How can there be a history of that which has always existed, that never changes? This is a brief overview of the agonizingly slow rise in awareness of this undying principle of nonviolence which, as Gandhi said, has made life and the evolution of life possible, and that sustains us to this day.

India seems to be the only culture that had a word for nonviolence, where it was held up to be the 'highest law', 'supreme religion', or 'law of nature' -- all translations of the formula ahimsa paramo dharma found repeatedly in some early scriptures. When, in the dark days of colonialism, Gandhi reawakened this law and used it for the spectacular purpose of 'making it impossible for us to go on ruling India but possible for us to withdraw without rancour and without humiliation' (Arnold Toynbee), the West also began slowly to awaken to its great possibilities. While every time someone stands up to a threat and/or an insult to her or his dignity without mirroring back the hostility of the threatening one she or he is instinctively drawing upon the power of nonviolence, it was left to Gandhi to 'reduce nonviolence to a science' and, as Martin Luther King said, 'lift the love ethic of Jesus to the level of a political force.

This process of consciousness-raising and of implementation is still in its infancy, but there are signs that we have entered upon a period of rapid expansion, provided that humanity rises above sectional conflict to realize that all life on earth now needs protection and the human experiment continues (as we think it will). Here are some of those signs:

• Dozens of colonized nations, particularly in Africa, took heart from Gandhi's example and threw off the yoke of oppression, in some cases also with Gandhian methods, i.e. nonviolence.

• Martin Luther King explicitly employed the methods and inspiration of Gandhi to bring the Civil Rights movement to success in the United States, again in the aftermath of World War Two.

• Other waves of "people power" revolutions followed in the intense decade of the 1980's, including several in the wake of the collapse of Soviet control. According to Richard Deats and Walter Wink, "If we look at all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions just since 1986 (the Philippines, South Korea, South Africa, Israel, New Caledonia, Burma and New Zealand), and the other nonviolent struggles of our century-the independence movements of India and Ghana, the struggle against authoritarian governments and landowners in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, and the civil rights, United Farm Worker, women's, environmental, antiwar and antinuclear movements in the US--the affected population reaches 3,300,100,000, a staggering sixty-one percent of humanity."

In addition, there have been qualitative changes:

• Something like the beginning of a science and a formal history of nonviolence has begun to emerge. In this connection,

• Scientific research, for example into "[[mirror neurons]]," has begun to reveal the natural basis for nonviolence and its predictable effects.

• New institutions have emerged to put nonviolence into practice, e.g. nonviolent intervention across borders (an extension of Gandhi's [[shanti sena]], or 'peace army').

And perhaps most importantly,

• Systematic attempts have begun to collect the experiences of nonviolent actions and make them available to other practitioners, both inside and outside formal educational circles; for example, the Center for Advanced Nonviolent Actions and Strategies that enables student leaders of the successful nonviolent overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia in 2000 to work with like-minded activists around the world.

The history of nonviolence that will be written in the latter half of this century will be much richer than what we can compile today, however hopeful.