Course Overview

The rise of nonviolent, people power movements around the world has become a defining feature of the 21st century. Organized citizen campaigns and movements using nonviolent methods are challenging formidable opponents: unaccountable governance, systemic corruption, institutionalized discrimination, environmental degradation, dictatorship, foreign military occupation, and violent extremism. Their “weapons” are not guns or bombs but rather protests, boycotts, sit-ins, civil disobedience, building of alternative institutions, and hundreds of other nonviolent tactics. Combined with the use of traditional political and legal means, these movements have and continue to shape political, social and economic change across the globe.

Learning Objectives 

This is part 2 of a course series on civil resistance. It examines the theory, history, and strategy of how nonviolent movements craft and deliver their message. Participants in this course will:

• Learn from a diverse set of activists, scholars and practitioners through stories, research, and exercises.
• Transform how they analyze and think about conflict – its value, mode, and outcomes.
• Engage with a growing community of learners and experts enrolled in the course through a continuous series of live, interactive, and collaborative online events.
• Co-create new knowledge and insights to enhance and update the course as the field evolves.

Activists, civil society leaders, scholars, regional experts, policymakers from governments and international organizations, journalists, religious figures, educators/trainers, and those with a keen interest in how ordinary people are transforming conflicts through nonviolent action are encouraged to enroll and join this powerful global conversation.

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