Nonviolence Radio

On Sept. 13, 22 year old Mahsa Amini was detained by the Iranian morality police and died in their custody three days later, allegedly at their hands. Protests have erupted across Iran and with solidarity actions taking place among the diasporic community across the world. A women- and youth-led movement has taken shape, and people are willingly facing brutality and even death in the streets, with...

“Every individual should be deliberately and consciously living their life in a peaceful and nonviolent way. And that is the basic self-transformation which is important for the Culture of Peace. And that is the thing that we have been telling again and again, that peace is something very individual to all of us. Yes, we create the communities. We create the nations. But individuals do it. Nations...

In this week's episode of Nonviolence Radio, Stephanie speaks with interdisciplinary sociologist Ruba al-Hassani to bring context and understanding to the current protests in Iraq, and how they differ from the nonviolent Tishreen/October movement of 2019. To provide context to each of these movements, she first gives a deep explainer of the ethno-based consociational and power-sharing model o...

When Paul Cox was called by his draft board to serve in the U.S. war on the people of Vietnam, he did not feel he could, or should object. Once he arrived, however, he began questioning the motives and purpose of the war and felt it was a duty to do something about it, finding a community of other GIs and veterans who were also opposed. In this interview, Paul describes his experiences as part of...

In this week's episode of Nonviolence Radio, Michael and Stephanie speak with members of the Nonviolent Global Liberation community (NGL) about their collective and individual experiments in nonviolence, including the process of building and working within the NGL community.  Their commitment and resolve to explore and address all areas of life, from market economies to home life, to the even...

This week, Nonviolence Radio hosts three exceptional guests: Tim Pluta and Adrienne Kinne, two former veterans now working for peace, and writer and activist, Lawrence Cox. Tim and Adrienne talk to Stephanie and Michael about their recent work in Western Sahara with three women from the Khaya family who have been forcibly detained in their home for well over a year. The suffering they have endured...

In this episode, we hear from Kazu Haga from the East Point Peace Academy and Robin Wildman from Nonviolent Schools RI , exploring different aspects of nonviolent trainings to diminish the violence in our cultures. In the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler begins with the importance of “Thou Shall Not Kill” in the cultures of the world, and how that message is critical to counter America’s rising...

Nigerian writer and activist Amos Oluwatoye joins Stephanie and Michael on Nonviolence Radio this week to talk about his path to nonviolent activism. He traces his path through radical Marxism and student activism to religious activism to a kind of synthesis and expansion of them all. At university, acting as a leader of his community, Amos was pushed to make difficult choices, choices in which le...

This week, Nonviolence Radio broadcasts a talk by peace researcher and award-winning author, Maria Stephan. Maria is chief organizer and co-lead at the Horizons Project and collaborated with Erica Chenoweth on the book, Why Civil Resistance Works. In this episode, she explores how nonviolence might be effectively used in Ukraine – and the ways it already is: … right now, inside Ukraine, in towns,...

Qamar Jafri visits Nonviolence Radio this week to talk with Stephanie and Michael about the Pashtun Protection Movement, committed to bringing about justice through nonviolent means, even in Pakistan, a place which has suffered from entrenched violent conflict. This interview explores not only the ways the Pashtun Protection Movement effectively uses nonviolent resistance to end oppression and inj...

This week’s Nonviolence Radio show shares the stories and wisdom of two guests: Osama Elewat, an activist from Combatants for Peace (a volunteer organization that brings together ex-combatants from Israel and Palestine to find peaceful solutions to the cycle of violence in the region) and Michael Beer, the director of Nonviolence International (an organization that advocates for active nonviolence...

Joanne Sheehan of War Resisters League and War Resisters International joins Nonviolence Radio to share insights and strategies for resisting militarization and ending war through nonviolence, with a focus on current events of the war in Ukraine. 

Dr. Vandana Shiva joins us on Nonviolence Radio this week to discuss her latest book from Synergetic Press, Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy: A Global Citizens'  Report on the Corporate Control of Technology, Health, and Agriculture. 

This week, Michael and Stephanie talk about reparations (and more) with UC Berkeley professor emeritus, Charles Henry, who is also the former president of the National Council for Black Studies and former chair of Amnesty International USA. In 2007, years ahead of his time, Professor Henry wrote a book on the issue of reparations, Long Overdue. The Politics of Racial Reparations . Reparation, Prof...

On today's show we honor the life and teachings of Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay as he is lovingly referred to by his students.  Thich Nhat Hanh passed away at the age of 95 on Friday, January 22, and leaves a legacy that goes beyond Buddhism and into the heart of what it means to be human, and how to put compassion and nonviolence into practice.  His teachings ha...

Journalists Sher Kashimov and Colleen Wood join Stephanie and Michael this week on Nonviolence Radio to give background about the current situation in Kazakhstan. After the government shut down the internet, very little information was known about the protests or the government’s increasingly violent response with an invitation to the Russian military, “Shoot to kill.”  Sher and Colleen manage to...

This week, Stephanie and Michael are joined by community leader, Natasha Juliana, who is currently hard at work on “Cool Petaluma,” a project that aims to heal the climate from the ground up. Aware at how easy it is to become overwhelmed by the climate crisis, paralyzed by its magnitude, Cool Petaluma starts with concrete, inclusive and non-political actions taken at a grassroots level. This allow...

Stephanie and Michael welcome three guests this week on Nonviolence Radio. First, they talk to Katherine Hughes-Fraitekh and Steve Chase about their work together in Solidarity 2020 and Beyond . Responding to the isolation and suffering caused by COVID, Solidarity 2020 and Beyond offers hope and support to grassroots activists and organizations, providing them opportunities to network, to learn fr...

Robert Levering comes to Nonviolence Radio this week to talk to Stephanie Van Hook and Michael Nagler about the film “The Boys Who Said No!” and the powerful draft resistance movement that helped to end the Vietnam War. Robert is an executive producer of the film, a position he is well suited to as he himself was a draft resister in the 1960s. In the interview, we hear how Robert worked collective...

This week, Michael and Stephanie talk to Kathy Kelly, life-long nonviolence activist, co-founder of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and co-coordinator of the Ban Killer Drones Campaign. This week she discusses her extensive experience in and thoughts about Afghanistan. American intervention, she believes, was -- and indeed, continues to be -- entirely misoriented, escalating rather than resolving...

This week Nonviolence Radio hosts Ela Gandhi, granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, herself a peace activist and committed supporter of nonviolence. Ela was raised in The Phoenix Settlement, an ashram established by Gandhi in 1904 dedicated to the value of self-sufficiency, grounded in a profound concern for the natural world and dedicated to promoting human dignity for all. In this episode, Stephanie...

“Share the Day” — this is a translation of a greeting from the ocean world of Shora, which was a world created by Joan Slonczewski. She’s a science fiction writer and professor at Kenyon College. This is from her 1986 novel “ A Door into Ocean .” The book describes a society of people who are committed to nonviolence at a very, very deep level — and not just an emotional, sentimental kind of “do n...

On this episode of Nonviolence Radio, Stephanie and Michael are joined by Kelly Denton-Borhaug. Kelly teaches in the Global Religious Department at Moravian University and has written extensively on issues of war culture, moral injury and the ways that sacrifice can be used as a means to dehumanize and oppress marginalized people. Kelly traces the celebration of sacrifice -- so pervasive in Americ...

As we move into the days commemorating the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we join with activists and scholars around the world who say “no” to nuclear proliferation. What kind of wealth system, what kind of thinking about human life and our shared ecology would pose a fundamental challenge to the nuclear mindset?  We invited Dr. Michael Allen to Nonviolence Radio to offer a short but...

This week, Michael and Stephanie welcome Dr. Wim Laven, professor, author, board member of the International Peace Research Association and the Peace and Justice Studies Association , and Editor in Chief of Peace Chronicle magazine. Wim’s work looks at the immense power of forgiveness as well as the very real difficulties involved in the act of forgiving. How does forgiving release us and allow us...