Why do these protests strike me as such a departure from previous nonviolent demonstrations I’ve been in? For starters, we marched through the streets without permits, without established parade routes, and without peacekeepers and armbands. The center of leadership in the crowds shifted constantly; I couldn’t tell how decisions were being made, and actually in the moment it didn’t seem to matter.

In Seattle, after November 30th, when much to our surprise, we actually did shut down the WTO meetings, we felt a growing sense of our own power. This was no symbolic display of discontent -- we were really having an effect! It was an exhilarating experience. Similarly, the IMF and World Bank delegates only managed to meet in Washington by leaving their hotels at 5:30 a.m. Some World Bank employees slept in their offices; others sneaked through the crowds in jeans and T-shirts, carrying suits in their backpacks. Alleviating world poverty was practically all the officials talked about in their public statements about the meetings. Clearly, it was not business as usual for the IMF and World Bank!

Even the violence employed against us told us that we’d hit a nerve in the global capitalist system.

Going back to the Black-led pro-democracy movement of the sixties, nonviolent strategy was calculated to reveal the underlying violence of the system. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. brought his campaign to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 largely because he knew the police chief could be counted on to unleash dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protesters. King had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Albany, Georgia, because the police chief there studied the dynamics of nonviolence. Instead of beating and jailing demonstrators, the Albany police chief presented himself as a reasonable, nice guy. He outmaneuvered King, and King needed to regain the moral high ground by once more exposing the naked violence of racism. So King went to Birmingham, although he believed he might not live through it himself, and indeed four young girls died when segregationists firebombed their church. King repeatedly put his own life and the lives of many other African-Americans on the line in order to make clear that the powers that be would use violence indiscriminately to maintain their power.

That risk-taking edge to nonviolence became duller when translated to the white-led peace and environmental movements of the seventies and eighties. Peace activists (including myself) propose nonviolence as an alternative to international warfare -- and quite subtly, nonviolence becomes a way to resolve conflict rather than a way to conduct conflict. In demonstrations, nonviolence became a way to keep people safe, rather than a way to dramatize underlying injustices. We somehow hoped that we could express our opposition to the mightiest killing machine in all of recorded history without being hurt ourselves -- and acting nonviolently was the way to avoid getting hurt. As a nonviolence trainer, I used the example of the Birmingham campaign with a women’s peace group in the 1980s, and one of the participants reacted in shock and horror. She thought that King had acted violently in Birmingham because he had calculated how to provoke violence, and put people’s lives in danger.

While being critical of the goal of being safe through being nonviolent, I also want to notice that there are situations in which a nonviolent activist can and does promote safety. When repressive governments threaten the lives of activists, unarmed supporters go to their countries and accompanying them day and night. Many lives have literally been saved by nonviolent activists, who volunteer weeks or months through Peace Brigades International, Witness for Peace, and Christian Peacemaker Teams. Sometimes this job is as fun as playing ball with the children of the family; sometimes it is as terrifying as confronting army sharpshooters with loaded rifles. In this instance, a nonviolent activist does promote safety -- not necessarily her/his own, but quite certainly the safety of the person s/he accompanies.

Back in the Belly of the Beast, though, losing the risk-taking edge to nonviolence has sometimes prevented peace activists from forming important alliances. For example, during the early and mid-eighties, peace activists in the Twin Cities carried on twice-yearly blockades of an arms manufacturer. Each action drew more and more blockaders, until hundreds of people risked arrest. These events had an orderly, predictable feel to them: demonstrators would block a doorway to prevent workers from going in, talk quietly among themselves or sing, and wait for the police to take them away. (Meanwhile, the workers would enter the building through tunnels and overhead walkways from the parking ramp, which never got blocked.) The police would mill around for a while letting us have our media opportunity, issue an arrest warning, and escort the demonstrators one by one to a waiting bus. Supporters would cheer and clap for each arrestee. Demonstrators would be ticketed and released later in the day, and often the charges were dropped a month later. The wife of the chief of police got arrested several times. The police chief arranged for coffee and donuts to be served to the detained activists, and made a point of dropping his wife off at the demonstration site and kissing her good-bye.

On the one hand, this gave us the feeling that we were making in-roads into the halls of power, and refreshments certainly brightened up the booking procedure. On the other hand, I had the uneasy feeling that our police chief, like the chief in Albany, Georgia, had outwitted us. Here we were, protesting the military, and our nearest paramilitary outpost came off looking like genial hosts! Furthermore, people of color protesting their treatment at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department got no sympathy or support from the white-led peace movement -- surely, our nice police chief wouldn’t let anything racist happen! We learned to say "peace and justice" in one breath, but we didn’t always recognize injustice, even when it was right in front of our noses. We "knew" that as long as we stayed nonviolent the police would also stay nonviolent -- therefore, if the police got violent with someone, it must be because s/he had provoked them.

Predictable, safe civil disobedience reached a point of almost absurdity during the last phase of the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. Blocking the doorways at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., became somewhat trendy, and US Representatives and Senators were arrested practically by appointment with the police! I participated in a dissatisfied discussion with other life-long nonviolent activists, where we complained that the tactic of civil disobedience seemed to have no zip or zing to it anymore. On the exciting side of the equation, many people who thought of themselves as ordinary citizens got arrested for taking a political stand. The disappointing part was that it all seemed so tame!

And yet, the lack of risk (for European Americans) in risking arrest was not all bad. When the Nicaraguan solidarity movement asked people to pledge that they would peacefully take over Federal office buildings if the US invaded Nicaragua to overthrow the Sandinista government, thousands of people signed the Pledge of Resistance. Though the US military used many illegal means to funnel arms and money to the insurgents fighting the Marxist-Leninist government of Nicaragua, they never deployed their forces. The vision of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of citizens nonviolently blocking doorways or occupying Federal buildings around the country may have saved Nicaragua from the fate of Serbia and Iraq.

When the US began bombing Iraq in the winter of 1991, I had my first inkling that something might change in the way white activists used nonviolence. One anti-war demonstration I attended broke up into a legal rally and an extra-legal march in the city streets during rush hour. We simply swarmed around cars, buses, and trucks and occupied intersections. As a way of releasing our anger at a military and government out of control, it was very satisfying. As a way of convincing our fellow citizens to oppose the war, it lacked sophistication. How could a driver stalled in traffic blocks away from us have any way of knowing that we were shouting and chanting about the bombing of Iraq? And would they be any more likely to call their congressperson even if they knew that the war delayed them getting home by half an hour?

Greenpeace and Earth First! led this demonstration. They also introduced me to the use of chaos theory in creating social change. (As a nonviolence trainer, I often learn just as much from the groups I train as they do from me.) The direct action arm of the environmental movement has been playing with ways to create chaos, on the assumption that established institutions don't know what to do with chaos. Like a physical structure, an institution like the WTO or the World Bank is made up of sub-particles, and those sub-particles are in flux even when we can't see them. Besieging an institution (even one which appears as solid and massive as a rock) with chaos increases the chaotic action within the institution as well.

Chaos and nonviolence go well together. In 1994, my local anti-nuclear power group took over the customer service office of our electric utility, singing and throwing around balls of yarn until a bright, tangled, impenetrable web completely covered the entire place! The police and security guards got hopping mad, and as people were arrested the iron fist in the velvet glove of the Minneapolis police showed itself clearly towards peaceful white demonstrators. (When some of the activists got out of custody later that day, for a prank they walked past the customer service office and tossed a ball of yarn into the lobby. The utility’s staff reacted as if they’d thrown a hand-grenade through the door -- so great was their fear of more chaos!)

The defiant, fluid, decentralized, theatrical, sustained demonstrations in Seattle marked a quantum leap for chaos and nonviolence. In terms of numbers, many demonstrations have been larger than the actions in Seattle. The difference between the WTO protests and the Million Man March on Washington, D.C., (for example) was that people did not all do the same thing at the same time in Seattle. Spontaneity ruled the day(s). As in the physics of chaos, seemingly random events emerged into a pattern, and almost as quickly dissolved into a less-identifiable pattern. Right there on the streets, affinity groups of demonstrators worked out their tactics and next steps more or less by consensus as they went, responding to the conditions they met and created. It was inspiring.

Chaotic demonstrations are here to stay -- thank goodness! They are just the breath of fresh air that the nonviolence movement needed. At the same time, and especially after the IMF/World Bank protests in D.C., I want to offer a critique, too. There is a element of dare devilishness in the tactics of the radical environmental movement: scaling trees and buildings, sailing small boats in front of large ships, locking body parts to immovable objects for days at a time. These actions take physical strength, endurance, and courage, and appeal to young men. Such actions are certainly more difficult, if not impossible, for activists with disabilities, activists with serious illnesses, and activists with greater body size. Many women don’t get as excited about taking such physical risks. Sometimes we don’t believe that we are strong enough (which may be the result of internalized sexism); sometimes we have children who would suffer even more than ourselves if something went wrong. The bravado exhibited in the streets of D.C. -- forcing the police back with countercharges of demonstrators, leaping in front of a mini-tractor which was about to remove a barricade -- reflects the extent to which the direct action arm of the environmentalist movement is dominated by young men. Several young women have complained to me quietly about this over the last decade, and it seems that this new wave of activism may have to relearn some of the lessons of radical feminism.

Just in case they should be forgotten, I want to point to the women’s peace encampments of the 1980s, and to the Women’s Pentagon Actions, as examples of self-governing, militant, sometimes chaotic demonstrations. These actions, undertaken entirely by women, had a particularly female quality to them. When they camped outside military bases for months at a time, women attached pictures of children and beautiful objects to the fences to remind the soldiers inside what would be lost in a nuclear war. They keened and wailed outside the gates for hours. They repeatedly scaled fences and stopped convoys to talk to the soldiers. Their attitude towards the police was different, too. At the climactic march of the Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment in the summer of 1985, demonstrators intent on occupying the Seneca Army Depot wouldn’t allow themselves to be stopped by a very nervous county sheriff. They simply swarmed past the law enforcement barricades. They didn’t taunt or confront police officers -- they ignored them. Women may relate to these authority figures not solely as authoritarian fathers, but also as brothers and sons. (Like any generalization, of course, this one is full of dangers.)

And then there’s the difficult question of ethnic diversity within our movement. Events in Washington highlight this. The IMF/World Bank protests came at the end of a week full of demonstrations against global capitalism. A Jubilee 2000 rally on Sunday April 9th attracted about four thousand people to the national mall -- a bad disappointment for organizers, who talked confidently of ten thousand. In one respect, though, Jubilee 2000 succeeded where the IMF/World Bank protests failed: many more people of color attended. More people of color appeared to be among the organizers, and their voices were clearly heard from the speakers’ platform. Participants in the crowd -- of a range of ethnicities -- talked about how they wouldn’t come near Washington next weekend, because the anarchists were set to destroy the city. To me, who came to work with the anarchists, the fears seemed all out of proportion. Still, how could the crowd at Jubilee 2000 know that? The Mobilization for Global Justice depended on college campuses and the Internet for recruitment, and obviously didn’t make personal connections with a large audience of color. Yet, US people of color are not indifferent to the effects of globalization on the southern hemisphere -- Jubilee 2000 moved them to rally for debt relief because organizers made their case in churches and labor union halls.

Risky, confrontational, chaotic demonstrations don’t necessarily appeal to people of color any more than did the tame nonviolent demonstrations of the 1980s. During the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in August, demonstrators marched to the Ramparts Division of the police department, calling attention to the corruption and brutality that has plagued this police force. People of color have been the main target of the LA police for decades, and many people of color participated in this march. However, when it came to blocking the doorway of the police station, and defying orders to move, people of color drew back. A group of young Ladino men explained, "We can get arrested any day. These white guys seem to want to get busted. They have to make this big march and come here specially to get arrested. Well, fine for them, if they want to -- we’ve seen all we care to see of the inside of that building." Of course, these men spoke for themselves, and not every person of color will feel the same way. At the same time, it’s easy to see why blockades and civil disobedience may appeal more to European-American activists than to activists of color.