Originally published by Campaign Nonviolence (in collaboration with Nonviolence News) on Waging Nonviolence.
Nonviolent action is an art, a science and a toolbox for making change. With over 300 methods of waging struggle — from street art to strikes, boycotts to blockades — and millions of people engaging with it, nonviolent action is innovative, unexpected and sometimes laugh-out-loud surprising.
If nonviolent struggle has a bread-and-butter item, it’s protests. They’re everywhere. They can be so routine, in fact, that the news media often yawns and ignores them. But instead of “yet another boring protest,” people can infuse their ideas with a little creativity — and come up with something unforgettable — and impossible to ignore.
Here are some stories collected in Nonviolence News (many via Waging Nonviolence’s excellent reporting) throughout 2022. They reveal how protest can be a many-splendored thing, a tool that achieves a multitude of goals. Protests can startle people awake and make sure the injustice is noticed — such as when Anonymous wired Russia security systems to sound alarms whenever the air raid sirens went off in Ukraine. They can call upon people to take action (like the Indigenous-led light projection calling on people to boycott a racist hotel in South Dakota).
Protests can make a complaint memorable — like the strippers who dressed up as OSHA violations in objection to lack of workplace safety measures. They can stun the public with its determination, such as when a pregnant mother in India continued her sit-in protest for land rights even when she went into labor. (Her infant son was literally born into the struggle.)
Unexpected protests capture attention. Myanmar held a “silent strike” to oppose the coup, emptying the streets instead of filling them. New Zealanders sent in the clowns to tell the Transport Agency to stop clowning around on climate. Puerto Ricans protected their beaches by holding beach parties against privatization. A TikTok influencer and creator of the feminist hit song I Know Victoria’s Secret staged her viral music video as a flashmob outside of the lingerie store. Greenpeace held a boat tour protest announced as The Last Tour of Venice in protest of tourism’s greenwashing advertisements in a city that is threatened by rising sea levels.
Crashing the party of other people’s events can offer built-in platforms that small groups of people can leverage to gain a huge audience. For example, sports has a long history of protests — from the Black Power clenched fist raised on the Olympic podium in 1968 to Colin Kaepernick taking a knee to protest racist police brutality. Sports builds a stage and gathers an audience — one that activists can use. In Serbia, fans rolled out an immense set of banners featuring the number of U.S. military interventions since World War II and the message: “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” With phone lights shining, hundreds, if not thousands, of people participated in the action.
In the United Kingdom, climate activists charged multiple soccer fields to lockdown to goal posts. Their message? “You can’t play soccer on a dead planet.” They wanted to remind fans of the burning need to address the climate crisis immediately. A smaller, but similar incident occurred in the United States when a young woman dubbed “Glue Girl” stuck her body to the basketball court to draw attention to the team owner’s animal rights abuses at his factory chicken farms.
Protest can reclaim a narrative, subvert propaganda and reveal the truth. When New York City rolled out a “How To Survive A Nuclear Attack” PSA and tried to tell residents that “you got this,” peace activists quickly lampooned the slogan and flipped it to the truth that “no, you don’t got this.” Australians took their prime minister’s coal-praising speech and dubbed footage of their nation’s climate change disasters behind him. Another group went a step further and re-wrote Chevron’s advertisement to highlight the reality that oil companies are driving humanity toward extinction. Some protesters, fed up with the extreme absurdity of certain strands of misinformation launched an effort to “fight lunacy with lunacy” by bringing signs to protests that read, “Birds Aren’t Real.”
But when the nonsense gets too surreal, sometimes you have to give it an underscore that matches, which is what actor Hugh Grant pulled off he when got activists to play a cartoon-esque theme song behind conservative speeches outside the British parliament during Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation. (British political satire is brilliant, as they say. Another activist gave Boris Johnson a commemorative plaque … on a sewer drain. A spokesman said “this conduit of effluent will become his lasting memorial.”)
Humor aside, protests are often used as an outlet for rage and frustration. (In California, one man was so fed up with his terrible dentist that he got his electric guitar and shredded it outside the office. He also held a sign that read: Western Dental Sucks. No doubt, it made potential customers think twice.)
Protests can also be used to send a message of support and solidarity. In multiple cities across the United States and Canada, prison abolitionists banged pots and pans, set off firecrackers, and blew car horns outside prisons to let incarcerated persons know they were not forgotten or alone.
While protest is known for outrage, its capacity for invoking other emotions shouldn’t be overlooked. Poignant demonstrations can be just as galvanizing as displays of rage. For example, after the tragedy of the Uvalde school shooting, parents played audio of their children outside the governor’s mansion. Another effort put school desks and memorials onto 52 yellow school buses — the miles-long rolling convoy has photos and personal belongings of many of the 4,368 children killed by gun violence in the past two years. Its title? The NRA Children’s Museum.
Other demonstrations that tapped into powerful expressions of grief, sorrow and mourning include: Cancer Alley activists holding a funeral march in Washington, D.C., Central American Mothers of the Disappeared holding a caravan for their missing migrant relatives, an #EveryChildMatters mural on a cross-continental railcar calling attention to abuses of First Nations children at residential boarding schools, and a parade of portraits of disappeared activists lifted up in Bangkok.
Even the most classic protests can benefit from a little out-of-the-box thinking. Wouldn’t your boss pay attention if you gift wrapped and delivered 900 understaffing incident reports under their office Christmas Tree? Or how about the Palestinian who used a drone to fly a Palestinian flag over the Israeli nationalists “Flag March”? The NBC news corporation spent 13 months dragging their feet on a pay equity proposal — so the workers held a 13-minute work stoppage to hurry them along. Tour de France bike riders halted mid-race to protest dangerous racing conditions. And when high cooking fuel prices hit India, citizens didn’t just chant slogans against high cooking fuel prices — they plunked their empty canisters down in the road and blocked traffic.
To be effective, we need to make our points in memorable, attention-grabbing, potent ways. Like artists studying other painters’ masterpieces, we can learn a lot from the creativity and inventiveness of our fellow activists worldwide. These fantastic examples from around the world can spark our imagination — and make our protests even more powerful.
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Rivera Sun is the editor of Nonviolence News, the author of “The Dandelion Insurrection” and other novels, and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent movements. www.riverasun.com