The Continued Search for a Nonviolent Future
By Stephanie Van Hook
It was over 17 years ago now. I was in graduate school, pursuing an advanced degree in conflict resolution and a certification in mediation.
I am certain that the day was overcast, I was in Portland, Oregon, after all. I had ridden my bike over to the glorious Powell’s Books on Burnside and picked up a copy of a book that would change my life forever: “The Search for a Nonviolent Future” by Michael Nagler.
Wanting to look beneath the surface, my deepest interests were beginning to emerge around what the life of the mind and spirit had to do with building a more peaceful world, not just in a personal-practice way but with a scientific edge. The book prepared the foundation for my understanding of nonviolence and has enriched my life ever since. Where before I understood nonviolence somewhat dimly, though idealistically (idealism being one of my most unconquerable qualities), my eyes were opened to see it as a culture with a history, a science, and a vast, untapped potential.
With the discovery of nonviolence, I also found the Metta Center, Michael’s small nonprofit dedicated to the study and practice of nonviolence worldwide. And then, of course, I found Michael himself, someone I am honored to have as a mentor and friend, who shares and encourages my idealism and my vision for a world free from violence once and for all.
All of this is to say that when “The Search for a Nonviolent Future” came across my desk as a project for the Metta Center’s imprint, Person Power Press, to revise and republish, I saw it as a sacred undertaking. I am not the only person whose life was changed by the book (and, well, let’s say it, by Michael himself). One friend of ours wrote to him years ago and said that he bought the book on a Tuesday and by Wednesday had quit his defense job. That is pretty dramatic, but as we see every day, nonviolence does change us as it transforms our world. It is that kind of powerful. Gandhi said, “I consider myself a practical idealist.” This book makes all of us into that.
This revised and expanded edition includes a new foreword by the prolific Rivera Sun, a new introduction, additional essays, an updated index, and a Q and A with Michael in the back. Our gratitude goes to those who helped fund this project, and to our endlessly talented book designer, Miroslava Sobot.
The book is now available at the Metta Center’s bookstore.
Here is the new forward by the activist, nonviolence trainer and author Rivera Sun:
In the early 2000s, Michael Nagler took a long, hard look at the culture of violence and dared to challenge its comfortable position in our society. With numerous examples, he boldly pointed out the obvious: violence was hurting us. Wasn’t there a better way?
In “The Search for a Nonviolent Future,” Michael offered “a way out of no way” by making a convincing moral, spiritual and scientific case for nonviolence. Dispelling misperceptions, articulating definitions, the book laid the groundwork for the growing recognition of the vast array of projects, programs, solutions, tools and approaches that could be viewed under the umbrella of nonviolence.
Similar to the Sanskrit word ahimsa — a term that goes beyond the simple absence of harm to invoke the presence of all things healing, liberatory and transformative — Michael encouraged the reader to see nonviolence in a similarly expansive way. Nonviolence is not merely the absence of violence, nor simply a passive acceptance of injustice. It is the presence of deep practices that empowers our innate ability to address conflicts without causing further harm. Nonviolence, it turns out, is a word that embraces a thousand ideas, including soul-force, civil resistance, reconciliation, conflict skills, de-escalation, peacebuilding, restorative practices and so much more.
When he wrote the first edition of “The Search for a Nonviolent Future,” the world was emerging from a decade of nonviolent movements that had dramatically reshaped the social and political dynamics of the globe. Such movements had gained independence from the Soviet Union for Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Ukraine, East Germany and the Czech Republic in the 1990s. Nonviolent resistance removed dictators and authoritarians from the Philippines (1986), Chile (1990), Indonesia (1998), Peru (2000), Mali (1991), Malawi (1993), South Korea (1986), and Serbia (2000).
But it was also a world plunging into the global, borderless war on terror — a war that would ultimately drive thousands of people into the ranks of the terrorist groups it sought to eradicate. Mass surveillance was on the rise, secretive and hidden until Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing in 2013. The scourge of school shootings that had started with Columbine High School in 1999 would grow into a horrific pattern of 428 incidents by 2024.
Mass shootings in public spaces would hit movie theaters, grocery stores, concerts and churches; other kinds of gun violence would claim tens of thousands of lives each year in the United States. In 2014, the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, would bring the terror of police brutality and racism to wider awareness, followed by the murders of Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, George Floyd, and thousands more. The unaddressed climate crisis would lead to mass displacement, climate refugees and millions impacted by heat waves, fires, floods and droughts. Wars and gang violence, economic instability and repressive regimes would send millions of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees across borders, where mass detention, deportation and inhumane encampments awaited them.
Michael’s message of the urgent need to shift our culture away from violence is, if anything, more urgent now than it was then.
In the intervening years since the publication of this book, new research into the remarkable power of nonviolence has also proved that Michael’s steadfast commitment to the legitimacy of nonviolence was well-placed. To say that the past two decades have been momentous for the study and practice of nonviolence is an understatement. In 2011, a pair of researchers confirmed what advocates of nonviolence have been saying all along: it works. Comparing 326 case studies of violent and nonviolent campaigns to oust dictators, change governmental regimes and end foreign occupations, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan proved that nonviolence worked twice as often as violence, in a third of the amount of time, and with one-tenth of the casualties.
Yet, even this impressive statistic barely scratches the surface of the power and potential of nonviolence in our world.
The Global Nonviolent Action Database has catalogued 1,264 case studies of nonviolent struggles around the world. Nonviolence News, a newsletter collecting 30-50 stories of nonviolent action each week, has collected over 16,000 articles in a five-year span. Nonviolent Peaceforce, founded in 2002, has put peace teams into dozens of hot conflict zones to provide protective accompaniment and civilian protection. Cure Violence has demonstrated that violence intervention programs have a verifiable track record of reducing and preventing violence in dozens of U.S. cities and other places internationally.
Record-breaking protests were held in the United States during the Occupy Movement, March For Our Lives, Women’s March, and more. In 2020, the George Floyd Protests brought out 20 million people into the streets over multiple weeks, becoming the largest mass movement in U.S. history. In 2021, India shattered world records by bringing together 250 million farmers and others in sit-ins, strikes, marches and blockades to resist the Farm Bill, ultimately overturning it. Between 2019 and 2025, mass movements ousted corrupt leaders in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sudan, Bolivia and South Korea.
Amidst this profusion of nonviolent movements, the stories and examples in “The Search for a Nonviolent Future” withstand the test of time, offering an enduring message of nonviolence’s potential in our world. With its thoughtful critique of the culture of violence — from media to pseudoscience to political rhetoric to unchallenged misperceptions — “The Search for a Nonviolent Future” holds up a contrasting and empowering vision of nonviolence that draws from science, studies, statistics, stories and spiritual wisdom. Page after page illuminates an alternate world — not a someday utopia, but a pragmatic reality that has been here all along.
Michael reminds us that, despite the headlines, nonviolent tools and solutions have endured in societies and cultures throughout history. And they offer answers to our most pressing questions today. Traversing continents and centuries with one compelling example after another, Michael’s timeless book reveals how nonviolence can be practiced among family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, strangers and entire societies.
From the small and personal to the large and political, his anecdotes highlight the immense possibilities of nonviolence, from de-escalating a knife-wielding murder-suicide attempt (as in the case of nurse Joan Black) to saving people from extermination camps (as the Danes did in World War II) to ousting a dictator (as in the example of the People Power Revolution in the Philippines in 1986). Michael’s work digs beneath the surface, as well, connecting these outward achievements to the inner work, meditation and spiritual fortitude through which individuals wield nonviolence skillfully.
Our task is to take seriously the vision that Michael describes as he pairs pragmatic examples with a breathtaking scope of application. What might happen in our world when every school uses restorative justice instead of punitive measures? When civil resistance replaces civil war as the popular method of resolving long-standing injustices? When ending poverty is seen as fighting crime by preventing it? When nations spend billions on peacebuilding instead of tanks, or on nonviolent defense instead of war maneuvers? When we deploy unarmed nonviolent patrols to interrupt and prevent violence in the streets, at home, or abroad?
That we can engage in such speculation is a testimony to an emerging shift in human society.
As some have boldly claimed, nonviolence is “the next great revolution” for humanity. As with the abolition of chattel slavery, the struggle for women’s suffrage and equality, the civil rights movement to end segregation and racism, and the global workers’ movement for labor, the concepts of nonviolence represent a seismic shift in humanity’s understanding of itself and the world. With its countless case studies and examples, its myriad solutions and alternatives, the field of nonviolence is asserting its relevance, effectiveness and necessity.
In “The Search for a Nonviolent Future,” Michael writes, “Our object must be to elevate nonviolence from the tiny, specialized field it now occupies and show that it is the concern not of activists, not of the downtrodden, but of everyone. It is our heritage. It is something every one of us can use.”
Our world stands on the cusp of a historic transformation, for better or for worse. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. prophetically warned us decades ago: It is no longer nonviolence or violence. It is nonviolence or nonexistence. Either we will leave behind the escalating cycles of violence that we are currently caught in, or we will have no future. A nonviolent future is the only possible future for humanity.
Michael Nagler recognized this long before most of his contemporaries, picking it up from his studies, spiritual strivings and the example of M.K. Gandhi. In this book, and indeed in all of his life’s work, he persistently and patiently invites the rest of us to join one of the most profound journeys in human history: the long road coming full circle home to the infinite possibilities of nonviolence.
“The Search for a Nonviolent Future” is a roadmap that has guided thousands of readers on this journey over the past two decades. Like a North Star for the nonviolence movement, it will continue to do so until we arrive at the place it points toward.
RIVERA SUN
Rivera Sun is an activist, nonviolence trainer, and the author of numerous books and novels — including The Dandelion Insurrection and the Ari Ara Series. She launched Nonviolence News and has worked on many creative projects and nonviolent actions for peace, social justice, democracy, and the earth.