Chipko Movement: a non-violent philosophy of harmonious existence
Chandi Prasad BhattDasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal
submitted to the Nonviolence and Social Empowerment Conference
Puri, Orissa, India 18-24 February 2001
Nonviolence and Social Empowerment Project
c/o Patchwork
Kaiserstrasse 24 D-26122 Oldenburg/Germany
Tel.: +49-441-2480437 Fax: +49-441-2489661
email: wri-nvse-project@edu.oldenburg.de; website wri-irg.org/archive/nvse2001/
WRI Project on Nonviolence and Social Empowerment
WRI began in 1921 as an organisation bringing together people who had the strength to stand against the tide of their society and to resist war. In the second half of this century it has increasingly worked to deepen the understanding of how nonviolent action works and to promote strategies of nonviolent action. At the moment WRI is doing a project on Nonviolence and Social Empowerment.
To start this article I want to describe an empowerment-situation in order to give an example:
Dora Rosenzweig tells about an empowerment experience in her own history: "The workshop was one block of houses long. There were two rooms, a small one and a big one. I preferred working in the smaller room, where there were working thirty to forty people. They chose me to read aloud for them.
There are such words -- buzz words. You catch them here and there.
In peace, environmental or women's initiatives, in Peace News and United Nations documents. They change from season to season, from year to year. "Empowerment" had appeared in the meta-language of my colleagues -- working on change -- as an attempt to explain to ourselves and to others what we are actually doing.
Introducing their book The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies tell us what they learned from a conversation between women in a Bangladeshi village and Hillary Clinton, which they then use to develop their perspective on economy, a perspective 'from below'.
First published in the magazine XY: men, sex, politics, 5(4), Summer 1995-96. XY, PO Box 26, AINSLIE, ACT, 2602, AUSTRALIA. Reprinted with permission. © Copyright 1995
"What's so fabulous about the idea of patriarchy?" asks Bryan Law, who takes another look at Co-Counselling and reclaims men's personal power.
Collective identities"we" as queers, as whatever group you likeare often perceived as empowering, as providing a sense of belonging. On the other hand through their very existence, collective identities produce new boundaries of "in" and "out", and new norms of behaviour that limit peoples' freedom to be and to do. Not only can identity be disempowering, but it can also threaten peoples' lives, as nationalist and homophobic attacks show.
Ellen Elster
We in the peace movement want to change the world, and to have some influence of the course of events which affect all our lives. But we are frequently unclear how we would like to achieve this: do we want to make changes from the bottom or from the top? Do we want to have influence at a decision-making level, or through raising consciousness at the grassroots?
We usually dream about a movement that grows from the grassroots. Isn't that what the WRI programme on nonviolence and social empowerment is all about?