Choosing Partnership: Riane Eisler on Nonviolence and the Future of Humanity
In this first episode of 2026, Nonviolence Radio welcomes visionary scholar Riane Eisler for a spacious and deeply human conversation about the cultural shift our world is being asked to make—from systems of domination toward cultures of partnership. Drawing on Eisler’s lifelong work, including The Chalice and the Blade and Nurturing Our Humanity, we move through memory, trauma, economics, education, and story, discovering how nonviolence is not just an ideal but a lived, relational practice.
Together, we explore what it means to build a world rooted in care, courage, and connection—and how a “new story” of who we are and what we’re capable of can help guide us through this time of profound transition.
Transcript
With gratitude to Elizabeth High
Stephanie Van Hook: Welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I'm your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I'm here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor for the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. Michael, how are you doing this morning?
Michael Nagler: I am alive and kicking and ready to roll.
Stephanie: Yeah, that's all we can ask for, really. That's great. And, Michael, it's really cold out here in West Marin where we're at today coming through. It was ice and freezing everywhere. And it's about the closest that we've come to snow in a really long time.
Michael: I was wondering what happened to global warming.
Stephanie: Oh, no. This is part of it. It for sure is part of it. The extremes in weather and the extremes in our politics somehow are connected to the extremes in weather. Maybe it feels worse because of the contention in politics and our hope for Nonviolence Radio is to explore nonviolence in all of its different areas and facets so that we can together change consciousness and move into a new way of being together. And that is where I'm putting my energy on these topics. And I think you would, too.
Michael: That is a wise investment, Steph. I think that unless we find a new way, we may not have any way at all, the way things are shaping up.
Stephanie: So another way, a way out of….
Michael: A way out of no way.
Stephanie: Yeah. This is our first show in 2026. And I'm going to be doing themes throughout each of the months that are going to connect with work that is happening at the Metta Center, which is a 12-month study program. You can see it at mettacenter.org/nonviolencestudies. And each month has this theme. And so I thought, well, I'm going to combine Nonviolence Radio into that theme as much as I can, as long as nothing else more urgent comes up that we have to use.
Michael: It will happen, yeah.
Stephanie: But nothing's more urgent, I think, than nonviolence. And the theme for this month is about the New Story and transitioning into seeing the world through different models. And then we start to break apart the different, you know, areas of our society and look at it through those models in the lens of nonviolence.
And we were really happy to have Riane Eisler talk with us this week so that we could share her voice here on Nonviolence Radio. And so those of you who know her know what you're getting ready to listen to. So she's a social systems scientist, a futurist, a cultural historian, an attorney, a consultant, an author, and truly, truly a visionary. And she talks about this framework of relational systems. And within the relational systems, she sees these two categories, very broad, partnership and domination. And that when we look at the world around us, we can see the way that people are either moving toward partnership or the way that domination systems have infected our thinking and our politics and our families and our economics. And it's a really interesting model because just by starting to claim those two categories, partnership and domination, everything else begins to open up and it makes a lot of sense. Things start to make a lot of sense of how they've become the way they have, why things are bad and what kind of energy and embodiment we need to take on in order to remove ourselves from a domination paradigm.
Michael: People who are familiar with her earlier work will remember that, I think probably her earliest book, certainly her best-known book, is The Chalice and the Blade.
Stephanie: Yeah, that's exactly, yeah. The Chalice and the Blade being a key work that people recognize Riane for, which is, again, introducing the ideas of partnership and domination. But then she takes off into all these different areas. She's written so many books. The latest being a collaboration with the peace anthropologist Doug Fry, and it's called Nurturing Our Humanity, which you and I both thoroughly enjoyed reading, and we highly recommend anything, really, by Riane. And so in this conversation, it's really a bit of meeting of the minds. We shared with her our film The Third Harmony: Nonviolence and the New Story of Human Nature because we felt that it just truly aligned with the worldview and the work that Riane is doing. And so it really was a meeting of the minds.
Now, I want to catch people up in this interview because we're going to jump in. You're going to hear a conversation. You're going to hear not necessarily us picking apart the different aspects of her theory, but rather what a conversation sounds like when we're all a bit on the same page. and recognizing the importance of partnership values and so forth. And she refers to some aspects of her work, such as the four cornerstones, which you'll find as you start to explore Riane Eisler's work. And the four cornerstones are family and children, so cornerstone one, gender, economy, and story. And so all of these cornerstones are actually part of our conversation with Riane, which is really neat the way that it all comes together. So as we talk about the fundamentals of Riane's work, whose research on partnership and domination invites us to look beneath events and policies and toward the deeper cultural structures that shape human behavior, such as how we raise children, how we relate across difference, what our economies reward. And what's really important to us in nonviolence, especially, is the stories that we tell about what it means to be human.
And so in this conversation, as mentioned, rather than naming these elements directly, we move through them, beginning with lived experience and memory, and then widening into history and trauma, and then opening toward questions of economics, education, and finally, consciousness. And so in this way, the dialogue becomes an example of partnership thinking, relational, contextual, and grounded in real human lives. And so what stayed with me in this conversation was how nonviolence emerged not as an ideal but as a practice shaped by courage, care, and complexity, because the conversation that we have with Riane really resists simplification. And it acknowledges suffering and backlash while still insisting that alternatives to domination are not only possible, but already present in biology, our history, and our daily choices. So we hope that this dialogue invites you to listen not just for answers, but for orientation toward what kind of culture we're participating in and what kind of humanity we are quietly and not so quietly helping to grow. So let's turn now to Riane Eisler.
Michael: I wanted to mention, Riane, that I have Cuban relatives. And I have a call in to my sister, who's the family historian, to verify this. But I can't imagine how they got to Cuba, other than in one of those ships in 1936, I think it was, that they got released. So, conceivably, they were on the same ship, the one just before the Voyage of the Damned.
Riane Eisler: Well, I don't know that we were just before. We came in 1939.
Michael: Oh, ‘39. Wow.
Riane: Yeah. And we just barely managed to get out. Of course, money did pass hands. In fact, my work really is very much rooted on the questions that arose from these early experiences of witnessing so much violence and so much insensitivity, but at the same time, I don't know if you remember this, Michael, but my mother recognized one of the men who came to our house on Kristallnacht, who broke in and who dragged my father off, as a former errand boy in the family business. And she just got furious. And she said, “how dare you do this to this man who has been so kind to you? I want him back.” Now, she could have been killed. I mean, many Jewish people were killed that night. But by a miracle, she wasn't. And the head of the pack said, you know, “bring so and so much money to the south headquarters. I'll give him back to you.” Which he did. I call this courage that my mother displayed spiritual courage now. Because it's not courage like killing the dragon, where we're taught courage is you know, you kill. But it's standing up against injustice out of love. And that's what your movement is about, isn't it?
Michael: Yeah, I think even though a lot of those stories have come out, a lot of them have not come out yet. And one of the things that we've explored at Metta is the rescuers. For example, the story of André Trocmé in the south of France at Le Chambon, who rescued probably around 2,000 Jewish children. The point of that story that really meant the most to me is after the war, he went and contacted the German commandant who was in charge of his town and asked him, “how could you not have known that I was getting these children out of all over Eastern Europe and rescuing them?” And the guy who was a major, his name was Schmeling, he said, “what makes you think I didn't know?” He said, “we knew all about it, but we knew that this had nothing to do with violence. And it was nothing that violence could overcome.” So of all of those stories, you know, that's the one that I think has touched me most and has been the most revealing.
Riane: Well, the problem is trauma, my friend. And so many of the people who believe that violence, that you are a dominator or you’re dominated, are traumatized. I mean, I am a nonviolent person, but I'm also a Holocaust survivor. I believe that if the Allies had not resisted Hitler, well, none of us would be here, first of all. We wouldn't be here, and it would be a very different world. So it's a balancing act, especially in this period of transition.
And I think it is a period of transition for the simple reason that the old dominator systems are not adaptive, evolutionarily speaking. So, but transition to what? I mean, a lot of suffering certainly is going to happen in this transition. especially with the resurgence, with the reaction, really, against all the movements challenging domination. And I'm so glad, Stephanie, that you recognize that we, well, what Einstein said, that we cannot solve problems with the same thinking, and that includes the categories that created it. So how do we popularize, how do we mainstream this new way of thinking, of just looking, not right, left? I mean, there have been domination regimes in both of them, or Eastern, Western, again, or religious or secular. I mean, there have been domination regimes in all of these. And frankly, so have there been partnership regimes in so many different kinds of cultures, both in prehistory and now. I mean, look at the Nordic nations, look at Ireland, which really started to move towards partnership very quickly. Well, that's another story, and it is the story of religion.
Michael: Riane, you mentioned the name of Marija Gimbutas. And that is a millennial-long tradition of equality and no violence, judging from the archaeological record. And so it's so important because so often we encounter in our work people who say, and I'm sure you do also, “this is just human nature, there's nothing you can do about it.”
Riane:This is one of the things about the film that I think was so powerful. And there's so much evidence now from neuroscience, from a frankly evolutionary movement. I know you had Frans de Waal as part of it. But it's all piecemeal. This is the problem. We don't connect the dots. And these new categories, which aren't so new, really, of domination and partnership, do connect the dots. And they include family and childhood. They include gender. And these are fundamentals, and we know how important they are from neuroscience. Now, so what are we going to do really to, I mean, I believe that our job is to present a better alternative.
Michael: We couldn't agree more. And that's what we are also trying to do is recover those experiences in our own history, in human history, which show that partnership models work, and make them better known. So that if people actually know that those things were possible and that they happened. And, you know, Kenneth Boulding, who was a great peace researcher, English language peace researcher, his most famous law is if something has happened, it's possible.
Riane: Most people don't know about our prehistory for the simple reason that it is pretty much absent from our informal education, from media, et cetera. And it is absent, I mean, it's finally beginning to enter higher education. But most people don't know about our prehistory. Well, you know about the four cornerstones, that the last one is story and language.. But we have to change the economic reward system because, frankly, people need to eat and they need a roof over their heads. And as long as the economic rewards are governed by an economic system that does not include, I mean, neither socialism nor capitalism include the three life-sustaining sectors. And it's crazy, isn't it? The natural economy, the volunteer community economy, which was, when this all started in the 1700s, mostly the wives of affluent men. And, of course, the household economy. So how do we change it? And how do we do this? Because It is so entrenched.
Stephanie: I think, as you said at the beginning, part of it is presenting the alternative. Nonviolence is not just a tactic and it's not something that you just, you know, go out and protest. It's something that you practice. It's supported by science. It's a whole culture and history and it's something we participate in and dedicate ourselves to. So we are showing people that there's a way out of the dominator system. Now, I'm always thinking, how do we get people to understand nonviolence better and the way that language does confuse people? We didn't even have a word for nonviolence in the English language until the ‘20s.
But I think that partnership has been a really interesting thought experiment for me. When I'm trying to practice nonviolence in my daily life, and I'm trying to make a decision I've been asking myself, is the action I'm about to take promoting a partnership culture or is it promoting a dominator culture? And it helps. It's very gentle and it doesn't seem to have a moral connotation to it or a judgment to it. But just, I want to live in a world where we do partnerships, not domination. So how do I do that? And that helps.
Riane: And I think that the four cornerstones, including the last one, story and language, are very important. But there's enormous resistance and, of course, the regression. It's very interesting how even those parts of history that acknowledge domination, the attempt is to put them back under the rug, so to speak, and speak of courage and valor and all of those. And you're so right, you know, Stephanie, this isn't a question of blame or shame. This is a question of having an accurate set of categories for what we're moving from and what we must move toward because we're all interconnected, not only by technologies globally, of transportation and communication, but by technologies of destruction, like nuclear bombs, and more slowly by climate change now. It is really, as I already knew when The Chalice and the Blade came out, you know, my first book drawing from this research, a time of either breakthrough or breakdown of evolution.
Michael: And don't you feel as we do, Riane, that we're coming to the end of a really long cycle, it's not just you know the last 20 years or the last 100 years, but it's an attempt to create a restricted false model of what a human being is, has been going on for so long and it's not working anymore, it's breaking down. And I think the most important thing we can do is sketch out the new paradigm that we can move toward in which partnership predominates over domination and nonviolence is resorted to as a first resort, et cetera, et cetera
Riane: Well, I think we have to pay close attention, not only to sort of putting our fingers in the dike, so to speak, because that maintains the system, I mean, ameliorating the suffering, but also to changing the four cornerstones from domination to partnership. You know, we had a virtual summit last year, and I'll be happy to make that link available for those who want to watch it. It was called Peace Begins at Home, which confirms what we know from neuroscience, that trauma, we had a neuroscientist speaking about that, about the new/not-so-new, definition of human nature as not evil or selfish. But now I want to hold a virtual forum on economics because I've come to the conclusion that we have to create a caring economics that includes those three life-sustaining sectors and rewards them. And going back to pre-monetary times is just not realistic right now. You know, the new economy is a lovely idea, but it simply won't work in a monetized economy.
Michael: You know, one of the groups that we've been trying to discover and promote through our news program, among other things, are groups that are experimenting with local economies, which in one case actually is not so small, which is the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain.
Riane: You know, the Basque region is one of the few non-Indo-Europeans. But I think that even the Mondragon cooperative had adapted to excluding family and childhood and gender from their purview. But yes, but I don't think that the issue is one of local versus global because we have to realize, I think, that the issue of climate change is really a regional issue, a global issue. and you can't just address it in local communities. And again, we're trapped in this us versus us, us versus us. And this is one of the ways the system really maintains itself, but it also maintains itself through economic rewards and punishments. So anyway, I'm thinking of this summit, how would a caring economics, what is the process, not just the concept? I will send you some of my recent publications, including an article that I wrote for an issue of our journal, which is the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota on Caring Economics. Because that could be, I mean, I'm convinced that it's a question of what do we value? What do we measure?
Michael: There was a film that was housed at Southern Illinois University. And I used to use it every semester when I taught my nonviolence course. And that film was called “Gandhi's India.” And there was a long interview in the film with none other than E.F. Schumacher, describing how he discovered that Gandhi was an economist and how Gandhi made the realization that it is exactly what you just articulated, that unless we address the economic component, nothing else will work. And of course, Martin Luther King made the same discovery. We have to resolve poverty before any of this becomes viable.
Riane: Well, it goes beyond poverty, frankly. It goes to why do we reward the things that we say we don't like, like greed, like accumulation for the sake of accumulation. And what is the difference between artificial wants and human needs? And what happened to the human need for caring connection, which is left out of the present system? See, these are the questions that are so basic.
Stephanie: It seems that the way that our economy works with, say, brain science is that we receive the dopamine hit that we would get from connection, from accumulation, from buying things, from fitting into the story that is currently accompanying our economic system that feels so dehumanizing. So it's this cycle, right? The dehumanization leads us to feeling terrible, that leads us to wanting to feel better. But we have these things in between us that we can reach for before each other because conflict is hard. When you're with other people, you're going to have conflict. When you have money and things, a lot less conflict you feel. But it doesn't last. And so you have to repeat.
Riane: Well, the issue I've always said isn't conflict, you know, “I want to go to bed and you want to go to the movies,” I mean, right there, you've got conflict. It's, how do you resolve conflict? And resolving it through fear and through violence. But the creation of artificial wants instead of fulfilling the needs, I mean, there the whole psychological knowledge has been appropriated by marketing. But it's the same story, except that this story is “you're going to feel better about yourself. You're going to, you know, feel alive. You're going to feel like a ‘man.’ ” You know, the car ads with a beautiful woman standing next to the car, et cetera, et cetera. It has to change.
Stephanie: It has to change and it can change because it has changed in the past. Michael has talked before about these car ads that he used to see, like in the 50s, that said, “this is a good car. You know, look, it takes gasoline and it's pretty.” And then slowly the advertisements started to show women on top of the car or just a woman. You don't even see the car anymore. You're seeing status. You're seeing the status that you get with the object, not with the practicality of the tool in front of you that was built with the good intention to help you make your life easier in some way. We've started to associate things with status.
Riane: And of course, the status does not fulfill our need for caring connection.
Michael: You know, there's a story that we like to tell, Riane, about during the tsunami in 2002, I think it was. There was a U.S. Marine who was given the job of handing out food and blankets all day long. And at the end of the day, somebody asked him, “you know, this isn't what you were trained for. How do you feel about doing this?” And he said, “you know, I have been serving my country for 34 years, and this is the first day I got any satisfaction out of it.”
Riane: Wow. Well, you see, we do, the story that we don't help one another is absolutely untrue in emergencies. That's when we do help one another. But we have been so brainwashed. All of us are to some extent traumatized. But back to the issue of trauma, we have to deal with that. And the fact that trauma is being now talked about so much is a partnership trend. I mean, we're trying to pretend that it's normal.
Michael: Gabor Maté has been doing wonderful work on promoting the importance of trauma and the need to circumvent it before we can be found.
Stephanie: It's part of a trend of people getting to know themselves better, of evolving out of traumas that we experienced. And I think it's a new space where you are healing and what do you need to heal and how do you see yourself as whole?
Riane: Well, and the first summit was Peace Begins at Home, and it dealt frontally with the issue of denial, because it starts in an abusive, violent, or threatening violence household, where you can't admit that your caregivers on whom you depend for life, really, for food, for shelter, are causing you pain. So you immediately have to go into denial and deflection. And this in-group versus out-group is, of course, the defining characteristic of domination systems.
I draw in my work very much from new theoretical models in developing my own methodology in the study of relational dynamics, and it is during times of disequilibrium that we have an opening. And this, if there ever was, a quick time of disequilibrium caused by the shift from the industrial to the post-industrial economy, it's happening overnight, practically. So we have to be ready. And again, we come back to the four cornerstones. to family and childhood and gender. I mean, once we look at the entire picture, we see that it's all interconnected. And that's what I think that this forum on economics has to show is the interconnection.
Michael: Intersectionality is kind of a bland term, but I'm glad to see that people are mentioning it because in earlier times, I think I'm probably speaking for both of us, Riane, when we were active, things were terribly siloed. And people would argue that anti-nuclear is the issue that we should be working on. And others would say, no, it's domestic violence. And others would begin to say, no, it's climate destruction, et cetera. And we're starting to see that there's a common thrust behind all of these abusive, degenerating changes. And so that everything, all of these issues are part of a picture, but the picture is still fuzzy.
Stephanie: I think Riane has the picture. It's partnership or domination.
Michael: I'm for it.
Riane: Look, all of these movements that you mentioned challenge the same thing. It challenged domination. I mean, let's just face it, but we're still operating as if they were different, and they're not. This doesn't mean that every one of us has the conceptual bandwidth. But we have to at least recognize that they are interconnected.
Stephanie: You talked about starting with children, education and families and so forth. And I spent some time as a Montessori teacher for young children. And I went into that practice because I was looking for nonviolence in early childhood education to better understand it and I fell in love with that model. Maria Montessori is a bright shining light in our humanity and what she was able to accomplish for connecting the humanity of children to all of humanity is amazing. And so when you, when you talk about starting at home, I just want to shout out to Maria Montessori. But I think somehow Montessori also at this point has become tied to status. If you can send your child to a Montessori school, a new education that completely can radicalize relationships between children and adults by the people in the room that are caring for the children, honoring the humanity of the child in a way that you don't get necessarily in a public school education. And so, but there are people that would put their children in these schools just because they feel like it's the better education, because they might get a better job. And I think that there's something there that as we're doing these transitions, if not everybody has the conceptual capacity, as you mentioned, to see the interconnection, to somehow take these radical spaces and give them a status of is sort of a stealth way of breaking into a new consciousness.
Riane: Well, you know, I wrote a book that you would really like. It's called Tomorrow's Children. And it's on education. I got the rights back to that book, and I want to update it. First updating another book, which is The Power of Partnership. I have been doing that as a teaching tool because we can learn all through life. I mean, that's one of the really wonderful news of neuroscience is how our brains can even change. It takes a lot of work, but I certainly have witnessed and experienced transformation. And I've also experienced partnership. I had a partnership on the personal level with my deceased husband, David Loye. And I tell you, it was the first time in my life, those 45 years, where I really felt seen. It was a real partnership. I miss him terribly but he focused on one myth much of his later life: the myth of Darwin being as he said “this 800 pound gorilla for domination,” and it's wrong. Rediscovering Darwin for example is a wonderful book and I really really recommend it.
Michael: By the way the book of his that meant the most to me and was most helpful was The Great Adventure.
Riane: Oh that was such a wonderful book, I was fortunate to be in it.
Michael: Yeah. Because my family background is in science, my father was a biology teacher, and so it's always been part of my way of understanding the world is like what Willis Harmon, a friend of mine, used to say, science is the knowledge validating system of our civilization. If it's not science, no one is going to believe it.
Riane: But science was infected. Look at how in the 1900s, scientists were still saying, “oh, genes, only men pass them on.” And then our ancestors understood on a very simple level, women and men procreate together. That's what the sacred marriage was about. It is so amazing to see all of these commonalities.
Michael: Recently, I've been watching videos by Denis Noble, who is a brilliant molecular biologist from the UK. And he understands what's going on inside of a cell, I think, better than anyone on the planet right now. And he just is asking the question constantly. Okay, look at mitosis, for example, where the cell suddenly decides to fold in on itself and become two cells. Who has instructed it to do that? Who is giving it the instruction to go through these fantastical miraculous changes and I think he very wisely leaves that as a big open question but it's again a story how the revolution in a way began and is more advanced in science than almost any other aspect of our civilization.
Riane: And yet science is now being appropriated also for service of domination. So really, we are at a crossroads. And consciousness is the key.
Michael: I completely agree. I could not agree more.
Riane: So my work for all of these years has been changing consciousness.
Stephanie: You're here at Nonviolence Radio, and you were just listening to a conversation with the one and only, the great Riane Eisler. Riane is the recipient of many honors, such as the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award earlier given to the Dalai Lama, and internationally known for her groundbreaking contributions as a systems scientist, futurist, and cultural historian. She's the author of many books, including The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57th U.S. printing and 27 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, hailed by Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu as, “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking,” and Nurturing Our Humanity, published by Oxford University Press in 2019, co-authored with Douglas Fry. Eisler's innovative whole systems research offers new perspectives and practical tools for constructing a less violent, more egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable future. Eisler is the president of the Center for Partnership Systems, which provides practical applications of her work, and editor-in-chief of the online Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, published at the University of Minnesota. She keynotes conferences worldwide, has taught at many universities, has written hundreds of articles and contributions to both scholarly and popular books, pioneered the application of human rights standards to women and children, has addressed the UN General Assembly, and consults with businesses and governments on the partnership model introduced by her work. For more information, please see rianeeisler.com and centerforpartnership.org.
Well, Michael, that was a wonderful conversation. I was really happy to share it with our listeners here on Nonviolence Radio. I saw you madly taking notes, even though you were in the conversation, too. I wonder if, do you have anything you'd like to follow up with in terms of this conversation with Riane on partnership and domination systems and that kind of caring economy and world we're building?
Michael: I certainly do, Stephanie. One thing I'd like to point out is that she stands in a long tradition where a kind of duality, which might be looked upon as an oversimplification on one level, is nonetheless a very explanatory model for the choices that we have to make as a human being. One of my favorite people, St. Augustine, I know he's problematic to some. But in The City of God, he had like a mantra, a little short sentence that was so powerful, which I would translate as, two impulses in the human being lead to two different civilizations, two different social orders. And also the Jewish sages talked about the yetzer hara and the yetzer hatov. The yetzer hara being the impulse to evil and the yetzer hatov being the impulse to good. And in a very real sense, I think we human beings face this dualistic choice on a moment-to-moment basis. And it's very good to clarify that and to know about that.
Now, I do want to – there was something that I think we really need to get back to though where Riane talked about the fact that World War II, the intervention of the allied forces made it possible for her to live basically and probably millions of other people. I don't deny that but it would be very wrong to draw the conclusion that therefore we have to be prepared for immense violence at any moment because we know how that dynamic works. We prepare to, “defend ourselves.” Our neighbor thinks we're preparing to attack them and the cycle goes on and on. Stephanie, you want to weigh in with something?
Stephanie: Yeah, I think that if we were to have gotten more in depth with Riane on that topic, we would find a meeting of minds because, as she mentions well in the interview, it's not about conflict, it's about how we engage with conflict. And what we understand about World War II, about any war, is that there's other ways to engage that don't necessarily end in triumphant victory “us over you” kind of dynamics and that the world is developing practices from traditions of nonviolent intervention that can be strengthened if we were to invest economically in them. So I think that if we were to break that apart with Riane a little bit, we would find something closer to how you…
Michael: Oh, yeah. I mean, my point was not to criticize her presentation at all, but just to point out that this is a fact that we nonviolent folks have to assimilate and deal with, that the allied intervention, which was an act of enormous violence, prevented worse violence. And the way we have dealt with it in the Metta Center is with this model called the escalation curve, which shows that the longer you wait in a festering conflict, the fewer options you have. And finally, if you've waited too long, the only option that you have left is the use of force. And that will either be violent or nonviolent or somewhere in between depending on how you address it psychologically. That's a very subtle point. But the key takeaway is to intervene sooner rather than later in conflict and therefore to have nonviolent rather than violent mechanisms on the shelf ready to be used when conflict threatens.
Now, moving on from there. Now, thank you, I got that off my chest.
Stephanie: Yeah, we don't have that much time left for news, so I do want to make space for you to share some of the resources and articles and information that you've been collecting for quite some time now.
Michael: Yeah, I think it's important for us to be aware of the resources we have, and I'm calling this little presentation “Resources for Resistance”, or “Getting Ready for the Nonviolent Moment,” because I do feel, as Riane was pointing out also, that the two forces of domination and partnership are kind of warily circling each other looking for an opening. And I have a feeling that we're going to build up to a confrontation of a type that we usually call the nonviolent moment. But so then that means it's important for us to know about some of our resources.
Now, one of the earliest academic programs in nonviolence was at the University of Rhode Island, the folks that we were in touch with quite a bit when we were doing peace studies at Berkeley. And now they have a program which is just amazing, the Nonviolent Schools project, which trains teachers and administrators in how to align their public or private school with principles of nonviolence. That would fill an enormous gap, namely in our educational system. And so as they see it, it includes restorative justice, training students in conflict resolution skills, and actively promoting a culture of nonviolence within the school. The one thing that I was a little bit puzzled about is that they say that it was based on Kingian nonviolence, and I've never really gotten clear what people mean by that. How is that different from Gandhian nonviolence? How is that different from nonviolence itself? But that's my problem, not yours. So the University of Rhode Island would be a wonderful resource.
Another, of course, is Waging Nonviolence and Pace e Bene, And we recently had a year-end retrospect done by Rivera Sun. At the end of her report of 2025, she said the following. “In retrospect, 2025 was not a great year for authoritarians. Now, this may sound surprising. It's certainly true that they were causing suffering in far too many nations around the globe. But more importantly, authoritarians faced consequences and challenges from an unprecedented wave of movements,” which we are seeing all around us if we know where to look today. So, as – still quoting – getting back to quoting Rivera, “as we enter 2026, the widespread resistance shows no signs of relenting. Countering authoritarianism, abuses of power, corruption and economic hardship will require sustained and strategic campaigns,” “Yay,” says I, “yet we can take heart in the wins, learning from what's working and keep moving forward together.”
Now, do you have friends, coworkers, or fellow activists who want to get involved in this? Well, on January 15th, Freedom Trainers is offering a free three-hour training on their standard curriculum. And it's a great way to improve your skills in local community. And this comes from Pace e Bene and Campaign Nonviolence.
And I'm remembering here in this connection someone that I want to give a shout out to. And that was the central role of Highlander Folk School in not only the civil rights movement but other anti-violent movements that have climaxed. And that person is Myles Horton, among those whom we recently lost this year. But he was a founder of Highlander.
Now, here's another really good thing to look at. We all knew, there's most of us in the field, we knew about UPeace, the University of Peace. We have a good friend from Metta who's teaching there right now. And that is based in Costa Rica. Costa Rica being one of the only countries, I think only about eight or nine of them, in the world that do not have a standing army. And they opted not to have one a long time ago. And so the UN University of Peace is mounted there. But this idea, I'm very happy to report, is spreading. There's now a University of Peace in Africa.
Stephanie: I just want to point out that it's University for Peace, not of peace. And I think that that “for” versus “of” is really essential in the conceptual framework of that university. University for Peace, not of peace. It's be both.
Michael: Correct as amended. University for Peace. Yeah. And that the UN has mandated a University for Peace, UPeace, mandated an Africa program, which offers formal academic degrees, both master's and a PhD, in Peace and Security studies, aimed to foster peace, conflict resolution, and development across the continent through different models. So, UPA, the University for Peace in Africa, provides immersive, short-term, full-boarding campuses with practical training and rotating locations, while the UPeace Africa offers structured university education from regional hubs in Addis Ababa and Mogadishu.
Let's cycle back closer to home now for a bit. Guns to Gardens has grown. It's a very widespread program now. Of course, it is after the fact and it deals only with the tools of violence, not the consciousness that leads to violence. But these things react on one another and I'm not going to minimize the importance of them. But religions have gotten involved, for example, in Detroit where their disarmory ministries have dismantled over a thousand firearms through their Guns to Gardens programs. Then there's a fellow in Chicago, Quilen and Hannah Blackwell, who has a program called Southside Blooms, where flower farms prevent gun violence by providing jobs and opportunities for at-risk youth and by transforming a neighborhood with hope. As a result of all this work, gun violence deaths have decreased, which is a good thing, of course, in itself.
But I want to give you some other resources, and one of them, and this fits into Riane Eisler's fourth category, story and language. She highlights, I think I'd highlight it even more, the central effects of mass media in tilting us toward partnership or domination. And that is a resource, a network called Pressenza. This is an international news agency dedicated to news about peace and nonviolence. And they have offices all over the world: Athens, Barcelona, New Delhi, Valencia, Vienna, et cetera.
Stephanie: Oh, Michael, thank you so much. Do you have one thing you can wrap up with or is that the best way to put the cane around your neck and pull you off the stage?
Michael: Just look also at the Rise and Shine resource page and you'll find a lot of good resources and an opportunity to make a pledge.
Stephanie: Thanks so much, Michael. Thanks for your Nonviolence Report. And special thanks to Riane Eisler for her interview today on Nonviolence Radio, to our mother station, KWMR, to everybody who helps make the show possible, transcribe it, Elizabeth High, our friends over at Waging Nonviolence who help syndicate the show, Pacifica Network, everybody. Until the next time, thank you, listeners. We do the show for you. So until the next time, everybody, please take care of one another. We'll be back in two weeks.