The best books on nonviolence

I consider this the best, most comprehensive biography of Dr. King, and essential reading for all who want to understand him, the Civil Rights movement, his struggles, and his methodology of nonviolence. There are other good books, but this tells the whole story in clear prose and leaves the reader overwhelmed by his staggering, faithful, visionary life, and challenged to do something for justice, disarmament, and nonviolence. Still one of my all-time favorite books! I read it every year, and find myself re-energized all over again to carry on Dr. King’s work for social, economic, and racial justice as well as disarmament and nonviolence.

Inter- and intrastate war are commonplace. News media play up the human drama and transmit the impression that much war is irrational, and that violence is dished out indiscriminately.

Scholars have long since discarded the notion of irrationality of and in warfare. Nonetheless, in their studies of the causes, conduct, and consequences of violence, they tend to treat violence itself as an unexamined entity. Enter Kalyvas who, in this book, disassembles violence into its components, much like natural scientists have disassembled molecules into atoms and atoms into subatomic particles.

With the constituent elements in hand, Kalyvas then proceeds to build a theory of (civil war) violence that is starkly logical, or rational. The hope is that once this logic is understood, better policy intervention tools to prevent violence may be designed. 

The author is perhaps best known as an instigator of the “microhistory” field of study (of which I’m an avid fan and sometime practitioner). But he’s also a chronicler of protest, including one book on the worldwide demonstrations of 1968 and another, Ready for a Brand New Beat, that notes the civil rights impact of Martha and the Vandellas’ "Dancing in the Street". I’ve often felt that I was born late, just missing so many of the cultural convulsions that have informed my writing. With Non-Violence (2006) Kurlansky gives us a historical foundation for the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era.

This first book is nonfiction, but it’s a key book for carving out the imaginative space that makes nonviolence make sense. If you’re like me, you grew up taking for granted that locking up people who do crimes (a form of state violence) is the gold standard for keeping everyone else safe. Nonviolence, the reasoning goes, may be more morally pure, but at the cost of being effective. Sered’s book takes a hammer to this assumption, methodically dismantling the myth that the carceral system does much at all to support victims’ healing and safety. Until We Reckon provides a critical reality check for what benchmark nonviolent solutions should be compared to.

This Hugo Award-winning novel has one of the most original stories I’ve read that revolves around a remarkable mother, Essun.

While Essun pretends to be ordinary, she is an orogene, a race of humans with the ability to significantly alter her environment. As a result, the orogenes are wretched exiles, feared by society and trapped in a governing system that seeks to control them.

I was immediately taken with Essun’s emotional journey as the story opens with the loss of her child. She wants to live a quiet life with her family but is pursued by officials who cannot allow her to go free.

The story really tapped into the most primal aspects of motherhood. Ultimately, it’s motherhood that strengthens Essun’s power as she unleashes it with devastating effectiveness. 

Along with authors like Alyssa Cole and Talia Hibbert, Courtney Milan is a luminary of romance’s liberatory wing. If love can conquer all, let’s aim it at something worthwhile! This book takes one of humanity’s deepest nonviolent instincts, the desire for one another, and shows how it gives people the strength to support each other through the hard work of building a better world. I want to recommend all of Milan’s books, but from a nonviolence perspective, The Devil Comes Courting stands out because of the way it also wrestles with what reconciliation (the last step in Kingian nonviolence) really means.

Learning to communicate in a way that creates a win-win situation for everyone is a skill. Often we get what we want to the detriment of others or the other way round. Nobody wins and the ultimate consequence is nobody is happy. I really like how practical this book is and how it taught me to speak in a different way entirely! It’s all well and good to know the theory of how negative language can destroy relationships but knowing how to communicate differently is what really matters. I like books with exercises I can put into practice as well as the theory that underpins them. This is what gets me to pick this book up and go through it again twenty years after I first bought it.  

This book may seem like it has nothing to do with bipolar disorder, but hear me out. In Strength to Love, King says that love undergirds the universe, and that good will ultimately triumph over evil. The book also tells us that all humans are interconnected, and that we can find hope and purpose in fighting for freedom and justice. Bipolar depression can rob people of all hope. People with bipolar disorder need books that hold our hope for us when we can’t hold it for ourselves. 

Pinker’s masterpiece is hugely important for two reasons.

First, it well makes the case that the world is the most peaceful it has ever been. This is so despite what you see on TV. Second, he explains four reasons why: rule of law, rule of reason, rule of women, and international trade.

I have spent the last forty years teaching and promoting international trade. The fundamental truth of human relations is: The first persuasion was coercion; the first sophistication is exchange. We are almost through with coercion in this 21st century.

Readers of Pinker’s book will walk away with a greater understanding of what it takes to create peace in the modern geo-political climate.

Another nonfiction book, Healing Resistance does a splendid job showing the philosophical connections between nonviolence on an interpersonal level and nonviolent social change movements. Drawing on the tradition of Kingian nonviolence, this book is a useful starting place for anyone who wants to understand what nonviolence is and isn’t as well as how it works. It’s also chock full of recommendations for other books and is a great jumping-off point for further reading. Sometimes nonviolence doesn’t look like what we expect.

I consider Mahatma Gandhi one of the greatest peacemakers in history. He showed us how to use nonviolence at every level, even how to get the British empire to leave India peacefully. I have read the entire 100 volumes of Gandhi’s writings and many biographies, and edited my own collection but Fischer is the best and knew Gandhi personally. His biography continues to inspire me forty years after I first read it because he brings out some of Gandhi’s strongest teachings on nonviolence, including the connections with self-denial, prayer, fasting, and being willing to go to prison to stop injustice and war. I think he captures the radical spirit of Gandhi best. This book is my go-to book for peacemaking inspiration.

In his heyday, Kenneth Boulding was among America’s leading intellectuals across the natural and social sciences. A cofounder of the fields of ecological economics and of peace economics, he also wrote poetry.

Well-known books of his include The Image and Conflict and Defense, but I like the little Stable Peace the best. Just 143 pages long, it takes peace seriously, not as a utopian ideal but as a practical policy option. Boulding asks: as a scientific matter, what might it take to reach stable peace?

If nothing else, you will enjoy both the power of his concepts and of his writing. If phrases like “policy is social agriculture” don’t stop and engage you, what will?

In 1922, protestors in the northern Indian town of Chauri Chaura set fire to a local police station, killing the twenty-two policemen trapped inside. The event prompted Ghandi to question whether Indians were ready for independence and led to a suspension of the non-cooperation campaign. In his book, Amin explores how memory of this local affair, marked by violence, became entangled in a larger national narrative that emphasized non-violence. The result is a work that deconstructs how historical narrative is produced, and how the story of Chauri Chaura differs based on whether it's told by regional or state and national parties. This book is highly original in its presentation, use of source material, and methods of analysis. 

Building from the scope of world revolutionaries and revolutions, authors build a compelling idea that nonviolent revolution is something everybody may – and should try at home. Balancing the fine line between solid, historically founded cases and an “academic world” and something which is both accessible and inspiring for the common reader. See numerous cases of common people pushing for massive change, and getting inspired.

I love reading sci-fi YA books and this book was really talking to me. Peaceful contact or not?

Reading this book by the author – her first – it reminded me of the much-loved movie Avatar, which I also love.

Like in the movie, when Captain Melissa and her crew finally arrived at the new planet, to contact the people living there, they looked peaceful. They find out, that they are telepathic, not only the people, the plants, and animals as well.

After the people of the planet perform a play, they find out, what was really going on there. Not everything you see can be trusted when you look behind the scenes. From the outside, it was all peaceful, but when you touch the plants, they speak to you.

In the 1940s, journalist John Hersey wrote an eye-opening expose on the effects of the atomic bombing of Japan with Hiroshima. In doing so, Hersey began to shape the already-contested memory of why America dropped “the bomb.” Following in Hersey’s footsteps, in the early 1980s Jonathan Schell penned a straightforward warning about the atomic age. After interviewing scientists, policymakers, and intellectuals, he began to pen an accessible essay exposing of what would happen to earth after a nuclear war. The result was Fate of the Earth, and it went on to become one of the most impactful pieces of non-fiction of the decade. It helped to validate scientist Carl Sagan’s controversial “nuclear winter” hypothesis, and inspired an untold number of the public to engage in antinuclear activism. To appreciate the early 1980s as a period of intense nuclear fear, this is a must-read.

The first book in the Kingston Cycle series, Witchmark is set in a magic-powered Edwardian era just after the end of a World War. I loved the balance of soaring magic and gritty realism as well as the unexpected revelations surrounding each of the characters.

Miles — a witch who is desperate to keep from being used as a power source by mages — has faked his death and lives in hiding as a military doctor. However, when Tristan Hunter brings a dying man to Miles’ hospital, Miles’ secrets are threatened. But Tristan isn’t interested in blackmailing or exposing him. Instead he needs Miles to help him to track down a murderer and uncover an epidemic threatening to destroy all the magic in their world.

Obviously, the setting and premise had me from the start but the real fun of the book was following Miles and Tristan as they tried… show more.

Markowitz starts with the iconic images of Gandhi – Father of the Indian Nation, the modern saint, the apostle of nonviolence, and so on – and unpicks them to show how selective they are. He examines with great insight the way that Gandhi’s image was created in the West from the 1920s onwards, with him often being compared to Christ. Attenborough’s influential film on Gandhi is reviewed in revealing ways. He also examines the many biographies of Gandhi, showing how they have tended to focus on aspects of his message and fail to bring out the huge complexities of the man. 

He shows how Gandhi’s reputation as a serious political and economic thinker was shaped in the West first by pacifists and alternative thinkers, and much later by academic social scientists. He also provides some excellent analysis of Gandhi’s career in South Africa and India. The book is full of… show more.

Thomas Merton is perhaps the best-known and most beloved monk in history. His 1948 best-selling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, inspired millions of people. He went on to write over 100 books on every aspect of the spiritual life, as well as racism, war, poetry, and peacemaking, while spending his days in his Kentucky monastery, until his untimely death in 1968. The third of Jim Forest’s biographies, Living With Wisdom sums up Merton’s story using all his writings, journals, and letters, along with many photos, and offers the best overview of Merton’s shining example of contemplative peacemaking. It will inspire everyone to go deep into the spiritual roots of peace and nonviolence and become authentic peacemakers.