When the culture-jamming activist group Adbusters put out a call on July 13 for "20,000 people" to "flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months," it never said who...

Saturday evenings, on the south side of Tompkins Square Park in New York City, there has been a meeting happening. About a hundred people are clumped in an ovular mass around a banner, spray-painted with the words "NYC General Assembly." Some have been coming for weeks, and others are there...

I noted at the end of my earlier post that nine people were arrested on Wall Street in New York City on September 1 while conducting a test run of the police response in preparation for #occupywallstreet, the sustained action slated to begin on September 17. As of my...

Even as the last of the 1,252 people arrested in front of the White House in opposition to the tar sands pipeline were being handcuffed and processed, another group planning to make trouble in the capital decided to bide its...

It's an eerie feeling when you know something should be happening, and it isn't -- yet. In The Washington Post, sociologist David Meyer has an incisive essay asking why, if Americans are so angry about their political system, are...

So much of the ugliness that the American wars have brought into the world over the past decade has been invisible, hidden from view by being unrecorded, unremembered, redacted, spun, censored, or glorified. For those not in the way of...

Even those of us who don't bother owning stocks will find ourselves shuddering some at the newspaper these days:

But don't let it discourage you. The next few months are looking to be a busy...

Originally published at Waging Nonviolence.

When a country is shaken by violence, most people expect it to react in kind with force. We're certainly reminded of that now,...

On the first day of this month, inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison, joined by inmates in other prisons around the state, began a hunger strike to protest "inhumane and torturous conditions" in the Security Housing Unit, which holds inmates in solitary confinement for decades at a time. They're still...

Unfolding this month at the Boston Review is "China's Other Revolution"--an essay by MIT political scientist Edward S. Steinfeld and a series of responses, all on the subject of whether and when real democratic reform will happen,...

It's a little-appreciated fact that Frederick Douglass, a man born in slavery who became a famous orator and an advisor to President Lincoln, had an especially perceptive grasp of how nonviolent struggle works. (Some times more...

On Saturday night, after driving through the snow from his home in rural Wisconsin, Waging Nonviolence special correspondent Quince Mountain arrived in Madison, where for almost two weeks, protesters had been occupying the Capitol building in a historic effort to prevent the passage of Governor Scott Walker's bid...

It's New Year's Eve, and last night my colleague at Waging Nonviolence, Eric Stoner, returned safely from Afghanistan. He was there as a journalist and activist with an envoy of peacemakers, meeting networks of Afghans and internationals who are working to end...

It's out: an enormous trove of documents about the war in Afghanistan appeared on Wikileaks (whose servers currently seem to be overwhelmed by the traffic) together with comprehensive reports by The New York Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian. The leak represents...

A couple weeks ago I was riding my usual route from home in Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg Bridge when I saw that the ground had shifted beneath my bicycle gears. As I crossed Flushing along Bedford Avenue, into the heart of Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my bike lane was gone....

During World War II, government fiat turned thousands of peacetime manufacturers into arms producers for the war effort. Factories that once made cars and home appliances were retooled to turn out weapons. Now, in the present recession, market forces appear to be doing effectively the same thing, threatening to throw...

With a black hood covering my head, all I could see outside was blurry and dark. The outside couldn't see in. After an hour of standing still, my muscles began to ache terribly. The cardboard sign I carried felt like a slab of concrete. Sounds blended and muffled, and their...

"y Hamas launch missiles not peace?" complained the Israeli Consulate in New York during a December 30th press conference held on the microblogging site Twitter. Meanwhile, during that fourth day of Israeli air strikes against the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian death toll passed 350. Many around the world, shocked...