Nonviolent Encounters - Edinburgh Feminist Studies on Peace, Violence and Justice by Louise Ridden Hardcover

About the Book

Studies nonviolence as a way of knowing, doing and being in armed conflict.

Book Synopsis

This book takes the emerging practice of Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) as a case study of nonviolence to interrogate the roles of violence and nonviolence in conflict knowledge production. By focusing on nonviolent actors using UCP, it decentres violence, which is often so prominent in peace research. This approach creates space to fundamentally reimagine how the world might be when imagined and enacted through nonviolence.

Drawing together feminist theorising from critical military studies, peace and conflict studies and international relations, Nonviolent Encounters argues that decentring violence in conflict knowledge production upsets the simple binaries of protector/protected and war/peace, underpinned by the 'one-world' onto-epistemology of much Western conflict knowledge. Instead, space is created to reconsider nonviolence, not as the binary opposite of violence, but as a way of knowing, doing and being - as a way of producing alternative ontological worlds.

Review Quotes

This book is an outstanding contribution to the literature on nonviolence. It is theoretically innovative and empirically grounded in the practice of unarmed civilian protection (UCP). It offers a new way of understanding embodied, spatial and temporal dimensions of nonviolent practice and shows how UCP operates productively within violence in ways that disrupt violent knowing, being and doing.--Kimberly Hutchings, Queen Mary University of London