Por Ian Hansen
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| Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair |
The West is already paying for this bend in its moral arc[4]. And it seems bound to pay increasingly more as the domestic and geopolitical consequences of the fecklessness of its leadership class unfold. There is, though, at least one “silver lining” opportunity arising from the West’s persecution of nonviolent resisters of genocide, and the resisters gaining ground anyway. The odds-beating small victories that the pro-Palestine movement has enjoyed nurture the forbidden hypothesis that nonviolent collective action can potentially stop a genocide. The mounting evidence for that hypothesis may eventually become a universal acid that dissolves the foundations of militarism.
Up to now, it has been received wisdom that genocides must be stopped by violence before they reach their conclusion, otherwise they end by reaching their conclusion. The mandarins of the West who most regularly remind us of this received wisdom might reconsider that wisdom, though, when the genocide-targeted people are Palestinians. Such mandarins habitually frame violence by, or on behalf of, Palestinians as “terrorism” and thus something forbidden to contextualize, even if the context is an ongoing genocide against Palestinians.
It has long been normative, in fact, to scold Palestinians for not having had a Gandhi arise among them. My sense is those who complain the loudest on this score (without reviewing the historical evidence of what typically happens to Palestinians who adopt Gandhian methods) do not really want a Palestinian Gandhi anyway. Such complainers often count nonviolent Palestinian resistance to colonial occupation as terrorism also. And for those most committed to rationalizing the killing and oppression of Palestinians, the latter commit “terrorism” just by continuing to live and breathe.
The West has acknowledged some genocides as unjust, though. With these genocides in mind, received wisdom in the West strains against the idea that anyone could put a nonviolent, anti-war ethos in service of an anti-genocide struggle. The common assumption was—and, in some contexts, remains—that whenever a potentially genocidal power targets people worthy of life for aggression, all pacifists and other war-resisters could only ever be useful idiots of the genocidaires.
Against this view, there is much evidence that nonviolent resisters can make valuable contributions to anti-genocide struggles. This evidence includes the fascinating, and often moving, documentation of successful operations to rescue individuals and families among the hunted. It is often other civilian individuals and small communities who carry out these nonviolent rescues, with rescuers sometimes explicitly committed to pacifism.[5]
In support of the received wisdom, though, there is little evidence that the typically small-scale anti-genocidal contributions of nonviolent actors can scale up to fully stop a genocide. The closest thing to a historical case for the genocide-stopping power of nonviolence is the disciplined success of Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s nonviolent army, the Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) against early 20th century British rule. Khan, a Pashtun ally of Mohandas Gandhi, and hailing from what eventually became the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, was an unusually persuasive teacher of nonviolence.
Khan is known for having persuaded a substantial part of his fellow Pashtuns to adopt nonviolence as a kind of intensification, rather than compromise, of their longstanding martyrdom-ready ethos. Khan successfully argued that his people’s courage to face death in honor-related struggle would be more honorable, and powerful, with all the killing taken out of it. His hundred thousand-strong army of Khudai Khidmatgar recruits thus stayed unusually perseverant in nonviolence through some brutal and indiscriminately murderous British onslaughts against them during the struggle for independence. Khan’s nonviolent army did things like march into lines of British soldiers commanded to shoot at every man, woman and child in the non-dispersing crowds. This is as high stakes as “nonviolent direct action” ever gets.
In one such instance, the Qissa Khwani massacre of 1930, the British kept shooting into those nonviolent crowds for six hours, but did eventually lose their stomach for mass killing unarmed people. The backlash in British public opinion after that massacre contributed greatly to eroding British resolve to maintain its colonial possessions in what was then the British Raj. That erosion of resolve, combined with the perseverance and ubiquity of collective nonviolent action against British rule throughout the Raj, led eventually to Britain’s former colonial subjects there declaring independence and self-determination.
As the Qissa Khwani massacre illustrates, the idea that nonviolence could only defeat the British Raj because noble and kindly Britain embodied the moral antithesis of genocide is laughable. By bringing an end to the Raj, Khan and his army, his ally Gandhi, and the millions of others in the independence movement also ended the horrors of British colonial misrule. That misrule included not only the various indiscriminate massacres of noncombatants that the British inflicted, but also things like the millions-starving Bengal famine of 1943. So the Khudai Khidmatgar, together with the rest of the nonviolent Satyagraha movement, helped put a stop to some close-to-genocidal[6] behavior. So that can happen.
Consider also the Indonesian genocide against the East Timorese. Though armed international peacekeepers finally brought the genocide to an effective end in 1999, and the East Timorese resistance began with armed struggle in 1975, nonviolent resistance emerged as a deliberate resistance strategy alongside it in the late 1980s. Nonviolent international solidarity measures followed, including boycotts and vigils. Journalists Amy Goodman, Allan Nairn and Max Stahl also intensified international outrage at the genocide by taking fire while standing between the army and protesters during the Santa Cruz massacre of 1991. A largely nonviolent democracy movement in Indonesia brought an end, in 1998, to rule by U.S.-backed dictator Suharto, who had overseen most of the genocide. As noted above, United Nations peacekeepers were needed a year later to bring the genocide to a final close, but nonviolent action had laid much of the groundwork for that conclusion.
A more historically recent case of nonviolence against proto-genocidal violence was the Christian-Muslim solidarity work of the Women’s Peace Movement in Liberia. That movement arguably made the greatest contribution—a nonviolent one—to the end of Liberia’s brutal civil war in 2003. The movement also drew international attention that likely set the stage for the prosecution of Liberian president Charles Taylor for his war crimes (in Sierra Leone), and also for the election of the first woman head of state in modern Africa: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Such examples are probably exceptional, though, and among my examples, only the Indonesian genocide against East Timorese reached fully genocidal proportions. My guess is that for most genocides and attempted genocides that sufficient numbers of international genocide scholars and major human rights organizations recognize as such, some violent party ended them violently. Or the genocides ended by reaching the genocidaire-intended conclusion.
The violence of powerful armies, not violent resistance by the genocide-targeted, is what typically cuts genocides short—though violent resistance can help attract powerful sponsorship
There is a catch to violence’s record of success at halting genocides, though. Genocide-targeted populations opting for violent methods typically cannot stop their exterminators with their own armed resistance alone, or they would not be facing genocide in the first place. Genocide-targeted populations generally need state or imperial sponsors more powerful than the aggressor entity.
Armed guerilla bands of Armenian fedayi did not drastically reduce the scale of the Ottoman Empire’s genocide against Armenians. It was the British, French, Russian and U.S. forces who did that, by winning World War I. Participants in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising did not stop the genocide of Polish Jews. It was the Soviet Red Army that liberated the extermination camps in Poland in 1944 and 1945. The Mukti Bahini in Bangladesh did not themselves end U.S. Cold War ally Pakistan’s genocide against Bangladeshis in 1971. It was the Indian army. Armed wings of the Cambodian middle classes did not stop the Khmer Rouge genocide. It was the Vietnamese army’s invasion of 1978-1979. Armed Bosniaks did not stop the acts of genocide against them by Serb nationalists in 1995. It was NATO bombing of Serb strongholds around Sarajevo and Pale.
The closest thing to a genocide-targeted population violently stopping the genocide through its own violence was arguably the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front invading Rwanda from Uganda to stop the 1994 Hutu supremacist-led genocide. Yet that was still not a case of the specifically genocide-targeted Tutsis residing in Rwanda defending themselves with their own unaided violence.
Could nonviolent action have cut short any of these genocides as swiftly or conclusively? Probably not. In 2011, political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan published a well-regarded book reviewing the empirical evidence that nonviolence generally works better than violence to achieve a campaign’s ultimate goals—more than twice as well on average, according to their central finding. And they found nonviolent resistance works about 22% better than the violent kind even when a regime is violently cracking down. But Chenoweth and Stephan stop short of suggesting that nonviolent methods might ever be sufficient to stop a full-scale genocide.
Chenoweth wrote specifically, “…clearly a truly genocidal regime will be difficult to confront with nonviolent resistance (or violent resistance for that matter).” And the historical evidence suggests Chenoweth is right on both counts. Nonviolent resistance is likely to fail here, but then so is violent resistance, at least by militarily marginalized resisters.
However, the advantage that violent resistance offers over nonviolent resistance under potentially genocidal circumstances is greater hope of attracting a powerful state or imperial sponsor. States and empires like to sponsor and support others’ violence when they think they can get something out of it. It also helps if the state or imperial sponsor does not have to sacrifice that much themselves. If they can make some money on the deal through arms sales and resource extraction, so much the better. As ill-motivated and meddlesome as the sponsor may be, genocidally-besieged forces especially may often still want the help.
Chenoweth and Stephan present an unsympathetic case study to illustrate this point:
The aid of an external donor may help violent insurgents to wage successful campaigns against more powerful adversaries…. Many would argue, for example, that Franco’s revolutionary fascists would have been defeated by the Spanish Republicans without the support of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy (p. 54).
To be fairer to insurgent movements than this loaded example, fascist-led insurgent movements are not the only uprisings against entrenched power that feel they need a helping hand now and again. Pretty much every survivor of a fascist government’s war crimes will attest to that. Still, the Spanish Republic example is at least a reminder that governments do not hold a monopoly on genocidal atrocities. Rebel groups can sometimes fuel such atrocities more than governments (see, for instance, the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan). Any kind of mobilized human collective—governmental or insurgent—can be genocidal or targeted by genocidal forces.
The point, in any case, is that if a genocide-targeted human collective can strongly signal intent to use violence against genocidaire forces, they stand a chance of attracting support from an even greater power hoping to benefit from that violence. If all goes well, the greater power sponsor can help the genocide-targeted obtain successful relief from the genocidal onslaught[7].
Signaling nonviolent intent is a less reliable way to obtain state sponsorship
Why couldn’t a genocide-threatened human collective attract as much or more “greater power” violent assistance by signaling a willingness to resist nonviolently? Aside from the obvious mismatch in methods, the answer relates to an under-discussed, but crucial, point that Chenoweth and Stephan make in their work comparing resistance movements (and their focus is resistance movements, not so much vulnerable governments). That point is that nonviolent resistance movements are less dependent on foreign state sponsorship for success than are violent resistance movements. And the corollary of that point is that foreign state sponsors are more likely to invest themselves in violent than nonviolent resistance movements.
Chenoweth and Stephan lay out the specific statistics underlying the first claim in Table 2.4 (p. 52) of their book. That table shows that the odds of state sponsorship improving nonviolent campaign success are about even, while state sponsorship improves the odds of success for a violent campaign by about 15%. And, by implication, lack of state sponsorship reduces the odds of success for violent movements, but not for nonviolent movements.
Chenoweth and Stephan note directly in the text the evidence for the second, correspondent claim that strong state or imperial sponsors tend to be less likely to bother investing in those pursuing nonviolent struggles. Chenoweth and Stephan write, “whereas 35 percent of the violent insurgencies received material support from a foreign state, less than 10 percent of nonviolent campaigns did so” (p. 54). This makes sense, as the relative lack of dependence on sponsoring states of such struggles means less leverage—and thus less appeal—for sponsors[8].
Such statistics would seem to underscore the strategic advantage of nonviolent resistance, and generally they do. Chenoweth and Stephan lay out in detail all the conditions and complications around receiving a powerful foreign country’s military sponsorship (which Ukrainians can recount bitterly firsthand since Trump returned to the presidency). Given how onerous and uncertainty-producing these conditions and complications can become, movements should understandably want to avoid them when they can.
When a population opts for a nonviolent resistance campaign (under non-genocidal circumstances at least), its advantage is not only in having a substantially better chance of achieving its ultimate goals. It also enjoys its prospects for success not being dependent on sympathetic interventions by a strong, and potentially meddlesome and mercurial, state or imperial sponsor. The achievements of such nonviolent movements are primarily their own. So much for the “color revolution” and “Soros-paid protesters” slurs that dictators like to use to slander the accomplishments of homegrown nonviolent resistance movements.
So when a genocide is not on the table, and a mobilized collective of some kind really wants to succeed in confronting a militarily stronger foe (and without perilous dependency on some other powerful state or empire), the data is clear. It suggests the mobilized collective increases its chances of success by sticking to nonviolent direct action.
Once a genocide is on the table, though, getting some external state or imperial support—no matter how tainted by extortionate control-seeking and fealty-demanding—can be understandably perceived as an acute matter of survival. Given the track record of powerful armies ending genocides, and the evidence that violent campaigns can attract the sponsorship of powerful armies sometimes, Chenoweth and Stephan’s findings take on a different meaning for the genocide-threatened. Their findings unintentionally provide evidence that signaling a willingness to use massive violence may sometimes put a resistance movement facing genocide at a survival advantage, all else being equal.
But then all else is not equal.
The disappearing potential sponsors problem
During the 20th century Cold War era, most countries and movements in the world had some hope of being able to court one of the cold-warring powers or the other to sponsor them in their violent campaigns for whatever purpose. Plenty of genocides occurred because of the Cold War too, as proxy wars do sometimes become genocidal. But even with genocidal violence generally more prolific back then, a genocide-threatened entity theoretically had a good chance of attracting some great power sponsorship by signaling a readiness to indulge in violence against their aggressors.
Today, with more ideologically ambiguous concerns driving geopolitical divides and surveillance tools giving ruling states growing control, those threatened with genocide are often more constrained in their options. If the genocide in question is sponsored by a U.S. ally, or the U.S. itself, the circumstantial constraints are even tighter. And most ongoing genocides in the world named by a critical mass of genocide scholars and human rights organizations as such—those in Gaza, Sudan, Tigray, Burma/Myanmar, and Congo—are not fully independent affairs.
A U.S. ally, like Israel or the United Arab Emirates either directly inflicts, or has effectively enabled, all these genocides. In the case of Sudan, it is the United Arab Emirates that bankrolls the genocidal Rapid Support Forces. In the cases of Ethiopia (partly responsible for the Tigray genocide), Rwanda’s RPF-led government (responsible for much of the genocidal carnage in Congo), and the Myanmar junta ruling Burma (inflicting genocide on the Rohingya), close U.S. ally Israel is either openly allied with those governments, or has happily sold them arms and offered other support[9]. The U.S. itself has technically condemned the genocidal RSF violence in Sudan, as well as Myanmar’s violence against the Rohingya, while taking more ambiguous stances on the governments of Ethiopia and Rwanda. In none of these cases, though, has the U.S. even come close to threatening to enforce accountability for any of the associated genocides. And, of course, the U.S. funds the genocide in Gaza with U.S. tax dollars, and lately also supports it by deporting non-citizen ethnic minorities who name it as a genocide.
The cultural genocide against Uyghurs, with its mass detention, forced indoctrination, cultural erasure and sexual abuse, is exceptional in that a rival to the U.S.—China—is relatively exclusively inflicting it. Neither the U.S. nor its closest allies like Israel are allied with China, nor inclined to sell them arms. Yet Israel—like the U.S. under Trump—sees little strategic advantage in trying to stop the Uyghur cultural genocide in its present state either, given its thematic overlap with more Western-approved and Western-ignored genocides.
And this thematic overlap also accounts for there being little hope of a “responsibility to protect” ethos emerging in some superpower that rivals the U.S. Neither China nor Russia are likely to revive their Cold War roles as self-proclaimed assisters of colonized peoples’ liberation in the spirit of “an injury to one is an injury to all” internationalism. China’s and Russia’s interests have grown much more narrowly nationalist in the 21st century, and there is practically zero likelihood of either of them sending their armies to end genocidal horrors in Palestine, Sudan, Tigray, or Congo (and certainly not Myanmar). Increasingly formidable regional powers like India (which once stopped Pakistan’s genocide against Bangladeshis) have, under present political conditions, largely the same ethos as Russia and China on these questions.
All this leaves political forces among genocide-targeted peoples scrambling to find violent sponsorship by ideologically-aligned regional powers, with outfits like Hamas aligning with the Iranian state in the Palestinian case. These days, such regional powers tend to be dramatically militarily weaker than the aggressor state they are otherwise inclined to battle. And they are typically not models of humane governance either, as the thousands of dead protesters in Iran would attest if they could.
Also, the catastrophic failure to achieve Palestinian goals with sponsor-pleasing acts of horrific violence like the Hamas-led October 7 massacre of accessible Israelis, many pro-Palestinian peaceniks among them, has given anticolonial violence a bad name. Accordingly, genocide-suffering Palestinians have been leaning overwhelmingly away from violent self-liberation methods lately. And with the unexpected success of this strong shift in tactics at obtaining global popular support for the Palestinians, there may be opportunity for imagining similar successes for other genocide-targeted peoples.
Necessity is the mother of nonviolent invention
It’s not that Palestinian resistance has never taken a nonviolent form before. The vast majority of Palestinian resistance has been nonviolent, as the vast majority of resistance everywhere tends to be. But the exceptions over the decades have been frequent and, in some cases, as newsworthy as breathless U.S. media coverage of those exceptions would suggest.
The “if it bleeds, it leads” standards of big media have generally not treated Palestinian nonviolence—common though it is as a resistance tactic—as equivalently newsworthy. There have been some exceptions, though. The First Intifada gathered much international sympathy by being extremely constrained in violence (predominantly stone-throwing) relative to the live round-firing automatic weapons of Israeli soldiers. Palestinian ventures into even purer nonviolence have also sometimes garnered attention from, say, watchers of independent documentaries. Julia Bacha’s documentary film Budrus, about the West Bank town of the same name that nonviolently kept Israeli soldiers from dividing up the community with their “security barrier,” did some significant, albeit non-viral, work to raise awareness in this regard.
Unfortunately, when the world really needed to pay attention, and respond with overwhelming outrage—during Israel’s mass killings of unarmed participants in the Great March of Return (from Gaza) in 2018—it largely did not. In the U.S. specifically, where the core of Israel’s support lies, there was nothing approximating the response of the 1930s British public to the Qissa Khwani massacre. Expressions of outrage did not extend far beyond the already pro-Palestine types who had long been expressing outrage already. The growth in outrage was not enough in any case to make that Khudai Khidmatgar-style nonviolent strategy seem worth sticking to, as nothing really changed.
But since the genocidal onslaught of Israel’s “Operation Swords of Iron” began after October 7, 2023, Palestinian and pro-Palestinian newsworthy resistance has leaned more saliently towards nonviolent tactics, primarily by necessity. At present, the Palestinian equivalent of Khudai Khidmatgar-type high stakes nonviolent activism has shifted somewhat away from marching en masse unarmed into zones where soldiers shoot to maim and kill. It now more typically takes the form of, say, teaching in a Gaza school, working in a Gaza hospital, providing food and water to the thirsty and starving in Gaza, and, especially, doing journalism in Gaza. As Omar El Akkad writes in his prophetic book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This:
As I write this [in 2024], Palestinian reporters are in effect the world’s sole source of information about the reality of the obliteration of Gaza…The price of reporting under these conditions is everything. As of July 2024, at least 108 Palestinian journalists have been killed… [the regularly-updated number, more than doubled since then, can be found here]. There is nowhere else on earth with even a remotely comparable death toll. For the crime of reporting in a way the Israeli government disapproves of, Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh sees his family summarily executed in a missile strike. He continues reporting the next day. Shortly thereafter, he himself is wounded. He continues reporting the next day.
To continue reporting the facts (or healing the sick, teaching the next generation, feeding the hungry, etcetera) when doing so is potentially punishable by death is nonviolent direct action of the most powerful kind. Even the simple determination to remain living in Gaza and not allow oneself to be ethnically cleansed is an act of Khudai Khidmatgar-like nonviolent resistance. Such courageous human acts under such circumstances have inspired the mobilization of worldwide popular support for Palestinians on an unprecedented scale. And the most shocking surge of support for Palestine has occurred among ordinary Americans in the United States, Jewish Americans particularly. Increasing numbers of influential Israeli military and intelligence figures even acknowledge, and condemn, the ethnic cleansing that the Israeli state is inflicting on Palestinians.
The consciousness-raising accomplishments of the sharp turn in the character of Palestinian resistance have also illustrated another point made by Chenoweth and Stephan. Nonviolent resistance is as capable as violent resistance at drawing some kind of foreign assistance[10]. But the foreign assistance that flows to nonviolent resistance primarily comes from ordinary foreign people, and much more rarely from foreign organs of state. And just as violent resistance attracts violent assistance, nonviolent resistance attracts nonviolent assistance—like participation in boycotts and calls for divestment and sanctions.
Accordingly, foreign support for Palestine, though taking much lower stakes forms than the death-defying moral courage that inspired it, has manifested primarily nonviolently. The acts of support have included college campus pro-Palestine encampments, massive protests and civil disobedience actions, a renaissance for boycott-divestment-sanctions (BDS) activism[11], formerly impossible—and now increasingly successful—election campaigns for pro-Palestine politicians, and legal petitions like those of South Africa to the International Court of Justice.
This activism—and the draconian suppression of it—has accomplished something that pro-Palestinian activism has never achieved before. The perceived credibility of pro-Israel propaganda in the eyes of ordinary Americans has collapsed. Most Americans for the first time ever now side, according to polling, more with Palestinians than with the State of Israel. And Jewish Americans prefer, by double digits, the calling-it-genocide Mayor of New York City to the genocide-enacting Prime Minister of Israel (notwithstanding the long electoral success record of the latter in the world’s only Jewish-majority state).
The upshot of all this is that for Palestinians, under present geopolitical circumstances at least, the pathways to making anti-genocidal change nonviolently are considerably more accessible, and capable of success, than violent pathways to this end. Admittedly, nonviolent anti-genocide activism has not cut short the Gaza genocide the way India’s army cut short Pakistan’s genocidal actions in Bangladesh; nor the way NATO bombing cut short Serb forces’ genocidal actions in Bosnia. The casualty count, and overall destruction, in Gaza has been much more devastating by comparison to, say, Srebrenica.
However, the mostly nonviolent push for a ceasefire by devoted and persecuted activists has not been in vain. It has at least resulted in a ceasefire posture that has brought a noticeable reduction of the daily carnage in recent months. That “ceasefire” may not be a genuine ceasefire, let alone an end to the genocide, but it is at least a slow-down-fire. The average deaths-per-day of the IDF onslaught in Gaza were near triple digits before the ceasefire (67,075 Gazans recorded as killed as of October 3, 2025, over 727 days of war). As of September 2, 2026, the BBC noted that more than 1,300 Gazans had been reported killed since the ceasefire, 301 children among them. That is a terrible number under any circumstances, especially for a “ceasefire,” but it puts the daily rate of killing since the ceasefire in the single digits.
By plausible worst case scenarios, then, things could have gotten much deadlier for Palestinians if the international nonviolent movement for Palestine had not proliferated as quickly and powerfully as it did. That movement has accomplished much, though nothing close to enough. The need to rely entirely on nonviolent solutions to genocide is a very new situation, historically speaking, and it is bound to stumble in its initial scramblings. A radically new situation like this calls for a huge infusion of counterintuitive imagination, and even more imagination will be necessary going forward.
Highlighting, and carefully studying, instances of genuine—if limited—success by nonviolent actors against genocides of the past will be fuel for this imagination project. But a broader shift of consciousness back in the direction taken by peace action movements of the past may also be indispensable. Some of that consciousness, hopefully, will emerge simply in the process of doing the work. People of conscience have innovated, and will continue to innovate, by working together to do what they can to stop ongoing genocides, particularly the ones that their own tax dollars and state sponsorship are most directly responsible for.
The possible providence in the forced turn to nonviolence
If it feels tragic to have to make this turn to nonviolent imagination, it shouldn’t. The lost option of violent state sponsorship for anti-genocidal violence may turn out to be a blessing in the long term. After all, military vanquishers of other genocides in history have rarely been transformed into moral paragons by their violent accomplishments.
All countries embroiled in World War I—including the victors who vastly reduced the scope of the Ottoman Empire’s genocide against Armenians—did such shockingly brutal and mass-murderous things to each other’s civilian populations that “The Great War” was temporarily declared “the war to end all wars.” No one came out of that war clean, and the victorious nations, instead of ending all wars, planted the seeds of World War II with the cruel Treaty of Versailles.
World War II, while just as brutal if not worse, offered a sharper moral contrast between the sides, and the Soviet Union joined the less abominable Allies and ultimately liberated several death camps as part of the Allied victory. Yet the Soviet empire remained a lethally tyrannical system throughout most of its existence and collapsed under the weight of its own moral rot in the late 1980s and early 90s.
After ending Pakistan’s genocide against Bangladeshis in 1971, India conducted its first test of its own weapons of genocide—nuclear weapons—in 1974. India became an official nuclear weapons state in 1998, prompting Pakistan to also do open nuclear testing, thus further enabling global nuclear proliferation. Subsequent intensification of conflict in Kashmir also included extreme human rights abuses by Indian security forces against Kashmiri civilians, a stain on India that continues to deepen in the present era.
Vietnam’s political influence is widely detested in Cambodia, even among those it saved from the Khmer Rouge genocide, and Vietnam remains one of the least free countries in the world.
Two years after stopping the Serb nationalist genocide in Bosnia, NATO invaded Afghanistan (only to eventually have to leave it, hundreds of thousands of lost lives later, back in the control of the Taliban). That 2001 invasion also paved the way to the even more catastrophically mass murderous “coalition of the willing” invasion of Iraq in 2003. This dislocating blow to the brief enjoyment of relative peace after the Cold War arguably facilitated the re-intensification of authoritarian politics worldwide, an intensification embodied—and plausibly led—by the Trumpian transformation in 2016.
And the RPF, after stopping the Rwandan genocide, led Rwanda to being a major aggressor in a multinational, often genocidal, war in Congo that has killed some 6 million people.
The complex historical record, in other words, leaves a less triumphant impression than the one the victors against temporarily genocidal enemies often project. Violent solutions to genocide often accomplish their aims effectively, and we can be glad they did. The alternative to stopping genocides is watching the perpetrators run them as long as they need to get exactly what they want out of them. Societies formed by such genocidaire victories leave behind repugnant legacies. Joshua Oppenheimer’s excellent documentary, The Act of Killing, about Indonesia’s cheerfully nostalgic former perpetrators of the anti-communist mass killings of 1965, illustrates this point masterfully.
Nevertheless, violent solutions to anything—even genocide—do not leave a sweet taste in the mouth, unless you like the taste of blood. Violent cessations of genocides can be mistaken as grounds for seeing some kinds of killing as having a moral virtue that killing can never have. And the killing required to stop a genocide is not the kind of lone, instinctual, bad-guy-attacks-and-you-defend “mama bear” killing that action movies celebrate. It is calculated, organized killing that requires recruiting soldiers, manipulating and lying to them in accordance with military necessity, and sending them out to kill and possibly die with grander instrumental strategies in mind.
The ethos of nonviolent direct action, by contrast, values even the life, safety and humanity of the genocidaires, and seeks to rebuild the bridge between the humanity of the perpetrator and the victim. There is, in that sense, something sweeter about the nonviolent-by-necessity global movement against the genocide in Gaza compared to other, seemingly more successful, violent campaigns against some of the other genocides in history.
It is jarring to imagine that there can be any kind of “sweetness” to a method that achieves its goals so slowly and contingently. Nonviolent methods, for now, remain ill-equipped to fully end the bitter pile-up of genocidaire-murdered and -maimed human beings. Whatever sweetness there may be to the method’s intentions, the bitterness of its evident failures is bound to feel heavier. Again, though, the cornering of anti-genocide activism into necessary nonviolence should not be forgotten here. When cornered into a method, one takes whatever sweetness from it one can get.
Notes.
[1] This documentation of genocide has already convinced the major human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Genocide Watch, and B’Tselem, as well as humanitarian organizations like the American Friends Service Committee (former recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 in part for its work aiding Jewish refugees from Nazism) and Doctors Without Borders. It has also convinced 86% of those in the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) who showed up to vote on the genocidal nature of Israeli war crimes in August 2025.
[2] Such draconian punishments are most dramatic in the United States, which went from aggressive crackdowns on generally nonviolent protests and encampments under the Biden administration to seeking to deport, under the Trump administration, non-citizen ethnic minorities doxxed by the Israel-based website Canary Mission. Canary Mission doxxed those minorities for organizing campus activism, taking pro-Palestine positions in editorials, supporting BDS, or even just naming the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Then there is Britain’s arresting and charging elderly peace activists with crimes potentially carrying multi-year prison sentences for declaring their support for the banned “terrorist” group Palestine Action. There have been comparable crackdowns on anti-genocide activism in Germany, and Australia, and attempted (though often court-blocked) crackdowns in several other Western countries.
[3] Or at least non-killingly. States often refuse to acknowledge the nonviolence of nonviolent actors, as states like to define words like “violence” and “terrorism” in novel ways to allow for severely punishing dissent, civil disobedience and not-harmful-to-humans property damage.
[4] The obvious example is enabling an endless self-owning war with Iran that is turning the latter from a regional into a globalpower and hastening the global economy’s race to collapse. But the West is arguably also paying by being forced to watch the rising global popularity of increasingly authoritarian and expansionist China. Otherwise democracy- and liberty-appreciating populations—most notably younger Americans—increasingly credit Xi Jinping’s tightly-controlled, heavily surveilled and rights-free China with being an admirably impressive society. And Chinese leadership being closer to right on the Gaza genocide is just one factor among many in this “Chinamaxxing.” The People’s Republic of China also comes off to the youth as closer-to-right regarding climate change, respecting the value of international law, and regulating the global development of AI. And China also hasn’t been bombing other countries, regularly mass-murdering whole boatfuls of people, or targeting other nations with sovereignty-trampling kidnapping or crippling blockades. Yet.
[5] Here are a few examples. The southern French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, led by the pacifist pastor André Trocmé, and aided by villagers throughout the Haute Loire region, rescued hundreds-to-thousands of Jewish refugees—mostly children—under the nose not only of the Vichy government, but even under direct Nazi occupation. Arab communities in the Levant—particularly Syria, Iraq and later Lebanon—took great risks, typically nonviolent by necessity, to rescue Armenians from the genocidal death marches that the Ottoman Empire was exterminating them with. The Rwandan Muslim community—which has long condemned all killing as un-Islamic—not only steadfastly refused to take part in the Hutu supremacist genocide in 1994, but also rescued many of those targeted at great personal risk (and with minimal use of violence due to both religious principle and lack of armaments). The tiny country of Albania—a Muslim majority country in Europe—was also the safest European country to be Jewish during the Holocaust, as the Jewish population of Albania grew rather than shrank during that period due to the largely nonviolent rescue operations by Albanians. All of these cases reflect not only individual actions, but community-coordinated ones, suggestive of something analogous to combat operations, but saving lives rather than destroying them.
[6] It is not customary to view anything that the British did in India as genocidal—just mass-murderously indifferent, racist and cruel.
[7] Though if it all goes terribly, as it is going in Sudan, the government fighting the genocidal rebels becomes only somewhat distinguished from it in atrociousness. Sudan’s government, technically fighting the genocidal RSF rebels while in many ways resembling them, is supported by towering regional power Saudi Arabia—with one of the biggest defense budgets in the world. Saudi Arabia, though clearly interested in throwing its weight around as a “big power” sponsor of others’ violence, has a long history of making bad conflicts worse.
[8] Foreign state sponsors cannot as easily force nonviolent struggle leaders to buy the sponsoring country’s lucrative goods and services, or to give up to the sponsoring state all their mineral rights, etcetera. And the most profitable goods and services that powerful states and empires have to sell are typically militarily-related anyway.
[9] The Israeli government sold weapons to the Myanmar junta—which is otherwise propped up by Russia and China, not so much the West—during the peak of its genocidal actions against the Rohingya. Although Israeli government figures did, perhaps from embarrassment at this relationship, once publicly condemn Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya.
[10] Chenoweth and Stephan found that predominantly nonviolent campaigns were 62% more likely to inspire international sanctions against the regime they were struggling with than violent campaigns (see their Table 2.3). Sanctions are a state-imposed act of economic coercion, one that registers as less violent than bombing, but that still has some potentially harmful effects on ordinary people caught up in an economy. Gentler—and potentially more potent for goal-achievement—are boycotts and acts of divestment by non-state individuals and institutions. Boycotts, according to King (2008) (and see also Friedman, 1985)have about a 28% rate of at least partial success in achieving substantial impact on their targets. That rate of success rises higher when there is additional public protest and media amplification affecting the reputation of the target. Sanctions, according to Chenoweth and Stephan’s Table 2.3, do not seem to contribute one way or the other to the likelihood of campaign success, whether the campaign is violent or nonviolent.
[11] The likes of Betar, Canary Mission and the Elon Musk-coddling Anti-Defamation League attack the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement so relentlessly, one might imagine they consider it an act of near-genocidal violence. In reality, BDS follows more in the tradition of the Montgomery bus boycott and, later in the 20th century, the movement to boycott, divest and bring sanctions against what was then Apartheid South Africa. As such it is a nonviolent movement to its core. BDS is, at least, a considerably less violent tool against an ongoing genocide than, say, bombing military strongholds or establishing a “no-fly zone” (i.e. threatening to kill those piloting aircraft over the designated zone).
Ian Hansen, Ph. D., is a professor of psychology at York College (CUNY) and a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility.
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