The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

When Jonathan Schell’s “The Unconquerable World,” a meditation on the history and power of nonviolent action, was published in 2003, the timing could not have been worse. Americans were at war — and success was in the air. U.S. troops had invaded Iraq and taken Baghdad (“mission accomplished”) only months earlier, and had already spent more than a year fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Schell’s book earned a handful of glowing reviews, and then vanished from the public debate as the bombs sco

When Jonathan Schell’s “The Unconquerable World,” a meditation on the history and power of nonviolent action, was published in 2003, the timing could not have been worse. Americans were at war — and success was in the air. U.S. troops had invaded Iraq and taken Baghdad (“mission accomplished”) only months earlier, and had already spent more than a year fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Schell’s book earned a handful of glowing reviews, and then vanished from the public debate as the bombs scorched Iraq and the body count began to mount.

Now, “The Unconquerable World’s” animating message — that, in the age of nuclear weaponry, nonviolent action is the mightiest of forces, one capable of toppling even the greatest of empires — has undergone a renaissance of sorts. In December 2010, the self-immolation of a young Tunisian street vendor triggered a wave of popular and, in many cases, nonviolent uprisings across the Middle East, felling such autocrats as Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in mere weeks. Occupations, marches and protests of all sorts spread like brushfire across Europe, from England to Spain to Greece, and later Moscow, and even as far as Madison, Wis. And then, of course, there were the artists, students and activists who, last September, heard the call to “occupy Wall Street” and ignited a national movement with little more than tents, signs and voices on a strip of stone and earth in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.
Source: http://www.salon.com/2012/03/01/the_u...
This link is to a March 2012 interview with Jonathan Schell.

War cannot be waged without guns, tanks, and planes. Nonviolent resistance cannot be waged without active, steadfast, committed masses of unarmed people. The civil-rights movement led by Martin Luther King in the United States provides an illustration. The courageous campaign of a minority, mostly black, touched the conscience of an inactive majority, mostly white, who provided the political support necessary for the movement’s historic judicial, legislative, and social victories.

The Washington think tank Freedom House keeps a record of countries it considers to be democracies. In 1971, it counted thirty; in 2001, after a quarter century of the liberal revival, it counted one hundred and twenty-one.

… I have sought to trace, alongside the awful history of modern violence, a less-noticed, parallel history of nonviolent power. The chronicle has been a hopeful one of violence disrupted or in retreat – of great-power war immobilized by the nuclear stalemate, of brutal empires defeated by local peoples fighting for their self-determination, of revolutions succeeding without violence, of democracy supplanting authoritarian or totalitarian repression, of national sovereignty yielding to systems of mixed and balanced powers. These developments, I shall argue, have provided the world with the strongest new foundations for the creation of a durable peace that have ever existed.