Description
Thought of as a moral yet naïve principle, or simply the opposite of violence, the possibilities and limits of nonviolence, particularly in the context of armed conflict, remain neglected (Jackson, 2020). As such, nonviolence is both a principle and a practice which remains under-theorised in IR. Unarmed civilian protection (UCP) is a nonviolent method of civilian-to-civilian and civilian self-protection, which instrumentalises nonviolent bodies in protection of themselves and each other. Building on interviews and workshops with UCP practitioners who embody nonviolence through protection practices, this paper seeks to engage the question of what nonviolence is. Rejecting the binary notion of nonviolence being simply not-violence, it explores the experiences of nonviolent practitioners to argue that nonviolence instead is a rejection not only of violence, but of permanence. Moving away from responses to armed conflict which are shaped through the finality and permanence of killing and death, UCP practitioners commit to a constant (re)production of nonviolent spaces which are, and will always be, necessarily in a state of becoming. As such, this paper asks how can nonviolence be understood as a necessarily temporal phenomena? And what is the relationship between nonviolence and permenance?
