Articles by Ken Butigan
We found 14 results.
(Italiano) Un convegno storico al Vaticano fa appello alla nonviolenza e alla ‘pace giusta’
Ken Butigan, Waging Nonviolence – Centro Studi Sereno Regis,
9 May 2016
21 aprile 2016 – Dall’inizio alla fine l’atmosfera degli incontri è stata elettrizzante: si trattava di un incontro senza precedenti presso il Vaticano – dove artefici del cambiamento provenienti da ogni parte del mondo, hanno deliberato con sacerdoti, vescovi e con i maggiori responsabili della Chiesa Cattolica per la giustizia e per la pace.
→ read full articleRemembering Daniel Berrigan, with Gratitude
Ken Butigan | PeaceVoice – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 May 2016
Daniel Berrigan has died, and so we have lost our great teacher who, flinty and generous and relentlessly persistent, taught us how to live in a culture of death and madness: “Find some people you can pray with and march with.” He pronounced this simple sentence at the end of a mesmerizing three-hour conversation he and I had in his simple Manhattan apartment in 1981.
→ read full articleRemembering Vincent Harding, an Enduring Veteran of Hope
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
2 Jun 2014
Vincent Harding, a close confidant of Martin Luther King, historian and nonviolent activist died at the age of 83 on May 19, 2014.
→ read full articleConscientious Objectors Needed Now More Than Ever
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
30 Dec 2013
In our time of permanent war, the Edward Snowdens and Chelsea Mannings are showing us how powerful conscientious objection still is. Like them, each of us can make a choice to withdraw our consent from ongoing war.
→ read full articleHow School of the Americas Watch’s Perseverance Is Paying Off
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
9 Dec 2013
Enduring social change typically takes many years or decades, especially if your goal is to shutter a facility that’s a lynchpin of U.S. geopolitics.
→ read full articleRestorative Justice Is the Heart of Nonviolent Change
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
4 Mar 2013
In a more nonviolent world we will confront violence less by imposing punitive arithmetic — long jail sentences and paralyzing fines — than by taking deliberate steps to repair harm, meet needs, foster accountability and gamble on the idea that transformation is possible. The emerging discipline of restorative justice, simply put, will have found its way into the heart of our lives, our communities and our societies.
→ read full articleGetting the Story out — Terry Messman and the Power of Activist Journalism
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
4 Feb 2013
Violence draws life from the endless stories that push its power. But things can work the other way too. Stories of the nonviolent option can unexpectedly seep into our right brain, disturb the certitude of the violence operating system, and open breathing space. We are living in a time when, despite the tsunami of violence, we are hearing these counter-narratives more frequently.
→ read full articleA Resurgent Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movement – Just In Time
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
1 Oct 2012
For those of us who first came to political activism by tackling the nuclear arms race in the early 1980s, the announcement that the U.S. is online to refurbish and reassert its nuclear might far into the future has a glumly déjà vu feel. At the same time, we know the power of people power movements to change history. Together we can build on this emerging next phase to take action, to stoke alternatives and to prompt a powerful nationwide debate on what, buried in the back pages of the Washington Post, is presented to us as a foregone conclusion.
→ read full articleEast Timor and the Nonviolent Option
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
10 Sep 2012
We are living in a special time that is disclosing many lessons concerning the power, techniques and gumption that people-power movements for monumental change require, from the Filipino movement that toppled Marcos to the Arab Spring that brought down dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. There are many keys to the effectiveness of this nonviolent option, including a stubborn relentlessness even when the feedback loop runs dry.
→ read full article118 Days in Captivity — A Peacemaker’s Account
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
3 Sep 2012
In November 2005 four Christian Peacemaker Team members serving in Iraq were kidnapped. A former U.S. Marine turned Quaker was murdered, but the other three were freed in a military operation carried out by U.S., British and Canadian troops in March 2006. Though no one was killed or injured in the rescue, the irony of a crew of peace activists being plucked from danger by armed coalition forces was lost on few observers, least of all those who were suddenly liberated.
→ read full articleA Salvadoran Gang Truce Amidst War’s Fallout
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
9 Jul 2012
One unexpected consequence of the U.S. wars in Central America was the emergence of youth gangs in El Salvador (including Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, and the 18th Street Gang) and the fratricidal violence between them. El Salvador became one of the most violent nations on earth, with a murder rate that surpassed 70 per 100,000 in 2011, and 90 percent of all homicides are gang-related according to the government.
→ read full articleChalmers Johnson and the Activism of Research
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
31 Oct 2011
Nick Turse has published a revealing overview of the dramatic proliferation of US Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Unmanned Aerial Systems entitled “Inside our drone base empire.” The US empire is not rooted in colonies but what Chalmers Johnson names a “base world”—in 2005, he documented 737 US bases around the planet that function to establish and maintain US military, political, and economic preeminence. (Since then, Nick Turse has documented that the US now likely possesses over 1,000 bases worldwide.) Johnson is somber about the karma this entails—the equal and opposite reaction this base world sparks and the whirlwind it will reap.
→ read full articleGlobal Nonviolent Action Database launched
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
26 Sep 2011
Nonviolence is a beautiful theory but it doesn’t work in the real world, critics have long argued. It is—they maintain—passive, weak, utopian, naïve, unpatriotic, marginal, simplistic, and impractical. In spite of these widely-held assumptions, however, people around the planet go on building one nonviolent people-power movement after another.
→ read full articleAnother Step toward Mainstreaming Nonviolence
Ken Butigan – Waging Nonviolence,
14 Feb 2011
The movement that ended President Hosni Mubarak’s thirty year autocratic rule not only has created a spectacular breakthrough for Egyptian democracy, it has bequeathed a priceless gift to the rest of us in every part of the planet. For eighteen days the Egyptian people carried out an unarmed revolution with determination, creativity, and a daring willingness to risk. They marched, they improvised, they prayed, they connected with one another. Most of all, they stayed put—and invited the nation to join them.
→ read full article