.  They are the outcome of specific
historical struggles.  Our world is shaped by the way we look at it.

Much of the power that is contained in violence is derived from the fact that
today's dominant discourse draws a direct link between power and violence. 
Power, as understood by most policy makers and commentators, is a negative
concept, something that emanates from a government's control over the means
of violence and coercion.  Power is, according to this view, not vested in
the people, it is contained in such institution as the army, the police, or
the state in general.  Foucault vehemently disagrees.  He sees power not as a
repressive element, he sees power as an enabling force, a potential
opportunity to improve the position of disadvantaged people.  Power is not
just limited to force, it operates at all societal levels.  Maybe most
importantly, power is not a predetermined and fixed thing, it is what the
dominant discourse defines it to be.

This is, of course, not to say that coercion has no real effects.  But all
violence can do is kill, injure, or displace people.  Any additional effect
of violence is dependent upon either the continuous application of violence
or the credibility of the threat that it produced.  Thus, with regard to
power relationships, the more enduring consequences of violence are not its
immediate effects, but the fear that they produce.

The same could be said of nonviolence.  Its power depends largely upon people
being aware of the potential that social noncooperation contains.  If people
in a repressive society accept that they are powerless against the
overwhelming state apparatus, then change from below is not likely to happen.
If, by contrast, the population realizes that the power to rule is dependent
upon the obedience of the population, then various possibilities for fighting
repression could arise.  Recent successful examples of such challenges
include the manifestation of 'people power' in the Philippines (1986),
successful student resistance to military regimes in South Korea (1987) and
Thailand (1992), or the velvet revolutions against authoritarian Communism in
East-Central Europe (1989).  

What kind of consequences does a devoted nonviolent activist draw from these
observations?  There are several crucial implications.  Acknowledging the
importance of discourses entails that besides nurturing the inner virtues of
nonviolence, as Robert Burrowes correctly advocates, one needs to pay equal
attention to the external awareness of these virtues.  It is not enough if a
few devoted activists are aware of the power of nonviolence.  In order to
have an influence on the dominant discourse and its forging of reality,
activists must try to increase public awareness about what nonviolence can
and cannot do.

Opening up thinking space within the dominant discourse is, of course, not an
easy task.  Established societal systems and the discourses that maintain
them contain an in-built mechanism of self-preservation.  Because dominant
discourses helped to establish the existing 'reality', alternatives to them
seem often to be unreasonable, Utopian.  Established regimes always try to
preempt or eliminate threats to the status quo, be they of a practical or a
discursive nature.  It is thus not surprising that throughout most historical
periods, statesmen, politicians, writers, and dominant societal discourses in
general stressed the duty to obey far more than the possibilities that could
arise out of disobeying.  It is not surprising that those who resisted
existing practices and promulgated the power of nonviolence were
systematically excluded from mainstream society.  The most prominent among
these seminal yet marginalized authors include Etienne de la Boetie, Henry
David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi and Gene Sharp.

Hence, if we are to unfold the full potential of nonviolence, we need to
continuously challenge the privileged position of the dominant discourse. 
Only through the continuous creation of thinking space can we eventually move
towards forms of social justice that are less exclusionary than the present
ones.  Only though a continuous challenge of prevailing perceptions of power
can such forms of nonviolent protest as civil disobedience or sit-ins
contribute to fighting domination and improving the position of marginalized
societal groups.  Only if we continuously resist submission to prevalent
social practices can nonviolent forms of conflict resolution take over the
task that coercion and violence are fulfilling now.

It is the responsibility of each of us who is concerned with nonviolence to
engage with the dominant discourse and the way it links power with violence. 
It is up to us to convince the people around us that nonviolence is more than
just a superior moral position.  We need to draw attention to the
transformative power that it contains and to the ways through which this
power can be unleashed.  This is one of the reasons why a publication like
Nonviolence Today is of great importance, not just as a forum for exchanging
ideas among activists, but also as an instrument to influence the general
public.
Roland Bleiker