John Roedel abstract

As violent conflicts become more frequent and more deadly, and as the drawbacks of the traditional methods for limiting those conflicts become more apparent, the impetus for methods of resolving conflict peacefully has increased. Nonviolence has had some dramatic successes in the peaceful resolution of conflicts since first employed on a mass scale by Gandhi in South Africa in the early 1900's. Unfortunately, nonviolent social movements have tended to be unstable, fragmented, and sustained only with difficulty, especially in the absence of their idolized and too-frequently martyred leaders. I argue that this instability, and even the violence that marked the end of Gandhi's life and the birth of the Indian nation, and the closing of the American Civil Rights Movement, can be clarified and ameliorated by the resources of mimetic theory.

The instability of nonviolent social movements arises from a misrecognition both of how nonviolence ideally works and of the scapegoating that nonviolence usually entails in practice. Christ's crucifixion, the perfection of nonviolence, is the paradigm for how nonviolence ideally works. In the ideal case, whether on a grand scale or in a personal interaction, the one offering nonviolence is able to remain vulnerable and suffer the violence of the opponent without fleeing, fighting back, or wavering in their love for that opponent. I argue that nonviolence is effective in such a situation to the extent that the opponent is able to recognize the innocence of the one offering nonviolence, who was previously seen as guilty and deserving of violence. Nonviolence in this ideal situation is in effect an invitation to conversion, an invitation to join the one offering nonviolence in the Kingdom of God, where the threat of pain and death are not the ultima ratio. Such a situation, repeated with several individuals, can lead to a cascade of positive mimesis.

Without the prior conversion of the one offering nonviolence, any nonviolence offered is only a simulacrum of the ideal of nonviolence. The effectiveness of nonviolence is lessened to the degree that the one offering nonviolence is seen to be locked in mimetic rivalry with the opponent. This sitaution, common in nonviolent social change movements, tends to produce a destabilizing cascade of mimetic rivalry. What is more, whatever effectiveness of nonviolence exists is usually misrecognized, falsely attributed to coercion, persuasion, and/or an underlying toleration by the opponent. Movement decisions made from this view of the effectiveness of nonviolence can be self-defeating.

Given this state of affairs, what is to be done? Those in a movement who can, must offer nonviolence in support of their opponents, taking their cue from the God of nonviolence who "sends rain on the just and on the unjust."

John C. Roedel is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Studies Area at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. His dissertation will attempt to shed light on nonviolence by means of psychoanalysis, phenomenology and the work of Rene Girard. He is also pursuing licesure as a psychotherapist.

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