Category Archives: Readings

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The Peace Line with Kate Laverty

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Beyond the programme: Nonviolence as organisational practice

A central question for organisations engaged in peacebuilding is whether nonviolence should be understood primarily as a discrete area of service provision or as a broader methodology that informs the entirety of organisational practice. In the context of Northern Ireland, this distinction is particularly significant. While there is clear value in creating dedicated spaces, programmes and services through which nonviolence can be taught and practised, there is a risk that such an approach can unintentionally compartmentalise peacebuilding. Nonviolence may become one strand of activity rather than the ethical and methodological framework through which all activity is understood.

There remains an important case for tangible nonviolence infrastructure. Dedicated hubs, programmes and practitioners can provide spaces for dialogue, mediation, restorative practice, conflict transformation and education. They can develop specialist expertise and offer communities accessible spaces in which difficult conversations can take place. In a society shaped by a prolonged history of political violence, communal division and intergenerational trauma, such spaces have considerable practical and symbolic value.

However, the existence of a dedicated nonviolence service does not in itself create a nonviolent organisation.

An organisation may deliver programmes concerned with reconciliation while retaining highly hierarchical internal practices. It may teach dialogue while making decisions without meaningful participation. It may promote dignity externally while reproducing practices internally that leave staff, volunteers or service users feeling marginalised or unheard. It may challenge interpersonal violence while paying insufficient attention to structural inequalities that contribute to conflict, exclusion and social harm.

For this reason, nonviolence may be more productively understood not simply as a programme, but as a methodology.

Such an approach would require organisations to examine the values and assumptions that underpin their everyday work. The relevant questions would extend beyond whether an organisation provides peacebuilding activities. They would include how authority is exercised, how conflict is addressed, how decisions are made, how people experiencing anger or distress are responded to, how accountability is understood, whose voices are included, and how power is distributed within organisational and community relationships.

These are not peripheral questions. They are central to the practice of nonviolence.

This distinction is particularly important in Northern Ireland, where peace has often been measured in terms of the reduction of overt political violence. The transformation brought about through the peace process is substantial, yet significant patterns of division remain embedded within social and community life. Residential segregation, educational separation, interfaces, enduring sectarian attitudes, socioeconomic inequality and competing narratives of identity continue to shape everyday experience.

A meaningful contemporary understanding of nonviolence must therefore extend beyond the prevention of physical violence. It must also examine the conditions in which violence, alienation and social fragmentation become possible. Within Kingian traditions of nonviolence, nonviolence is not synonymous with passivity or conflict avoidance. Rather, it involves an active engagement with injustice while resisting the dehumanisation of those with whom one is in conflict. This is an important distinction within the Northern Irish context, where the avoidance of difficult issues can sometimes be mistaken for reconciliation.

Nonviolence does not require the absence of conflict. It requires a different relationship with conflict. It requires the capacity to challenge injustice without reproducing humiliation, to hold people accountable without denying their humanity, and to acknowledge trauma without allowing past trauma to determine future relationships. It also requires a willingness to address questions of power, inequality and exclusion rather than focusing exclusively on interpersonal reconciliation. Seen in this way, nonviolence becomes relevant across the full spectrum of community practice.

In youth work, for example, a nonviolent methodology would move beyond behavioural management towards an understanding of behaviour as communication. Boundaries and accountability would remain necessary, but they would be exercised in ways that preserve the dignity of the young person and recognise their capacity for change.

In community development, nonviolence would require a shift from delivering services to communities towards building agency and power alongside them. Participation would mean more than consultation. It would involve communities having meaningful influence over decisions that affect their lives.

In organisational leadership, nonviolence would similarly raise questions about the exercise of authority. Leadership would remain responsible for making difficult decisions, but greater attention would be paid to transparency, participation, relationships and the manner in which power is exercised.

Even apparently ordinary organisational practices may carry significance within this framework. Hospitality, welcome, listening and the creation of spaces in which people feel recognised can themselves become forms of peacebuilding. In divided societies, everyday encounters can gradually challenge inherited assumptions about identity and belonging.

This suggests that the most useful distinction may not ultimately be between nonviolence as a hub and nonviolence as a methodology. Both have value, but they serve different purposes. A dedicated hub can provide focus, expertise, visibility and practical resources. It can act as a centre in which nonviolent approaches are taught, developed and tested. However, its purpose should arguably be to influence the wider culture of the organisation and community rather than to contain nonviolence within a single programme. The hub might therefore be understood as an organisational centre of learning and practice rather than the sole location in which peacebuilding occurs. Its success would be measured not only by the number of programmes delivered or participants engaged, but by the extent to which nonviolent principles influence the wider organisation.

This would mean asking whether youth provision reflects those principles. Whether community development practice reflects them. Whether governance reflects them. Whether organisational leadership reflects them. Whether approaches to safeguarding, conflict, staff management, participation and accountability reflect them.

For Northern Ireland, this broader understanding may be particularly important. The next phase of peacebuilding is unlikely to depend exclusively upon formal peace initiatives. It may also depend upon the extent to which the principles associated with peacebuilding become embedded within the ordinary institutions of social life. Youth centres, community organisations, schools, family support services, voluntary organisations and neighbourhood networks all have the potential to become sites in which alternative relationships with power, conflict and difference are practised.

The central question, therefore, may not be whether an organisation has a nonviolence programme. It may be whether nonviolence is recognisable in the way that organisation behaves. A dedicated hub can give nonviolence visibility, expertise and institutional presence. A methodological approach allows it to shape organisational culture and everyday practice.

In the Northern Irish context, the most effective model may require both: a clearly identifiable centre in which nonviolent practice is intentionally developed, alongside a commitment to ensuring that its principles are embedded throughout the organisation. Nonviolence would then cease to be simply something an organisation delivers. It would become part of how the organisation understands its purpose, exercises power, manages conflict and relates to the communities it serves.

Beyond the absence of violence: Building a deeper peace

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by Kate Laverty

Sitting today (21.9.26) at the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council’s Making A Difference 2026: Building Belonging conference, I have found myself returning to a deceptively simple question: what do we actually mean when we say that Northern Ireland is at peace?

It is an important question because we have become accustomed to measuring peace through what is no longer happening. Fewer shootings. Fewer bombings. Fewer deaths. Less overt political violence. These are extraordinary achievements and should never be diminished. The first Northern Ireland Peace Index, published this month by Queen’s University Belfast and the Institute for Economics and Peace, gives empirical weight to that progress. Between 2019 and 2025, measures of what researchers describe as Negative Peace — the absence of violence and fear of violence — improved significantly. Yet the structures and relationships associated with Positive Peace improved only marginally.

That distinction matters enormously. Because the absence of violence is not necessarily the presence of peace.

Northern Ireland knows this perhaps better than most places. We can remove the gun without removing the fear. We can stop the riot without addressing the alienation that preceded it. We can construct political institutions while communities continue to experience poverty, exclusion, sectarianism, racism and disconnection. We can become remarkably successful at preventing conflict from becoming violent while remaining much less comfortable with conflict itself.

And perhaps this is where nonviolence has something important to offer the next stage of peacebuilding.

Nonviolence is not the avoidance of conflict. It is a methodology for entering conflict differently.

That distinction is critical. Too often, nonviolence is understood as passivity: being reasonable, remaining calm, avoiding confrontation or simply refusing to retaliate. But serious traditions of nonviolence demand considerably more than restraint. They require people to confront injustice, expose harm, challenge unequal power and refuse to accept conditions that diminish human dignity.

Passivity asks us to endure what is wrong. Nonviolence asks us to confront what is wrong without surrendering the humanity of those with whom we are in conflict. That is a much more demanding proposition.

It requires us to develop the capacity to remain in difficult conversations rather than retreating from them. It requires dialogue that is capable of holding disagreement, rather than dialogue whose success is measured by everyone leaving the room comfortable. It requires de-escalation without silencing legitimate anger. It requires restorative approaches that take harm seriously while refusing to believe that punishment and exclusion are the only meaningful forms of accountability.

And it requires reconciliation to mean considerably more than people learning to be polite to one another. One of the challenges for peacebuilding in Northern Ireland may therefore be that we have occasionally confused managing conflict with transforming it. Conflict management asks how we prevent a situation deteriorating. Conflict transformation asks a deeper question: what is producing this conflict, and what needs to change?

That takes us beyond the immediate argument and into questions of relationships, identity, power, inequality, history and belonging. It asks us to look not only at the people standing on opposite sides of an interface, but at the social conditions surrounding them. It asks why particular communities continue to experience disadvantage; why some young people experience limited routes towards power and recognition; why racism and sectarianism remain capable of mobilising anger; and why confidence in political and public institutions can remain fragile even decades after a peace agreement.

The Peace Index (https://nipi.economicsandpeace.org/) makes that challenge particularly stark. Northern Ireland’s reduction in violence is significant, yet the underlying foundations necessary to sustain peace have moved much more slowly. The research also identifies hate crime as the only Negative Peace indicator to have deteriorated between 2019 and 2025, increasing by 21.5 per cent.

That should make those of us involved in peacebuilding uncomfortable. Not despairing. But uncomfortable. Because discomfort is sometimes where serious peacebuilding begins.

It requires us to ask whether some of our established approaches remain sufficient for the society Northern Ireland is becoming. The Community Relations Council itself has recently supported reflection on whether community-relations practice needs to respond differently to contemporary experiences of identity, belonging and division. That conversation includes sectarianism, but can no longer be confined to the traditional binary understanding of community relations.

Our communities are changing. The forms through which fear and hostility are expressed are changing. The spaces in which conflict develops have changed. Social media can amplify grievance long before it appears on a street. Racism intersects with older territorial and sectarian divisions. Economic exclusion sits alongside questions of cultural identity. Trauma passes through families and neighbourhoods while new generations inherit conflicts they did not create.

Peacebuilding must therefore remain capable of changing too.

This is why I increasingly think that one of the most important capacities we can develop is not the capacity to eliminate disagreement, but the capacity to stay in relationship through disagreement.

That is different. It means teaching young people that conflict is not itself a failure. It means helping communities distinguish between anger and violence. It means creating spaces where people can speak honestly without humiliation becoming the currency of debate. It means being capable of saying, I believe this is wrong. I will oppose it. I will organise against it. I will challenge you on it — but I will not require your destruction in order to prove the legitimacy of my position.

That is the discipline of nonviolence. And there is something deeply relevant within it for Northern Ireland. Our peace process taught the world something extraordinary: political violence that once appeared intractable did not have to remain inevitable. But perhaps the work before us now is more dispersed and, in some respects, more difficult to see. It sits in youth clubs and schools, community organisations and workplaces, neighbourhoods and interfaces. It appears in conversations about migration, flags, language, poverty, policing, constitutional futures and who belongs.

The next stage of peace may not always look like peace negotiations. Sometimes it will look like creating the conditions in which people who profoundly disagree can remain in the same room. Sometimes it will mean restorative work after harm has occurred. Sometimes it will mean challenging structural inequality. Sometimes it will mean refusing racism or sectarianism when silence would be easier. Sometimes it will mean recognising the anger of a young person not simply as behaviour to be controlled, but as information about the world they are experiencing. And sometimes peacebuilding will mean having the courage to permit conflict because genuine transformation cannot occur where difficult truths are permanently suppressed.

The theme of today’s CRC conference is Building Belonging. That feels particularly significant. Belonging cannot simply mean inviting people into structures that remain unchanged. Genuine belonging asks whether people possess voice, agency and power once they arrive. The conference itself is deliberately creating space not simply to celebrate peacebuilding practice but to examine its future direction, including through work on community resilience, youth and identity, inclusion and courageous conversations.

And, when approached through the discipline of nonviolence, a place from which something different can emerge. The absence of violence gave Northern Ireland the possibility of peace. The challenge now is to build the relationships, institutions and social conditions that allow peace to become something more than an absence.

Book review: War is still a lie

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War is still a lie

by David Swanson

Published by David Swanson, July 2026, 575 pages

3rd edition of “War is a lie” (2010, second edition of 2015 had a new preface and epilogue) with additional 2026 epilogue. It can be ordered easily online for a reasonable price.

Reviewed by Rob Fairmichael

“The first casualty of war is truth” is an old adage which this book clearly shows to be nonsense; truth was a casualty well before any war reared its ugly head since lies and subterfuge were used to create the conditions for war and to justify building up to it and jumping in to it.

As this book concentrates on the USA, the greatest war maker and war power in the world, it has plenty to go on and there is upwards of six hundred pages of encyclopaedic content. As such it requires concentration and time to read and I didn’t find the basic layout of the book made that easier. While it might be said that a shorter book with less of the, mainly US, lies would still have been an authoritative commentary on the topic and perhaps more accessible, this perhaps ignores the fact that Swanson is continually writing and speaking, as well as heading up World Beyond War (WBW), https://worldbeyondwar.org/ so he is doing that as well.

There are an astounding number of lies and deceptions detailed in this book, originally written in 2010 and now issued in a slightly reworked and added to version. Who knew that the USA was deliberately riling and antagonising Japan in advance of the ‘unprovoked’ attack by Japan on Pearl Harbour, a colonial USA navy facility, in 1941? (page 73) I didn’t. Of course many of the minutiae of US government and government supporter lies are rather less earth shattering than that. And it is so detailed that sometimes the reader, myself in this case, can get lost in what the chapter is primarily about.

But it does have that encyclopaedic coverage. It contains so much about lies, deceptions, wilful ignorance, craven incompetence, and self interested brutality that this issue of Nonviolent News could be filled with just a small proportion of them. It therefore requires restraint in a reviewer to select what is mentioned. The chapters are entitled Wars Are Not Fought Against Evil, Wars Are Not Launched in Defense, Wars Are Not Waged Out of Generosity, Wars are Not Unavoidable, Warriors Are Not Heroes, War Makers Do Not Have Noble Motives, and so on.

His preface says that if he was writing the (whole) book today from scratch he would “probably have focused it less on the United States and I certainly wouldn’t have referred to the United States in the first person. I work too much now as part of a global peace movement.” This is to David Swanson’s credit but as the USA military and military budget dwarfs any other country by a massive margin, it is no harm to focus primarily on it. There are some other references, including war supporting lies from ancient Greece (page 153), and, for example, the machinations of Tony Blair in the UK for war or wars (the index shows any mentions of people such as T Blair).

The book effectively explores a huge amount around the culture of war, especially as expressed in the most militarily powerful country on earth. “Incidents which are ignored in some cases are used as excuses of war in others.” “Wars don’t go where the offenses are; the offenses are found or concocted to fit the desired war.” (page 64) He goes into some detail about the lead up to the 1941 Pearl Harbour attack by Japan on a US naval base. This included a US Navy plan for “’an offensive war of long duration’ that would destroy the military and disrupt the economic life of Japan….As early as 1932 the United States had been talking with China about providing aeroplanes, pilots and training for its war with Japan.”

And what if the USA had not overthrown Iran’s democracy in 1953? (p.94) Would we have there today a brutally harsh religious regime with which the USA is at war, and a war which affects the whole globe? Not likely. He details though perhaps doesn’t expressly explore much the fact that short term interests behind wars (control of oil especially) has been counter-productive in the long term both for the country or countries concerned, for the US of A itself, and for the world in general.

Justifications for war change. He states that “any war today must be justified in humanitarian terms unknown in previous centuries” (page 102) Think of the war excuse of supporting women’s rights in Afghanistan but that was way, way down the list of reasons for military intervention if it actually existed at all – and the end result for women was worse than the first situation. And the ‘Global war on terror’ following 9/11 increased violence and ‘terrorism’ (page 113) War is part of culture; there are non-warring societies and societies that rarely, if ever, go to war. If one society can be like that then so can we all but we live predominantly in a society which lauds its war heroes and military prowess. The Céide Fields in Co Mayo had a peaceful, settled agricultural and non-warlike society living there 5,000 years ago – and we think we have made progress.

He portrays how learnings from one war quickly get forgotten. And never “has a surrogate regime supported by the United States, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq, made the transition to democracy”. (page 112) He mentions the advantage to warmongers of the change of enemy from communism (in the Cold War) to al Qaeda; “While the Soviet Union could publicly collapse, a secretive and widely dispersed collection of terrorist cells to which we could apply the name of al Qaeda could never be proven to have gone away.” (page 198) Cue perpetual warfare. And aerial bombardment, proven not to work in cowing ‘the enemy’, is utilised nonetheless.

Even little old Ireland consumes vast amounts of war culture as entertainment, and some wish to align 100% with EU militarism and NATO. The Irish establishment justification that ‘things have changed’ with the supposed danger from Russia is ridiculous. Of course there is a danger from Russia when Ireland takes one opposing side which is ramping up its militarism. But the idea that the current situation, world justice, and indeed Irish interests, require a different approach than neutrality, as exercised from the foundation of the Irish state and which saw Ireland through the Second World War relatively unscathed, and the Cold War, is nonsense. Ireland has its own lies being told to fully involve it in the western war culture – and forthcoming wars.

By 2010 the Pentagon was spending half a billion dollars annually on propaganda. (page 286). He details how we have avoided nuclear war by the skin of our teeth but also speaks of the dangers of nuclear power plants as terrorist targets; think also Chornobyl in the Ukraine-Russia war. (page 305) He spends some time on the illegality of war and on US exceptionalism and mentions that fact that a poll in 65 countries in 2013 saw the USA as the greatest threat to peace in the world. (page 396) Some statements are challenging such as that US led slaughter in Afghanistan and Iraq was probably more one-sided, and deadly, than the Israeli slaughter in Gaza. (page 423)

The USA would have to reduce military spending by 99% to match world average expenditures. (page 420) But NATO and ‘the West’ seem to have bought into the US demand for 5% of GDP to be spent on the military, a crazy and inhuman sacrifice to Mars, the god of war. We look totally askance at archaic societies who practised ritual sacrifice but we are, today, quite prepared for the ritual sacrifice of war – and where there is technological superiority, the ritual sacrifice of others. David Swanson does go into some detail on the ‘opportunity cost’ of US expenditure on the military, what great things could be done with the money. Meanwhile there are 861 US military bases around the world, outside the USA, (page 431) and I’m not sure that counts Shannon Airport, a de facto US military base in being a well used transit point.

Of course war is not the only killer. Power and death can be manifested in other ways. Sanctions on Iraq probably caused the death of half a million children, about which Secretary of State Madeline Albright said in 1996 “we think the price is worth it.” (page 106) Tell that to the family of a child who died.

World Beyond War, of which Swanson is executive director, is the relatively new kid on the block in relation to international peace organisations and networks. It is trying to set up national chapters (the US English term used) around the world and it seems to be succeeding. If it seems or seemed to be too US American for some, that will be diluted as it grows stronger internationally though its base in the USA will continue to be an influence. It held its international conference in Limerick in 2019 (see photo album at https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/albums/72157711244251492/ ) It certainly has a dynamism that can be lacking in others though different peace structures internationally have different strengths.

He is good on analysing current wars including the one in Ukraine, and the role of “the West” in helping create that. I do feel he is a bit easy on Vladimir Putin in not mentioning his willingness, already done, to sacrifice a million or so of his citizens, dead or wounded, in pursuit of his greater Russia dream and desire to save face in the war on Ukraine – despite NATO putting him in what is, in conventional militarist terms, a totally unacceptable situation (NATO on his doorstep). Swanson mentions the comparison with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when the USA rejected missiles on its doorstep with a threat of nuclear war; this comparison has also appeared numerous times in Nonviolent News.

One positive step which he details, in a very negative situation, is the increase in the number of people who see through war lies, e.g. in relation to the US war on Iran (page 507), and less people willing to fight for their country, the USA, if a war takes place (37% and falling, page 510). He wants people to see, quite rightly, that the next war is a lie.

Swanson’s book is an important one to read for those who believe in peace. But, and I am not accusing Swanson or WBW of failure in this area since that is covered briefly in the book and elsewhere in WBW material, it needs to be balanced with knowledge and information about the possibilities, and successes, of nonviolence and nonviolent action. Why do people believe the myths propagated by the warmongers? Partly because of existing pro-war or pro-military cultures – and the war economy, plus military and national or tribal allegiances. As well as showing the lies we have to construct the alternative, as given in Gene Sharp’s “The Politics of Nonviolent Action”, or shown to work in analysis of violent and nonviolent movements in Chenoweth and Stephan’s book “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict”. Building the constructive alternative is not easy but slowly does it (see e.g. “Constructive Resistance – Resisting injustice by creating solutions” by Sørensen, Vinthagen and Johansen, 2023)

It is supremely sad that humanity, at this stage of technological progress, has enough knowledge and determination to kill everyone on the planet several times over if it was felt circumstances permitted, but not enough determination or love to overcome the violence, poverty and alienation which afflicts humanity and the global heating which threatens to destroy a massive number of lives and livelihoods and cause so much further strife and misery. Exposing war lies is certainly an essential task in making progress to save humanity from destruction and David Swanson’s book is a very useful contribution to that.

Because of cultural affinity in Europe across the north Atlantic, including Ireland in a particular way, identification with the USA has often been unquestioning. Donald Trump’s idiocy has to some extent put an end to part of that but there hasn’t been a questioning of warfare and war as such, as opposed to rejection of particular wars. We have even seen that in relation to Northern Ireland where few want to go back to war but few extrapolate from the fact that it was inclusive dialogue that provided the breakthrough, backed by public opinion, to see that is what is needed, or part of what is needed, in all international or national conflict situations.

War is a lie and it is part of our job to unpick that lie, or range of lies, so that peaceful alternatives can be chosen instead of people feeling they have no choice but to use war and violence. As the saying goes, if war is the answer then the wrong question is being asked. And those wrong questions and trite answers are putting us all on this planet at huge risk, and already making life virtually unbearable, or indeed terminal, for those in war zones.

The Peace Line with Kate Laverty: The gentle boundary – Everyday nonviolence and the courage to say no

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We often imagine nonviolence in its great and public forms. We think of marches, resistance, prison cells, speeches, movements and those extraordinary people who stood before systems of violence and refused to become violent themselves. But most of us will never stand at such a dramatic threshold. Our practice of nonviolence will happen somewhere quieter: around a kitchen table, in a difficult conversation, in the moment when someone asks too much of us, in the workplace when we have to say no, or in the family when an old pattern begins to rise again.

Perhaps some of the deepest acts of nonviolence are almost invisible. They are the moments when we refuse both aggression and surrender.

There is a temptation to think that kindness must always say yes. Particularly for those of us who work in community, hospitality or care, inclusion can slowly become confused with unlimited availability. The door is open. The kettle is on. There is another chair at the table. These are beautiful things, but an open door does not mean that every person may enter every room. There must also be thresholds.

A threshold is not an act of hostility. It is the place where one space meets another and both are allowed to retain their integrity. This is what a boundary can be. Not a wall. Not punishment. Not the withdrawal of love. A threshold. It says: you may come this far, and here we will meet one another.

There is something profoundly nonviolent about that. Violence, in its broadest sense, often begins when we cease to recognise the separateness of another person. We demand access. We insist. We control. We decide that our need gives us a claim upon somebody else’s time, body, attention or emotional life. But the opposite can happen too. We can commit a quieter violence against ourselves by continually abandoning our own limits in order to keep others comfortable.

Nonviolence asks something more difficult. It asks us to honour the dignity of both people. I do not have to diminish you in order to protect myself, and I do not have to diminish myself in order to welcome you.

That is a harder balance than it first appears. Sometimes maintaining an inclusive atmosphere means saying, gently, this particular space is not the right space for you. Sometimes it means saying, I cannot do that, but perhaps someone else can. Sometimes it means offering one form of relationship while declining another. Sometimes it means leaving the door open to conversation while closing the door firmly on a pattern that has become unhealthy.

The manner matters. There is a world of difference between saying no in order to wound someone and saying no because the relationship needs shape. A boundary offered without humiliation allows dignity to remain in the room. We can explain without accusing, redirect without rejecting, remain warm without becoming endlessly available, and refuse the request without refusing the person.

These are small disciplines, but perhaps this is where nonviolence begins to become a way of life rather than merely an idea. The great traditions of nonviolence have always understood that peace is not passivity. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of nonviolence as refusing both to inflict violence and to submit inwardly to hatred. There is strength in that middle place. It requires us to resist the seductive simplicity of two extremes: domination or capitulation.

There is another way: gentleness with firmness, hospitality with discernment, compassion with limits, love without possession.

And perhaps this matters especially in community spaces. An inclusive community cannot mean that every individual receives everything they want. In fact, without boundaries, the loudest needs can eventually consume the space intended for everyone. The task is not simply to keep the door open. It is to tend the room: to notice who has become quiet, who is taking too much space, who feels unsafe, who is always expected to give, and who has never learned that another person’s kindness has limits.

True inclusion requires stewardship. It asks us to protect the atmosphere in which belonging can grow.

Sometimes the gentlest thing we can do for a person is not to become indispensable to them. We can point towards another relationship, another service, another friend, another source of strength. We can resist the flattering temptation to become the answer to every need. There is nonviolence in this too, because dependency can quietly distort a relationship. What begins as kindness can become obligation; what begins as support can become expectation; what begins as generosity can become resentment. A healthy boundary interrupts that journey before either person becomes diminished by it.

Perhaps this is one of the quieter truths about peacebuilding. Peace is not merely learning how to live alongside the stranger. Sometimes it is learning how to live lovingly alongside those who are closest to us without consuming one another. It is learning the sacred distance from which another person’s life can remain their own.

There must be room between people: room for choice, room for responsibility, room for disappointment, room for growth. And within that space, affection does not disappear. Sometimes it becomes more honest.

There is great tenderness in being able to say: I care about you, and I cannot do this. Both sentences can be true.

Perhaps that is one of the gentler acts of nonviolence available to us each day: to remain present without taking over, to listen without absorbing everything, to welcome without surrendering the threshold, to say no without making an enemy, and to allow another person their dignity even when we cannot give them what they seek.

And then we return to the ordinary rituals of belonging. Put the kettle on. Pull out a chair. Ask how they are. Listen. Laugh. Share whatever can genuinely be shared. The boundary remains, but so does the welcome.

Perhaps peace has always depended upon these small things. Not simply upon the courage to stand against violence when it arrives loudly at our door, but upon the quieter courage to practise another way of being with one another every day: a way in which nobody has to disappear for somebody else to belong.

We haven’t gone away you know

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By Kate Laverty

Sometimes, I wonder if being nonviolent is being “too much” against the grain. But, nonviolence is all around us. We are not alone. We are not on the fringes. We are not fighting a losing battle. Here’s proof, on a global scale.

  1. 30 June — Cape Town, South Africa: standing between migrants and xenophobia. Around 20 organisations gathered at Salt River Circle under the banner “Workers of Africa Unite – Immigrants Welcome”, forming a human chain as a deliberate counter-presence to anti-immigration demonstrations elsewhere in Cape Town. What makes this especially interesting as nonviolence is what surrounded the protest: Muslim, Christian and other faith leaders convened emergency meetings, organised food, hygiene supplies, blankets and pastoral care for foreign nationals, and created a coordinated relief response. Here nonviolence was not merely opposing hostility; it was physically replacing hostility with hospitality. Muslim Views, reporting in July 2026. (Muslim Views)

  2. 2 July — Paris, France: marching in silence for Gaza. Several hundred people joined a silent march through Paris, carrying portraits of people killed in Gaza and walking behind a commemorative banner. Some participants dressed in black. Whatever one’s politics around the conflict, the method itself is striking: silence used as witness rather than shouting used as confrontation. Reuters Connect/Anadolu, 2 July 2026. (Reuters Connect)

  3. 5 July — Mallorca, Spain: a human chain to defend a landscape. Residents and environmental activists joined hands along Es Trenc beach to protest proposed changes they feared would weaken protection of the Es Trenc–Es Salobrar nature reserve. The symbol was beautifully simple: people using their bodies not to damage or occupy the landscape but to draw a protective human line around something they believed should be preserved. Majorca Daily Bulletin and Reuters imagery, 4–5 July 2026. (Majorca Daily Bulletin)

  4. 6 July — Washington DC, United States: an interfaith alternative rather than an enemy. Around 200 Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist participants marched across Capitol Hill as part of Interfaith Action for Palestine. The three-day gathering also included interfaith worship and visits to congressional offices. One particularly important detail is that organisers said that, unlike previous years, their emphasis was less on disrupting the organisation they opposed and more on creating an alternative vision based on equality, care and solidarity. That is almost textbook constructive nonviolence: don’t merely resist the thing you oppose; embody the alternative. Religion News Service, 8 July 2026. (RNS)

  5. 11 July — Hong Kong: remembering when public protest becomes impossible. Former Tiananmen vigil organiser Tang Ngok-kwan has continued acts of remembrance despite the disappearance of Hong Kong’s mass candlelight vigils and the imprisonment of colleagues. AP documented him returning quietly to former commemorative sites, bowing at Victoria Park and softly reading victims’ names. He has also repeatedly walked a route containing 64 steps—an allusion to 4 June—and while imprisoned once marked the anniversary by running 35 laps barefoot. This may be one of the most beautiful examples I found: when power removes the demonstration, remembrance itself becomes resistance. Associated Press, published 22 August 2026; AP photographed Tang on 11 July. (AP News)

  6. 18–24 July — New Delhi, India: fasting, human chains and keeping your own protest peaceful. Climate activist Sonam Wangchuk undertook a prolonged hunger strike amid youth protests over alleged examination irregularities. But one of the most interesting smaller stories came from the protesters themselves. On 23 July, demonstrators formed a two-layer human chain specifically to maintain discipline and prevent their own crowd moving towards security forces. Other volunteers formed chains to manage crowds while people collected rubbish from the protest site. That is nonviolence not simply as refusing to attack police, but as a movement deliberately regulating itself so anger does not become violence. Wangchuk eventually ended a 26-day fast on 24 July. Reuters, NDTV and Reuters Connect, July 2026. (Reuters)

  7. 16 July — London, UK: Muslims and Jews choosing relationship amid division. Muslim and Jewish leaders, interfaith activists and young people gathered in Westminster for the Together We Rebuild summit, jointly convened by the UK Muslim Network and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The point was not pretending that profound disagreements had disappeared; it was rebuilding relationships after years in which the Israel-Gaza conflict had severely strained relations between the communities. This belongs in a discussion of nonviolence because remaining in relationship with someone whose community carries a radically different experience of the same conflict can itself be a disciplined act of peace. Jewish News / Board of Deputies, 16–17 July 2026. (Jewish News)

  8. 27 July — Israel/Palestine: refusing a hierarchy of grief. Palestinian peacebuilder Aziz Abu Sarah and Israeli peace activist Maoz Inon gave a remarkable joint interview to Le Monde. Abu Sarah’s brother died after being tortured in an Israeli prison; Inon’s parents were killed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Yet they work together, tell both narratives and insist on equality between their losses. Inon explained that they deliberately use the same language to describe each other’s bereavement, refusing a relationship in which one person’s pain is treated as more legitimate than the other’s. This is a profound form of nonviolence: not denying injustice, but refusing to make empathy conditional upon identity. Le Monde, 27 July 2026. (Le Monde.fr)

  9. 28 July — Florida, United States: ringing a bell against execution. Outside the execution of James Duckett, opponents of the death penalty gathered peacefully. One person rang a bell and called out “not in my name”; a priest also rang a bell, while another protester held a sign calling for justice rather than execution. There is something powerful in the simplicity of it: standing beside an institution of state violence and answering it with a bell, presence and words. USA Today Network via Reuters Connect, 28 July 2026. (Reuters Connect)

  10. 29 July — Ecuadorian Amazon: teenage girls using law and persistence against environmental harm. The Guerreras por la Amazonía—the Women Warriors for the Amazon—continued pressing Ecuador to implement a landmark court judgment requiring the removal of harmful oil-industry gas flares near communities. Members include Indigenous girls and young women, some only 15 or 16. Their campaign has relied upon litigation, testimony, organising and international solidarity rather than retaliation, despite Amnesty reporting stigma and attacks against campaigners. Their persistence has already helped produce legal and political change. It is a useful example of nonviolence as stubbornness: continuing to return to institutions and demand that justice already promised be delivered. Amnesty International, 29 July 2026. (Amnesty International)

  11. 1 August — Wilmington, Delaware, United States: responding to a police shooting with a peaceful procession. Following the fatal police shooting of Kadir Skinner, protesters walked peacefully from the location where he was killed to Wilmington Police Department headquarters. It is an old nonviolent form but a powerful one: taking grief and anger—the emotions most capable of producing retaliatory violence—and turning them instead into collective movement, speech and public witness. Delaware News Journal/USA Today Network via Reuters Connect, 1 August 2026. (Reuters Connect)

  12. 18 August — Dhaka, Bangladesh: standing together against attacks on Indigenous people. Members of the Indigenous Forum formed a human chain at Shahbagh in Dhaka to protest attacks on Indigenous communities. Again, the human-chain method is significant: there is no weapon and no attempt to injure; the bodies of participants become the message—we will stand beside one another. Reuters Connect/NurPhoto, 18 August 2026. (Reuters Connect)

  13. July — Drumcree, Portadown: choosing not to march to the police line. For the first time in more than 25 years, Orangemen at Drumcree did not undertake their customary Sunday walk towards police lines at the Garvaghy Road. The decision was made while a High Court challenge was ongoing. Whatever one’s position on the underlying parading dispute, the act itself is significant: a tradition containing decades of confrontation was interrupted by a deliberate decision not to enact the confrontation that year. In thinking about everyday nonviolence, this is interesting because sometimes restraint is itself an action. Belfast Telegraph, 5 July 2026. Read the Belfast Telegraph article

  1. 6 July — Alexandra Park, North Belfast: friendships across a wall. An Irish News feature found residents on both sides of the Alexandra Park peace wall talking not simply about removing physical barriers but about the relationships that have gradually made removal imaginable. Carmeela Hamill, from the Antrim Road side, described making friends through a cross-community group with people from Tiger’s Bay and being invited to their Eleventh Night bonfire. Michelle McEwan from Tiger’s Bay talked about Protestant and Catholic children needing opportunities to meet rather than being taught implicitly that they cannot venture into one another’s areas. Community worker Kate Clarke described how relationships between residents on both sides have allowed problems to be resolved together, with consultation rather than decisions imposed on communities. This may be one of the purest examples of gentle nonviolence: friendship slowly making a wall less necessary. The Irish News, 6 July 2026. Read The Irish News article

  2. 14 July — Ardoyne, North Belfast: one drumbeat past an old flashpoint. The Ligoniel Orange lodges’ return parade passed Ardoyne peacefully after the Parades Commission scheduled the return for the following morning rather than the previous evening. This is an interface that has witnessed serious violence in earlier years. Instead, the bands passed with a single drumbeat, a small police presence and no incident. There is something almost symbolic about that image: where there could once have been competing noise, anger and confrontation, there was one restrained drumbeat and people simply passed one another. The Irish News, 14 July 2026. Read The Irish News article

  3. 15 July — Ballymena: answering horrific violence with silence and solidarity. After the deaths of a woman and her eight-year-old daughter in a suspected double murder-suicide involving their family, scores of people gathered at the Braid Arts Centre for a vigil. The family had Polish roots, and organisers Youth Ambassadors Northern Ireland issued their invitation in English and Polish, asking people to come together for quiet reflection, light and unity and explicitly standing alongside the local Polish community. Prayers were also offered at All Saints. It is an example of a community responding to violence not with spectacle, blame or suspicion, but with silence, flowers, prayer and presence. The Irish News, The Irish Times and UTV, 15–16 July 2026. The Irish News report | The Irish Times report | UTV report

  4. 24 July — Stranmillis, Belfast: Israeli and Palestinian girls playing on the same team. Seven Israeli and Palestinian girls, mainly from East and West Jerusalem, came to Belfast as members of one of the Middle East’s few integrated basketball teams. They joined young people from across Northern Ireland at PeacePlayers’ annual Interface Games at Stranmillis College. The young people played Gaelic games, rugby, football and basketball together and talked about the parallels between divided societies. One participant described friendships that otherwise would never have happened; PeacePlayers’ Gareth Harper said reconciliation had to be worked at every day. That sentence is important: peace was not being treated as an agreement signed 28 years ago, but as something practised repeatedly through relationship. The Irish News, 24 July 2026. Read The Irish News article

  5. 9 August — Belfast: 10,000 young people at a dance rather than destructive bonfires. This is perhaps one of the strongest examples for your purposes. More than 10,000 young people attended Féile an Phobail’s Dance Night in Falls Park on 8 August. Organisers explicitly described it as a diversionary event intended to draw young people away from the destructive anti-internment bonfires and antisocial behaviour once associated with that night. Belfast was reported to have had no republican bonfires that evening. This is nonviolence as constructive programme-building: you do not merely tell young people don’t build the bonfire; you create somewhere else to go, something better to belong to, music, celebration and community. Belfast Media and The Irish News, 9 August 2026. Belfast Media report | The Irish News report

  6. 9 August — Belfast City Hall: a Shankill flute band welcomed at the Fleadh. On the final day of the Fleadh, the Shankill Road Defenders flute band performed at the City Hall Gig Rig. Afterwards, band representatives described receiving an “extraordinary welcome” and stressed that the Belfast Bands Forum had not simply been included symbolically: representatives had been involved in planning, listened to when concerns arose, and given genuine ownership. This is worth distinguishing from tolerance. Nobody was being asked to hide their tradition. A loyalist flute band was able to perform within the world’s largest festival of Irish traditional music and be received warmly. The Irish News, 12 August 2026, reporting the 9 August performance. Read The Irish News article

  7. 12 August — Bogside, Derry: asking for “level heads” when confrontation was possible. Following the removal of controversial bonfire material near Lecky Road, tensions rose. But Bogside Community Support appealed explicitly for calm and urged young people not to give anyone the reaction they might be seeking. The group had been working with young people around the bonfire issue and attempting to reduce tensions ahead of the August 15 period. This is the kind of nonviolence that is easily overlooked because success often looks like something not happening: community workers entering an angry situation and trying to prevent grievance becoming confrontation. The Irish News, 12 August 2026. Read The Irish News article

  8. 21–22 August — Inner East Belfast: community representatives doing the work of de-escalation. Groups of young people from rival factions gathered around Bryson Street and Pitt Park and threw bottles and stones at one another; objects were also thrown at police. Yet the PSNI specifically reported that officers “worked with local community representatives to reduce tensions”, remaining until the young people dispersed. That brief sentence in a news report conceals a great deal of work: people knowing the young people, talking, negotiating, crossing an interface, moving groups, staying present and preventing something worse. The Irish News and Belfast Telegraph, 24 August 2026, reporting incidents beginning 21 August. The Irish News report | Belfast Telegraph report

Nonviolence is not weakness, and it is not silence in the face of injustice. It is the stubborn refusal to let hatred decide who we become. It is the courage to stand firm without dehumanising, to resist without destroying, to protect without humiliating, and to keep making room for the humanity of the other even when that humanity is difficult to see.

Our communities do not need more people skilled in outrage; they need people brave enough to interrupt it. So let us be the ones who lower the temperature, who cross the road, who make the phone call, who hold the boundary, who refuse the insult, who stay at the table, who stand beside the threatened and who build another way when violence tells us there is no alternative.

Nonviolence begins wherever we are. It begins in the next conversation, the next disagreement, the next moment when we are tempted to wound because we have been wounded.

Choose peace there. Practise it there. Make it visible. And keep choosing it until the gentler way becomes the stronger way.

Christianity’s Missing Peace

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Book review

Christianity’s Missing Peace – Pope Francis, Gospel Nonviolence and the Renewal of the Irish Church by Martin McMullan

Publisher: Wipf & Stock, 2025, Paperback ISBN 979-8-3852-6195-6, 134 pages.

Reviewed by Sylvia Thompson

This book by Martin McMullan, a Dublin-based teacher, has a foreword by Mairead Corrigan Maguire and reached me in February 2026 so a review is long overdue. Martin, the author, was known to me since the Pax Christi Ireland launch of Pax Christi International Catholic Nonviolence initiative on the 14th October 2023 in the Loyola Institute at Trinity College Dublin. This is referenced in the book (p.100).

In her foreword Maguire says “the church is in urgent need of a clear, courageous and prophetic moral stance”. This book is certainly a contribution to that. The preface gives the reader a helpful overview  and the Introduction says explicitly that the “book is aimed first and foremost at the church faithful from a Catholic persuasion” and McMullan believes this to be “an urgent task to awaken people to a central but forgotten and misunderstood tenet of Christianity that has the power to truly transform the world”. Although I am personally coming from the Catholic tradition, I believe that the message given in this book applies to all Christians.

The book has six chapters and 134 pages so it’s a short read but there’s a lot condensed in those pages, for example Chapter 1, Jesus and Nonviolence. This shows the scholarly background to this book and here the author concludes that nonviolence lay at the heart of Jesus’ teaching and practice. Indeed Chapter 2 outlines that the practice of active nonviolence for the first three centuries was ”taken as a given for the building of the kingdom of God” until the “Constantinian shift” which took place with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine and the beginning of the Christian Roman Empire which in turn lead to the beginning of the ‘just war’ theory.

This book is calling for a return to Gospel nonviolence and sees a papal encyclical on this as one significant step. This could not be more timely and we can now see from the strong pronouncements of Pope Leo X1V that the church seems to be edging towards this as he follows the lead of Pope Francis.

In Chapter 4 there is an examination of various papal pronouncements on War and Peace since Vatican II and McMullan writes that they have shown a gradual accepting of the centrality of nonviolence to Christian peacemaking in the world…a most interesting chapter.

In the final chapter entitled Gospel Nonviolence and the Renewal of the Irish Church there is a particular reference to Ireland and the gap in the teaching on gospel nonviolence is highlighted. It documents the work of the Peace People as exemplaries of this but does not reference the work of Pax Christi Ireland including its Belfast branch and other peace activists within the Christian tradition e.g. Fellowship of Reconciliation over many years especially in the lead-up to the Good Friday Agreement.

The closing words of the final chapter entitled A New Heaven and a New Earth, “It is time for brave and prophetic leadership to give hope to a very troubled humanity” is McMullan’s call to the Irish Church…is it listening?

The Peace Line with Kate Laverty: Joy in the time of sorrow

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The easier story would be the violence of recent weeks. The shattered windows. The smoke-dark language of hatred. The ancient human instinct to turn fear into fire and direct it towards the vulnerable.

But that is not the story I want to tell.

Because beneath the noise of those early June nights, something quieter and infinitely more powerful was unfolding. Something the headlines rarely know how to hold. Nonviolence.

Not as theory.

Not as performance.

But as lived, breathing practice.

I think of the children first.

Children sitting cross-legged on living room floors, their small hands stained with marker ink and paint, making signs to place in windows and on doors. Bright drawings declaring that refugees and asylum seekers were welcome here. There is something almost sacramental about a child choosing colour in the face of hatred. A holy refusal to let fear become the loudest voice in the room.

And then the women.

Women who organised gatherings in community centres. Women who walked alongside their Muslim sisters, their Black sisters, not with grand speeches but with ordinary tenderness — cups of tea, shared food, laughter rising gently above anxiety. The kind of care that rarely appears in political analysis but without which communities collapse entirely.

There is an ancient strength in women gathering. A form of resistance rooted not in domination, but in protection.

And then the volunteers.

And threaded through all of it were the volunteers. More than one hundred people, coordinated largely by two women from Sudan, quietly sustaining over six hundred people every single day. Grocery runs. Pharmacy collections. Lifts to work. Safe transport out of dangerous situations. Helping families move between temporary accommodations carrying little more than bags and exhaustion.

This too is nonviolence. Practical. Organised. Fiercely attentive.

And perhaps this is what gives me hope. Because violence is always loud. It needs spectacle. It feeds on visibility. But nonviolence often works beneath the surface, like roots strengthening unseen beneath winter soil. It survives through ordinary people choosing care over contempt again and again and again.

I have come to believe that the universe bends itself quietly towards justice through these acts. Through stubborn human tenderness.

And there is something else we must remember too: rest is part of this work. Joy is part of this work. Creativity is part of this work. The systems of hatred and violence depend upon exhaustion. They thrive when people become hardened, cynical, disconnected from beauty and each other. So every act of laughter, every shared meal, every song sung loudly in community halls, every badly painted banner held proudly by children becomes its own quiet rebellion.

To choose joy while protecting others is not frivolous. It is resistance. Perhaps nonviolence is ultimately this – the refusal to let the human spirit become smaller in response to cruelty. And for all the darkness that tried to descend, that is the story I want remembered.

–

Kate Laverty is director of Forthspring Inter Community Group https://www.forthspring.org/

Five points on Triple Lock issues by Anthony Coughlan

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INNATE introduction: Sometimes you can be wandering in the forest for so long you can’t see the wood for the trees. The issue of the Irish government, and in particular Micheál Martin, striving to get rid of the Triple Lock on the deployment of Irish troops abroad – as part of slowly abolishing Irish neutrality while denying doing so – has been simmering for a number of years. As a result we can be confused and forget. In this short summary of some of the background and issues, Anthony Coughlan sees the wood and the trees –

–

Five points worth thinking about in considering the Triple Lock and Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s latest proposal to abolish it –

1.     Ireland’s UN Obligations: Ireland is bound by international law and by the rules of its membership of the United Nations to abide by the UN Charter and every provision thereof, including the right of the permanent Security Council members to outlaw military operations they disapprove of, and authorise military operations they approve of, by unanimous vote under the Charter. In view of  this, talk of the veto power of  particular UN Security Council members being in some way a restraint on Irish “sovereignty” is sheer demagogy, legal nonsense and aimed at gulling the ignorant.

2.     Ireland’s “National Declaration” on Neutrality and the Triple  Lock: In 2002 the Bertie Ahern Government issued a solemn National Declaration by Ireland – always referred to with capital letters by the Government – to the effect that in view of Ireland’s neutrality policy the State would not engage in any foreign military operation involving more than 12 soldiers unless that was authorised by the United Nations.  This National Declaration was made because a majority of voters had  rejected the EU’s Nice Treaty in the 2001 referendum on that –  many of them out of concern at Nice’s effect on Irish neutrality.  The existence of the National Declaration and the Government’s Triple Lock commitment in it was mentioned in the publicity material that was sent to voters by the statutory Referendum Commission to inform citizens what the Nice Two referendum was about in 2002. This National Declaration by Ireland was supported by all parties in the Oireachtas at the time. It was formally responded to by the other EU Member States in their Seville Declaration of that year. These Declarations persuaded enough people to change their votes so that in the 2002 Nice Two referendum a majority agreed  that that treaty could be ratified, without any change being made to the treaty itself.  Ireland’s National Declaration and the EU’s Seville  Declaration were associated with the Nice Treaty when that was formally registered later with the United Nations.

3.     The National Declaration was repeated for Lisbon Two: A similar procedure was followed  by the Brian Cowen Government when a majority of voters rejected the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008 and the EU Constitution that Lisbon brought into being – again partly out of concern at its possible effects on neutrality.  Ireland’s National Declaration on Neutrality and the Triple Lock was reiterated by the Brian Cowen Government along with some other issues. It was again highlighted in the Referendum Commission’s Explanatory Guide sent to voters on the occasion of the second Lisbon Treaty referendum in 2009.  Again voters agreed to the ratification of an unchanged Treaty, in part because of this Triple Lock commitment. Again the National Declaration was associated with the Lisbon Treaty when that was formally registered with the UN.  

4.     The Triple Lock commitment in this unique National Declaration by Ireland has thus acquired a constitutional or quasi-constitutional character: No Irish Government has ever issued a National Declaration like this on any other topic throughout the history of the State. The Triple Lock commitment set out in the National Declaration by Ireland and its use to influence the votes of citizens in the Nice and Lisbon Treaty referendums has given the Triple Lock such a constitutional or quasi-constitutional character that it cannot be constitutionally set aside by the current crop of Government politicians without  a referendum of the People. The attempt to repudiate the solemn  commitments given in it may also raise legal issues under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

5.     Abolishing the Triple Lock would have the unintended effect of subverting comparable commitments in any future Border Poll: Even if people deny that the Nice/Lisbon Triple Lock has acquired constitutional force by the manner of its adoption and use in two referendums, its repudiation by the present generation of Government politicians would be a profound breach of political faith with Irish voters past and present. It would mean, for example, that any constitutional commitments or policy guarantees that might be given to Northern Ireland Unionists in the context of a future Border Poll could be repudiated just as easily by a later crop of Irish politicians and would show that such commitments could in no way be relied on.  Principled and sensible politicians in the Oireachtas will be sensitive to possible unintended consequences such as this when considering what the Coalition Government is now proposing.

Workshop and training materials: Interpersonal conflict without mediation

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Introduction:

We have added some new workshop materials to that section on the main INNATE website. In a final extract from this material – for now – we include here material on dealing with interpersonal conflict where mediation is not an option. It includes both a list of options and notes for using the list in a group or training workshop. Online this is available in the Workshops and nonviolence training materials section at https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/workshops/ and directly at https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/A-road-forward-with-notes.pdf

lA road forward –

Dealing with interpersonal conflict

without mediation

Introduction

You want to resolve or deal with a conflict at an interpersonal level but the other party (person, persons, or group) declines to be involved in a mediation process. Or you may feel mediation is not on for some reason, or you simply don’t like it. You may feel powerless. What can you do?

This check list is put in the context of interpersonal conflict in general and in particular neighbour-neighbour or work disputes. In the latter, however, there are likely to be procedures (good or bad) in place for grievances – whether this covers the issue(s) in question, or whether even if they do you want to go down that route, is for you to decide.

Whether any of the following points is appropriate to your situation is entirely up to you – think of this as a list of things to consider rather than a list of things to do. Some of the points below are attitudes or approaches and some are actions. Some might lead to you talking and negotiating directly with the other party; some might bring you to third party intervention as in mediation.

The list is semi-chronological in that things you should always consider or consider doing first as you start to work on resolving the issue are at the start of the list.

Points 1-8 are approaches both at the beginning and throughout as you try to deal with the conflict, e.g. if you find the conflict escalating, ‘doing nothing’ (Point 3) may not be what you want but it is still something to consider as a cooling off period if things are going badly.

Points 1, 2, 4 and 5 are about relating to the other party in a positive manner.

Points 9 and 10 are for when you feel sorting it out between yourselves, in a rational discussion of causes, effects and solutions, is not going to work (Point 10 is short-circuiting the process to go straight to ‘solutions’).

The last few points (11-13) are the last things you should consider doing (as they mark an escalation in response).

However the order may work out differently for you. To use the list effectively you need to be familiar with it all and not think of it as a simple step-by-step guide.

– – – – – – – – –

Options

1. Always think of the relationship

If you have to live, work or be in contact with the person or people involved in the future, always consider the effect anything you do will have on the relationship and the environment (of work or your locality). To win on the issue but poison the relationship might be a pyrrhic victory (not worth the cost).

2. Listen

If you get the chance to talk to the other party, listen carefully to what they say. If you hear their views from a third person, listen carefully. If there is something you don’t understand, ask. If you were involved in a mediation process of any kind, listening to the other party (and they to you) is a whole stage so listen actively and try to understand the other. This can be difficult when you are bursting with the injustice of your situation but the key to understanding what is needed to move the situation on may be revealed through you listening carefully. Useful conflict points here include focusing on the problem and issue rather than the person (attacking and blaming them is not going to get you far – it may make you feel better but it will make the other party more defensive and quite likely less able to change). When you have heard their case, think how you can help to meet their interests (which may be different to the position they adopt).

3. Do nothing

This is unlikely to be satisfactory if you were seeking to actively deal with the matter. But there are some issues in life where it is very difficult to get what we want, even where what we want may be reasonable (though what is ‘reasonable’ to you may not be to someone else). The matter might also be annoying but trivial 9not of great importance). You might decide that getting on with your life and ignoring the issue is best. An opportunity might come up to deal with it at a later date. It might just go away through changing circumstances, someone moving, or whatever – but it might not. On the other hand there is also the possibility of making things worse so this approach should at least be considered, at every point in the conflict.

4. Appeal to your common interest

Hopefully you have points of common interest with the other party in the dispute. Try to persuade them – or get a trusted person to persuade them – that you have a common interest in resolving the matter together, as neighbours, parents, team members, part of the same work force or NGO etc. To avoid the other side thinking they may lose from this process, emphasise that you want to find a mutual solution and agreement, a win-win solution rather than a win-lose or lose-lose one. Appealing to their sense of fair play can be part of this.

5. Treat them civilly / Doing the unexpected

‘Behaving differently’ sometimes communicates powerfully because people realise something has changed. If the relationship has been cold and silent because of an issue between you, consider ‘normalising’ it, i.e. treating them in a friendly manner. But you would need to say to them at the same time that a) the relationship between you is important so you want good relations, but b) that the issue remains important to you and remains unresolved. It is thus more difficult for them to consider you unreasonable and unwilling to have a proper discussion about it.

If you are normally very civil, showing anger – in a controlled way – can also communicate the strength of your feeling but it is potentially dangerous. If they perceive you have ‘lost it’ – or you actually lose it in being extremely angry – you may portray yourself as irrational or obsessed. It is best to use an ‘I’ statement that you feel considerable anger in this situation rather than exhibit it. But in any case be careful to show your rational side and willingness to talk reasonably.

There may be other ‘unexpected’ things you can do to draw the other party’s attention to the issue but they should be ‘nice’, and not nasty, acts. For example, during a dispute you could buy the other party flowers or a plant with a note saying you would like to build a good relationship, and to talk.

6. The ‘broken CD’ technique

Basically this is where you refer to the issue as frequently as you can, saying the same thing, but not in an angry manner, e.g. you could say how important it is to you to try to resolve the issue between you. This technique is difficult to use in a positive way in disputes and it can make the other party feel you are obsessed by the issue. So continuing to use it for a long period in a hostile atmosphere is not recommended at all.

7. Put things down in black and white

Writing things down can sometimes communicate and have an effect that is not achieved by speaking about an issue. However this is always best done in a non-accusatory way, that is, telling off the other party is unlikely to communicate in the way you want. It is much better to use ‘I’ or ‘We’ statements as in “We felt really put out/put down when…….” or “I really felt shocked and made to feel very small when….” Apart from your own feelings, put what happened factually and put what you would like to see happen – both regarding the issue(s) concerned and the relationship between you.

Choose a non-confrontational way to give what you have written to the other party. It could be given in paper or e-mail format – if the latter, find a way to check with the other party that it has been received and not lost in the e-mail shuffle.

8. Say what you are going to do before you do it

This is not making a threat but a statement about what you intend to do, before you do it, again with an ‘out’ for the other party. For example, you could say “I would really like to resolve this issue through us talking about it together, or involving a third party*, but if not then I intend to………” This is difficult to do without it coming across as a threat but it may be possible to use this approach to indicate how serious you are about resolving the issue – and that you would much prefer to do it informally. You should also only use it in an honest way, not stating you will do something you have no intention of doing.

* if the services of a mediation agency or other third party have already been suggested and rejected, there may be no point in making the same offer again. On the other hand, the further step which you have announced that you will take if the matter is unresolved may persuade the other party it is better to deal with it relatively informally.

9. Involve a mutually known and trusted third person

Another way to communicate might be through involving someone that both you and the other party would trust to communicate between you (but you have to be prepared to listen back to the other side’s responses). This could be a mutual friend, a priest, minister, or member of your religious faith or interest group – someone you know that would be acceptable to both you and the other party as a mediator or a messenger or go between. Such a third person might be trusted to assist when an outside agency would not. This may be mediation by another name.

However their role should be agreed between you and the other party – not least because someone not used to doing such a task could put their foot in it and make things worse. Some people are naturally skilled go betweens and mediators while others can stoke the flames of the conflict. It always helps for their role to be carefully defined and agreed (are they simply communicating between you, or are they mediating – i.e. taking you through a process); without such agreement they may do something entirely different to what you want or expect.

10. Think of their position and ‘make an offer’

It takes at least two people or parties to have a dispute. And there are thus always at least two sides to the coin, and sometimes more. If the other party does not want to engage in a mediation or conflict resolution process, why is this? Are they afraid of the process? Are they afraid they will lose? Do they see you as unreasonable or behaving unreasonably? Is there anything you can do to make an offer which might mean something to them?

Making such an offer might or might not have a financial cost to you – e.g. in a dispute over a dog digging up your garden you could offer to pay for net fencing to keep the dog out, in a dispute over noise you could offer to help with sound insulation or by being flexible occasionally. There is an old conflict rule about thinking of the other party’s interests rather than the position they take – can you help meet their interests? Always think of how you can give them an ‘out’ – a way in which they can change position without losing face or money.

In a mediation process, searching for a mutual solution comes after the sharing of stories and the establishment of some level of trust in the process. If the sharing of stories has been impossible, this approach may be short-circuiting that and jumping straight to making an offer and possible solution, and therefore has dangers. A ‘reasonable’ offer (what might look reasonable to an outsider), may be rejected by the other party because they are focused on the conflict rather than a solution, or simply their own narrow interest. And there is a risk that such a ‘reasonable’ offer, rejected at this stage, may be difficult to reintroduce later because it has already been rejected. This would not always be the case but it is a risk; another party who is focused on the conflict and their own gain rather than a solution may think “Ha, ha, I/we have got them [you] on the run, let’s see what more I/we can get.” Careful judgement is necessary but there is no gain for you without some risk.

11. Appeal to a higher power

In a neighbour-neighbour dispute, are there any local council regulations or government legislation on the issue? Or social housing regulations* if you are in social housing? In a work dispute, are there clear guidelines* or a trusted person in a senior position – who would be acceptable to you both – that you can go to? In a work situation you may have the right to go to someone senior without the other party’s agreement but remember point 1 above about relationships – going above someone’s head can make for long term resentment, even possibly with other people. However you may consider the matter is so important and clear cut that you should do so, as you are entitled.

* Such guidelines can be used in two ways; a) to get a judgement in your favour, or b) to be used as ‘independent guidelines’ on the issue in dealing with it informally. Obviously b) has the greater chance of establishing or maintaining good relations with the other party and a) can be considered by the other party as an escalation in the conflict.

12. Move

Neighbours do sometimes move to get away from a problem. People also leave a workplace for the same reason. This is obviously very disruptive to you and possibly very expensive (the cost of moving home or job). You also need to consider whether ‘the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t” (whether there could be problems where you move to). But moving is an option. It may however seem to you like giving in when it may not be your fault at all – but some people consider it worth it.

13. Go to the law

Recourse to the law and litigation may or may not be an option, e.g. in a boundary dispute between neighbours, and is the ultimate ‘higher power’. Employment legislation may mean in a work situation that recourse to a tribunal is possible. On the other hand, neighbours sometimes make the assumption that the law will support them when they feel strongly aggrieved about an issue – but the law may be highly unlikely to take a stand in favour of them on the issue concerned because it is not governed by legislation. Going to litigation, with its confrontational approach, is also likely to further damage any relationship, and make a better relationship harder to establish in future. It may, of course, be an option for you but you would be wise to consider the chances of success, the likely financial cost, and the cost to the relationship before pursuing this path.

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About using this list

– This check list can go under the label of ‘conflict counselling’ and, as with personal counselling, is not telling you what to do but aiming to help you explore options – and you always have a number of options so do not feel trapped. It aims to help you explore both ways to get a negotiated settlement and your ‘Best Alternative To a Negotiated Settlement’ (‘BATNA’).

Obviously it can be used for personal reflection but in a serious matter it is best explored in a pair or small group, preferably with at least one person from ‘outside’ the conflict to provide an overview and reality check. Ideally this outsider should be someone involved in working on conflict issues, or experience in so doing, but any outsider’s ‘common sense’ is valuable too.

Having worked through the options and what they might mean in the pair or small group, discussion can then focus on a plan which it is felt would communicate with the other party, deal with their interests, and be practicable.

This check list is, as the introduction said, in the context of interpersonal conflict at a neighbour-neighbour or workplace level. It therefore does not include other aspects of nonviolence or nonviolent action which might be relevant in different situations. Whether it was practised or not, it was meant to be the case in ancient Irish society that if a neighbour aggrieved someone then that person could fast outside their house – and they would also be obliged to fast – until hunger drove them to negotiate and, hopefully, a settlement. In a serious situation all sorts of nonviolent action is possible which can be explored, e.g. using the ‘Nonviolent tactics workshop’ under ‘Workshops’ on the INNATE website.

Using it in a training workshop

If you want to use this list in a training workshop on conflict there are many ways it can be used. You should go through the list first with people so they are familiar with the options, or simply allow them to read it, or both. You could then give them a scenario or scenarios and ask them to explore, in pairs or small groups, what would be relevant. However it may be better to get people into small groups to share an interpersonal conflict they have been involved in, or have knowledge of, each person speaking for up to a time limit of, say, 3-4 minutes (remember to tell people they can pass if they do not want to or feel they can share). Then for another minute they could share what points they felt were most relevant from this list and any lessons they saw from the case involved.

Another option here, where there is more time, is (after the above has been done) small groups pick one of the conflicts to analyse in more depth, perhaps using drama (normal rules apply that if the person sharing the problem is involved in the situation they have shared they do not play ‘their’ role). Finally, you can come back into plenary session together to draw out learning. Remember if anyone is very emotional or distraught about a conflict to offer further support or ensure they are supported.

The Peace Line with Kate Laverty

Nonviolent News, Readings, , ,

Nonviolent engagement

This weekend, nonviolence found me in a bookshop.

Usually, I encounter it in the natural world — in cliffs and rain, in wind through trees, in the stillness that reminds me I am part of something larger and slower than the urgency of modern life. Nature steadies me. It teaches restraint, interdependence, humility. It is where my spirit recalibrates.

But this weekend, in Edinburgh, it arrived differently.

Among dusty shelves and uneven floors in vintage bookshops, I found myself returning to older roots — history, memory, stories carried through paper. There is something quietly restorative about second-hand books; they hold traces of previous lives, previous hands, previous thoughts. They resist disposability. They ask us to slow down.

And sitting there, reading a history of Arsenal F.C. — because, as any youth worker knows, supporting a football team is essentially a professional requirement — I found myself reflecting on the club’s recent partnership with Deel. Deel is a global HR and payroll platform co-founded in 2019 by French-Israeli entrepreneur Alex Bouaziz who has spoken in support of IDF and the genocide in Palestine.

It would be easy not to think about it too deeply. Football is saturated with corporate sponsorship. We are conditioned to accept branding as background noise. But nonviolence, at least as I understand it, asks us to remain awake to systems — to notice what becomes normal, what becomes invisible, what values are quietly being reinforced.

So I sat with the discomfort.

What does it mean to love a club while remaining critical of the economic and corporate structures around it? What does ethical support look like in a world where identity and consumption are increasingly intertwined? Can you still belong while refusing unquestioning participation?

For me, the answer is yes. Nonviolence is not purity. It is practice. It is the ongoing discipline of refusing to surrender moral reflection simply because something is popular, profitable, or culturally embedded. It is recognising that we are always participating in systems, but still asking how we might do so more consciously, more ethically, more humanely.

So no, I won’t buy the new kit. Not because I reject the club, but because I care enough to remain attentive. To hold affection and critique together. To resist the idea that loyalty requires silence.

Youth work teaches this too. Young people do not need adults who perform certainty. They need adults willing to think critically, act ethically, and model that belonging does not require abandoning conscience. And perhaps that is part of what nonviolence really is, not withdrawal from the world,
but deeper engagement with it. A refusal to stop asking questions. A refusal to let comfort replace ethics. A commitment to living gently and truthfully within systems that often encourage neither.

This weekend, I found that reminder not on a mountainside, but between old books, in the quiet turning of pages, and in the strange grace of paying attention.

Community – the past is present

This week, I met a man who once imagined something into being. Not an idea in the abstract, but a place. A meeting point. A vision that would eventually become Forthspring — the community I now have the privilege of helping to lead. https://www.forthspring.org/

What struck me most was not nostalgia. It was continuity.

The Reverend Sam Birch is a prominent Methodist minister in Belfast known for his extensive peacebuilding work during and after the Troubles. During the height of the Troubles, Rev. Birch gained recognition for his quiet but vital cross-community work, which famously included partnering with Redemptorist priest Father Gerry Reynolds to reach out to grieving families across sectarian divides.

The vision Sam Birch had has not dimmed with time. It remains bright, rooted in people, sustained by relationship, animated by the belief that community matters deeply. As he spoke, he returned constantly to others — to connection, to encounter, to the importance of creating spaces where people can belong across difference.

And I realised how much of that vision still lives. Not only in the building itself, but in the daily practice of what happens there: tea shared across divides, young people finding safety, communities choosing relationship over retreat. Forthspring was never simply about services. It was — and is — about sustaining human connection in a world that increasingly fragments it.

That feels profoundly linked to the principles of nonviolence. Not nonviolence as passivity, but as intentional, relational work. The understanding that peace is not merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice, dialogue, participation, and shared humanity.

Nonviolence begins in how we see one another. It is built through spaces where people are listened to, where dignity is practised, where fear does not get the final word. It asks us to resist the easy pull towards isolation, suspicion, and dehumanisation, and instead to remain committed to relationship — especially when it is difficult.

That is what I heard in his reflections this week. A belief that communities are not sustained through control or performance, but through care. Through ordinary acts of welcome. Through people willing to hold open spaces where others can gather, speak, disagree, heal, and imagine differently together.

In many ways, sustaining Forthspring now feels like inheriting not only a building, but a practice of nonviolence. A commitment to connection in a culture of division. A commitment to encounter in a time of withdrawal. A commitment to hope that is active, not naïve. And perhaps that is why his vision still feels so alive.

Because the need for places like Forthspring has not disappeared. If anything, it has become more urgent.

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