Social Change and Conflict Transformation

Violence and nonviolence are strategies to balance power and raise awareness in conflicts that are not ready for verbal forms of negotiation, mediation, or dialogue. These strategies intensify conflict to coerce or persuade people to change. Violence usually spirals into a cycle and creates new victims. Waging conflict nonviolently through carefully wrought community collaboration, advocacy, and activism may ripen conditions for transforming relationships and structures while stopping the cycle of direct and structural violence. This class places the use of violence and nonviolence in a larger context of social change and peacebuilding. It stresses the need to focus on non-adversarial, relationship-based approaches. Also, students share their own communities’ violence and learn strategies for trauma awareness and resilience.