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When people feel they have to run faster and faster just to keep up, it is a personal experience of the acceleration that characterises late modern society. In reaction, some people attempt to escape "the rat race" by aiming to live self-sufficiently in the countryside. This article presents a text analysis of 35 letters from the magazine Åter, where people share their experiences of moving. The analysis focuses on the authors' motivations for the move, their criticism of mainstream society and their experiences of time, temporality and competing time norms in their new life. Rosa's concepts of acceleration, alienation and resonance, and Adam's concept of abstract and standardised clock time, provide the theoretical framework for the analysis. The study concludes that the authors of letters search for resonance and to a large degree they have also found it, especially since the authors experience their work as meaningful and live according to their ideological values. Self-sufficiency is an individual form of coping, but simultaneously choosing to live differently is a practice of constructive resistance to mainstream consumption and work norms.

Groups working for change are met with many types of responses. Most attention has been given to reactions of overt repression or support for movements and campaigns. However, there exist a range of other pacifying responses, such as ignoring, placating, devaluing, disrupting and misinforming. These subtler forms of obstructions pose a different type of challenge and require different types of counter-strategies than violent repression. This article introduces a framework focusing on four different types of responses – 1. Validating, 2. Discrediting and attacking, 3. Manipulative and 4. Non-interfering. This model can be applied to analyse responses to all types of nonviolent campaigns from opponents and so-called third parties. The Freedom Flotilla to Gaza in 2011 serves as a case study to present the model and to analyse how the Israeli government and its supporters successfully disrupted and contained this flotilla with much more subtle means than the 2010 flotilla where nine activists were killed. ; Interface journal https://www.interfacejournal.net/

Activists in both dictatorships and democracies use humor as a method of nonviolent resistance, and its special way of appealing to emotions and imagination through ambiguity frequently sets it apart from other forms of nonviolent action. This study analyzes three examples from twentieth‐century Sweden of the political uses of humor according to the ability of each to facilitate dialogue, break power, serve as an utopian enactment, and be a normative regulation. In these cases, humor is found to have a particular ability to break the power of dominant discourses, because their ambiguity makes them ideal as "guerrilla attacks" in the ongoing discursive guerrilla war the activists are waging.

People living in systems of domination and exploitation resist in many different ways. Some modes of resistance build and experiment with alternatives to the present in various forms, from the small to the large, the hidden to the open. An overall term for these efforts is "constructive resistance," which covers initiatives in which people start to build the society they desire independently of the dominant structures already in place. This is initiatives which not only criticise, protest, object, and undermine what is considered undesirable and wrong, but simultaneously acquire, create, built, cultivate and experiment with what people need in the present moment, or what they would like to see replacing dominant structures or power relations. Within peace and conflict studies, this has been approached through Gandhi's concept of the constructive programme. In the anarchist and Marxists traditions and social movement literature, a related notion is prefigurative politics.

AbstractIn recent years, a major focus of research and campaigning on strategic nonviolent action has been on movements to oust authoritarian rulers. However, these "nonviolent revolutions" usually do not transform systems of economic and social domination. To motivate appreciation of what might be involved in a more far‐reaching social transformation, selected anarchist themes offer useful guides. The relevance of four principles of anarchist theory and practice—non‐hierarchy, self‐management, direct action, and prefiguration—is illustrated in the South African struggle against apartheid. Activists should consider how to use nonviolent strategies to move beyond systems of domination based on states and capitalism.

The logics of capitalist temporality dominate western society today. Drawing on Barbara Adam's work, we explore two important dimensions of this dominant temporality. Standardised and abstract clock time involves a detachment from seasons and the life-world, closely related to the commodification of time exemplified by expressions like "time is money". Many initiatives attempt to challenge the dominance of capitalist temporality, amongst which we present: (1) worker cooperatives that organize work and its temporality as alternatives to capitalism; and (2) timebanks where people exchange services with each other based on time rather than money. We investigate how these illustrative examples differ from the dominant capitalist temporality, and in what ways they depend on the same logic that they resist. The analysis shows that the initiatives divert from the dominant temporality in important aspects, but also reproduce it in other ways. Thereby, this article contributes to theorizing resistance in connection to time and temporality, and gives insights in the potential and elusiveness of constructive resistance to dominant temporality.

Escalation of conflict is frequently deemed undesirable and problematic, as it is often assumed to refer to the escalation of violence. However, there exists a different form of escalation that we call "nonviolent conflict escalation." This occurs when previously unrecognized conflicts are intensified using nonviolent means to a point where the conflict can no longer be ignored. Five aspects of nonviolent escalations of methods are examined through case studies, showing how different forms of intensification can work together to escalate the conflict. Nonviolent escalations of unrecognized conflicts can serve as potent tools in struggles against tyranny, injustice, and human rights violations.

This article investigates what culture means for nonviolent resistance. While literature on nonviolence has had a tendency to look instrumentally at culture, this article suggests an intertwined relationship. Activists are themselves embedded in their own cultures, and there is no "outside culture." The authors suggest an innovative model of three strategies for analyzing the cultural aspects of a nonviolent struggle: (1) occasionally borrowing existing powerful symbols and cultural elements, such as flags or religious symbols, which is then applied; (2) partially remodeling"old" culture in the spirit of nonviolence. This strategy is illustrated through the Khudai Khidmatgar of the North‐West Frontier Province in the 1930s and shows how the nonviolent struggle there, was "negotiated" with Islam and a traditional code of honor; and finally, (3) systematically creating a nonviolent movement culture, which is a much more complex process, is illustrated through the movement for landless workers in Brazil, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra.