How technology and community organizing can combine to help prevent violence, with examples from Chicago to Sri Lanka. Tunisian and Egyptian protestors famously made use of social media to rally supporters and disseminate information as the “Arab Spring” began to unfold in 2010. Less well known, but with just as much potential to bring about social change, are ongoing local efforts to use social media and other forms of technology to prevent deadly outbreaks of violence. In The Technology of Nonviolence, Joseph Bock describes and documents technology-enhanced efforts to stop violence before it happens in Africa, Asia, and the United States. Once peacekeeping was the purview of international observers, but today local citizens take violence prevention into their own hands. These local approaches often involve technology—including the use of digital mapping, crowdsourcing, and mathematical pattern recognition to identify likely locations of violence—but, as Bock shows, technological advances are of little value unless they are used by a trained cadre of community organizers. After covering general concepts in violence prevention and describing technological approaches to tracking conflict and cooperation, Bock offers five case studies that range from “low-tech” interventions to prevent ethnic and religious violence in Ahmedebad, India, to an anti-gang initiative in Chicago that uses Second Life to train its “violence interrupters.” There is solid evidence of success, Bock concludes, but there is much to be discovered, developed, and, most important, implemented.

Towards an applied theory of violence prevention -- Reporting and warning about deadly possibilities -- Organizing against ethnoreligious violence in Ahmedabad -- Overcoming gang violence in Chicago -- Counteracting ethnoreligious violence in Sri Lanka -- Crowdsourcing during post-election violence in Kenya -- Foisting tribal violence in East Africa -- Comparing the approaches -- How to intervene effectively -- What to do when violence prevention is unlikely to work -- Concerns about misallocation of resources -- Future directions and recommendations.

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

9/11 marked the beginning of a century that is defined by widespread violence. Every other day seems to be a furthering of the already catastrophic present towards a more disastrous tomorrow. With climate change looming over us, frequent economic instability, religious wars, and relentless political mayhem, life for what we have made of it seems more and more unsustainable. Douglas Allen insists that we look to Gandhi, if only selectively and creatively, in order to move towards a nonviolent and sustainable future. Is a Gandhi-informed swaraj technology, valuable but humanly limited, possible? What would a Gandhian world—a more egalitarian, interconnected, decentralized—of globalization look like? Focusing on key themes in Gandhi’s thinking such as violence and nonviolence, absolute truth and relative truth, ethical and spiritual living, and his critique of modernity, the book compels us to rethink our positions today.

The Psychology of Nonviolence explores in a psychological perspective the meaning of nonviolence, particularly its philosophy, strategy, and implications. This book reports scientific evidence often based on experiments performed in accordance with the rules of experiments as the subject matter permits. Organized into eight chapters, this book begins with an explanation of the concepts of violence and nonviolence. Subsequent chapters explain the cognitive dynamics, as well as the power of nonviolence and information. The nonviolent protest, moral and practical bases of noncooperation, forms of noncooperation, and reconciliation are discussed. This text also shows the means and ends in nonviolence, including confronting some criticisms, preventive nonviolence and noncooperation in foreign policy, and peace. This book represents an instance of the explicit injection of values into social science.

"Peace Ecology" presents a cutting-edge exploration of an emerging paradigm that links the essence of peace and nonviolence with the tenets of ecology and the principles of environmentalism. Looking at issues including food justice, water sharing, climate change, peace zones, and the free economy, this book considers examples and illustrations from around the world where people, communities, and nations are employing the teachings of ecology as a tool for mitigating conflict and promoting peace. "Peace Ecology" presents an integrative perspective that bears directly upon the most pressing issues of our time, constituting both the ecological realm of peace and the peacemaking potential of ecology. The volume examines the rich history, contemporary relevance, and transformative future potential inherent in this dynamic nexus of theory and action. Its overarching aim is no less than moving the current scarcity-conflict paradigm to one of cooperative resource management and, ultimately, toward peaceful coexistence both among ourselves and within the balance of nature.To read the Common Dreams excerpt of "Peace Ecology" Click Here.Talk Nation Radio Interview with Randall Amster and David Swanson here."