PETER GELDERLOOS IN his book How Nonviolence Protects the State claims that nonviolence is ineffective, racist, statist, patriarchal, tactically and strategically inferior, and deluded.1 His attack on nonviolence is fierce and unrelenting. To assess Gelderloos’ views, I first outline the case for nonviolence and the associated case against violence. This provides a foundation for examining Geld...

The notion of persistency, based on the rule “no action can disable another one” is one of the classical notions in concurrency theory. In this paper, we deal with arbitrary place/transition nets, but concentrate on their persistent computations. It leads to an interesting decision problem: Is a given marking reachable with a persistent run? In order to study the persistent-reachability problem...

Communication is central to the effectiveness of nonviolent action: methods of protest and persuasion are essentially means of communication, while methods of noncooperation and nonviolent intervention have crucial communicative dimensions. As a mode of political communication, nonviolence can be contrasted with rational dialogue, electoral politics and violence, and stands out from them in com...

Persistency is one of the notions widely investigated due to its application in concurrent systems. The classical notion refers to nets with a standard sequential semantics. We will present two approaches to the issue (nonviolence and persistency). The classes of different types of nonviolence and persistency will be defined for nets with step semantics. We will prove that decision problem conc...

We argue that psychological and contextual factors play important roles in bringing about, facilitating, and escalating violent conflict. Yet rather than conclude that violent conflict is inevitable, we believe psychology's contributions can extend beyond understanding the origins and nature of violent conflict, to promote nonviolence and peace. In this article, we summarize psychological persp...

Taking the painting Be I by famous American Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman as a starting point, this paper explores relationships between Mohandas K. Gandhi’s aesthetic life and an emerging aesthetic of nonviolence in the post WWII era. A nonviolent aesthetic is considered in the painting and in relation to two key photographs featured in the exhibition “Experiments with Truth: G...