Empowering Nonviolence is a project of War Resisters' International's Nonviolence Programme, which offers campaigning resources and nonviolence training to grassroots activists around the world. Radical social change doesn't “just happen”; change happens when committed people take action together in ways that are effective and strategic. Empowering Nonviolence makes our resources available online, for free, to help activists build stronger, more powerful campaigns.
In 2014, we published the second edition of our Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns, a book designed to support activists and movements around the world in the social change work. The Handbook includes contributions from thirty activists from around the world, and includes sections on strategic campaigning, movement building, effective nonviolent actions, media strategies, building sustainable and empowering groups, a wide range of case studies and experiences, and detailed advice on delivering nonviolence training. Over it's two editions, the Handbook has been translated into twelve languages and has been read by thousands of activists all over the world. The Handbook is available to purchase from WRI's online shop.
Empowering Nonviolence is designed to make it easy to browse all of this content. From the main page it is quick and easy to browse to a particular chapter, or to filter the articles by key words. Each article is accompanied by a series of other related articles, including case studies that illustrate more theoretical content, and training exercises to explore and discuss the ideas in the rest of the book in creative, empowering ways.
We want to this resource to expand and grow, so we've built the site to allow you to contribute to this resource, offering your own articles and stories from your own experience of taking nonviolent action. After logging in, you can contribute an article which will be made available to other users to read and comment on, asking questions to pull out the key learnings, with the eventual aim of publishing the piece alongside the other articles on the public-facing site.