Peace teams

Peace teams

When nonviolent civil resisters intentionally confront a bad law--or a good law for a good reason--they know that part of what they are doing is part of what they are doing is stepping forward having prepared themselves for provocations. They want the public to see that they mean it when they claim to be nonviolent. They want their opponents to believe it when they, the challengers and resisters, assert their nonviolence and confront a social wrong in favor of a social good.

Their opponents or the targeted group usually have a legal right to use violence to enforce the law. Adversaries often know that they have put the resisters in a very hard dilemma. If the resisters back down, the opponents win public approval. If the resisters are violent--even in justifiable self-defense--the spin from the official channels will use that violent self-defense as an excuse, in turn, for the violence that the opponent actually started. Carefully selected moments of any violent self-defense will be featured again and again in news media as evidence that the challenger movement is composed of liars, and they are not nonviolent at all. Of course if the challengers never claimed to be nonviolent in the first place that is the easiest of all to defeat, as the record clearly shows again and again. 

The wider public will usually dismiss any nonviolent resistance if it turns to violence, especially if the civil resisters need to change public opinion on the issue in order to succeed. If the public is widely in support of the policy change, or protection of policy, which the civil resisters are advocating, the amount and nature of violence on the part of the resistance campaign is more negotiable. But especially in the early stages of the mobilization, when much of the public often holds a status-quo-ante opinion, the ranks of the resistance need to prove their innocence, because the wider public will reject it on the flimsiest of evidence, or suspicion. Even angry expressions on the faces of nonviolent resisters will be used to justify almost all measures against them. 

When a movement materializes with marches or processions in the streets, or even golds a public hearing or other public gathering, who will help the participants to offer the sort of behavior that will enhance the image of the movement and its purposes? Campaign and movements frequently have specially trained peacekeepers to help de-escalate conflict. They often focus on campaign participants who might be rightfully escalated by counter-demonstrators. The peacekeepers, sometimes called monitors or vibeswatchers, help to defend the image of the campaign to the broader public by reducing or eliminating the incidences of aggressively reactive or enraged behavior by movement participants. 

Is this fair? Of course not. If everything were fair we would not need to struggle in the first place. It is simply reality. We either work with reality or accept that what we are doing may be only for our own satisfaction, that we are not agents of social change, but rather we want to make ourselves feel good as self-justifying and often self-righteous, sometimes self-described "radicals." It is a bit like trying to fix the broken sewage system by denouncing the broken pipe in an arrogant memo. Some of us may instead choose to head down into the sewage to try to fix that broken pipe. We will suffer for it, but at least we have a good chance of fixing it if we have also managed to bring the right tools and materials. We accept the reality and are determined to work with it, even though it's totally unfair. We want tangible change.

This reality means we must be willing to suffer violence without returning it. This reality means we must recruit far more numbers to join our ranks if we want the change to succeed. Peace teams lower the barriers to recruitment by helping the campaign members prepare to avoid outbursts that will alienate the public, if and when media broadcasts show images of masked thugs throwing stones or full soda cans at cops. Those “radicals” with masks can reduce recruitment by making the civil resisters look dangerous.  Agents provocateurs engage in exactly that sort of provocation in order to harm movements. Peace teams can mitigate that threat. 

John Lewis beaten by Alabama state troopers on Bloody Sunday, 7 March 1965, generating massive participation, which boosted passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act

We prove that we mean it when we say we are nonviolent when the peace team can separate the violent actors from the larger movement. We can achieve a number of things with that ongoing proof, including but not limited to: 

·        keeping the public discourse focused on our issue rather than on our behavior.

·        gaining public sympathy, however grudging, if police, soldiers, National Guard, or counterdemonstrators act violently toward us. 

·        gaining the trust of law enforcement, and usually reducing the level of violence against us, by reducing both the fear of us and imposing “backfire”[1](see Glossary at end for meaning) costs upon them.

·        lowering the barriers to recruitment so that those who do agree with us see that we would not commit violence that excuses and provokes a violent crackdown, and, so, our numbers generally rise.

·        allowing sympathetic mainstream news media to change their frames through which they view us and to show us in a better and better light.

Hence peace teams to help us to create, cultivate, and defend our reliance on nonviolence.

How do peace teams operate?

·        They never argue, debate, nor do they insult or demean anyone.[2]

·        They work in teams of 2-6 unit members and keep track of all of them throughout any event.

·        They focus first on bystander intervention if violence breaks out or seems imminent.

·        They focus on de-escalation of all conflict, worrying primarily about the behavior of the campaign participants. 

·        They establish themselves as listeners, affirm all parties’ humanity, and seek to take belligerents out of play by separating them from their targets, what mental health workers call redirection. 

·        They tend to use the CLARA method, Center, Listen, Affirm, Respond, Add. First they center themselves, then listen, then affirm the basic respect for all, then if possible respond by asking follow up questions, then, at times, add information that can help the belligerent person contextualize the identity or personhood of the target.

·        They are nonpartisan for the entire event, neither carrying signs nor clapping, nor singing or chanting. 

This nonviolent safekeeping force can often prevent the image of a campaign slip into alienating categorization by defusing or redirecting destructive behaviors that might otherwise be associated with the coalition. 

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[1]“Nonviolence turned violent attacks on their head, using them to gain the moral high ground.”¾Barber (p. 119). All violence backfires.

[2]Hunter, Daniel & Lakey, George (2004). Opening space for democracy: Third party nonviolent intervention, curriculum and trainer’s manual. Philadelphia, PA: Training for Change.