Revolutionary Nonviolence: Philosophy

Dates: Fall 2020

Location: Online

Students will participate in the course using Georgetown University's online learning management system called Canvas. To learn more about Canvas, please go through the Canvas Guide for Students.

Professor: Mark Lance

Professor Contact Information: lancem@georgetown.edu

Virtual Office Hours: TBD, and pretty much anytime. I’ll be in my home office most hours of most days.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course begins with a presupposition: that our world today is deeply and systematically messed up in ways that call for immediate widespread collective response. The course isn’t to argue for or against that assumption. I’ll gesture at many of the things I mean by it - oppression, direct and structural violence, patriarchy, economic devastation, white supremacy, imperialism, war, prisons, militarism, environmental devastation, authoritarianism and all the interlocking intersectional complexities of these and more. But, again, this is a presupposition. The questions of the course are all downstream from these: what ought we be doing, assuming this is true. (You might disagree, and then take this as a course in hypothetical reasoning: if you were to find yourself in a deeply and systematically unjust world with urgent demands for change, what should you do? But cf final note.)

Specifically:
We will work to develop useful definitions of revolution (radical change) and nonviolence. The goal here is not to figure out how these terms are most often used, or what they *really mean* (whatever that really means), but to craft conceptions that are useful to the central task of figuring out how to respond to the world as presupposed. We will talk quite a bit about strategy and tactics, and the difference between them.

We will then look at ways that people have attempted to bring these together, have attempted to bring about revolutionary change toward a less violent world by less violent means.
We will try to draw lessons from all this for what our – and by our, I suppose I mostly mean your as I am moving into the last years of my life – work should look like here and now.

We will read some people who are professional philosophers, but more people who are revolutionaries and nonviolent organizers with other backgrounds. History, law, sociology, anthropology, conflict transformation, political organization, and even pedagogy are as relevant as anything narrowly defined as philosophical. This is as non-ideal as theory gets and to be honest, I am not very interested in the opinions, on these issues, of people who have not been engaged in the work.

A note: Some of you know, but many don’t, that I have been an activist and organizer for over 30 years alongside my academic career. If you happen to be interested, you can go to my website and look at my activism page to get an overview of that work. I’ve taught this sort of material lots of times at the undergrad level in the JUPS program, but never before in philosophy or as an advanced seminar. It is stuff that I’m passionate about to the point of going to jail, getting assaulted, and devoting tens of thousands of hours of my life to it. I have strong opinions on much of this and I do not believe in lying about that in upper division teaching. Obviously it will not impact your standing in the class or your grade to disagree with anything as long as you can defend and document what you say, but if you really think that everything in the world order is currently swell aside from minor tweaks, that African colonialism was a force for good, or that what we need today is the ascendency of the Orban/Trump/Erdogan/Netanyahu/Johnson axis, or even that you have no personal responsibility to change any of that, you will pretty much hate everything I say in this class. Just a heads-up.

Some more specifics:
This class will be reading-heavy. We are going to go through a lot of recent work, some not published yet, and much of it is complicated, though most not as dense as a typical philosophy seminar. We won’t be focusing on skills the way my lower division Nonviolence course does. Rather, we will be grappling with texts – so although the texts are hardly standard, the general form of the course is.

We’ll have a synchronous Zoom session at each of our meetings. I think, and having seen feedback from surveys after last semester, think most students agree, that this is important for building an intellectual community. I’ll ask folks to keep cameras on for these so we can see one another. If anyone has specific reasons why they cannot participate fully in that format, please let me know asap.

That said, I realize also that Zoom fatigue is a thing. So my plan is to make the sessions a bit shorter than normal and to supplement with a discussion board each week. I’ll have folks post some comments ahead of class – details tbd – and also to continue conversation after.

COURSE LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

Build a nonviolent revolution

COURSE READINGS

Howard Zinn: A People’s History of the US (background reading for course. If you haven’t read this, it really would help if you picked it up and read it this Summer.)

Franz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth

Judith Butler: The Force of Nonviolence

Shon McFessel: Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used to Be

Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer: Guns and Gandhi in Africa

Alexis Shotwell: Against Purity

You will need to get all the above books.

Lance and Matt Meyer: Revolutionary Nonviolence (Manuscript) I’ll make this available.

Other readings will be emailed or linked.

COURSE ASSIGNMENTS AND GRADING CRITERIA

Graded Assignments

Graduate students – you will write 3 short papers (no more than 5 pp)- 50%

a final seminar paper – 30%

Undergrads – 5 short papers – 80%

All will be expected to participate actively and with due preparation in class discussion.

Everyone will also be graded on participation both on Zoom and on discussion boards. – 20%

COURSE SCHEDULE

This course begins with an Orientation and is divided into 12 modules. Below is an outline describing the course structure. Unless otherwise noted, there will be a synchronous Zoom session Monday and Wednesday of each week, at 9:30 am Eastern Time