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Chipko Movement: a non-violent philosophy of harmonious existence Chandi Prasad Bhatt

Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal

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submitted to the Nonviolence and Social Empowerment Conference

Puri, Orissa, India 18-24 February 2001

Nonviolence and Social Empowerment Project

c/o Patchwork

Kaiserstrasse 24 D-26122 Oldenburg/Germany

Tel.: +49-441-2480437 Fax: +49-441-2489661

email: wri-nvse-project@edu.oldenburg.de; website wri-irg.org/archive/nvse2001/

WRI Project on Nonviolence and Social Empowerment

WRI began in 1921 as an organisation bringing together people who had the strength to stand against the tide of their society and to resist war. In the second half of this century it has increasingly worked to deepen the understanding of how nonviolent action works and to promote strategies of nonviolent action. At the moment WRI is doing a project on Nonviolence and Social Empowerment.

To start this article I want to describe an empowerment-situation in order to give an example:

Dora Rosenzweig tells about an empowerment experience in her own history: "The workshop was one block of houses long. There were two rooms, a small one and a big one. I preferred working in the smaller room, where there were working thirty to forty people. They chose me to read aloud for them.

by Vesna Terselic

There are such words -- buzz words. You catch them here and there.

In peace, environmental or women's initiatives, in Peace News and United Nations documents. They change from season to season, from year to year. "Empowerment" had appeared in the meta-language of my colleagues -- working on change -- as an attempt to explain to ourselves and to others what we are actually doing.

Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies

Introducing their book The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies tell us what they learned from a conversation between women in a Bangladeshi village and Hillary Clinton, which they then use to develop their perspective on economy, a perspective 'from below'.

By Bryan Law First published in the magazine XY: men, sex, politics, 5(4), Summer 1995-96. XY, PO Box 26, AINSLIE, ACT, 2602, AUSTRALIA. Reprinted with permission. © Copyright 1995

"What's so fabulous about the idea of patriarchy?" asks Bryan Law, who takes another look at Co-Counselling and reclaims men's personal power.

Andreas Speck

Collective identities"we" as queers, as whatever group you likeare often perceived as empowering, as providing a sense of belonging. On the other hand through their very existence, collective identities produce new boundaries of "in" and "out", and new norms of behaviour that limit peoples' freedom to be and to do. Not only can identity be disempowering, but it can also threaten peoples' lives, as nationalist and homophobic attacks show.

War Resisters' International presently is carrying out a project on Nonviolence and Social Empowerment. Interestingly, this project developed out of an idea to start consultations with armed struggle movements, presented at WRI's Triennial Conference in São Leopoldo in Brazil in 1994 (WRI 1995: 12). Through the course of the discussion it became clear that it makes little sense to take the issue of weapons as the central starting point.

[Editor’s note: the dedicated women of CONNECT did an excellent job in identifying and raising funds for participants to last year’s WRI women’s conference. Much of the Conference’s success was due to their hard work.)

This is a short note to tell everyone that CONNECT has formally debriefed and disbanded—it no longer exists.