The twenty-first century has begun with a surprising and hopeful upsurge of nonviolent direct action in the United States and elsewhere. The annual protest at the Army School of the Americas in November, 1999, was the largest one ever, and some four thousand protesters risked arrest in an effort to shut down the school. The WTO protests in Seattle, Washington, between November 29th and December 3rd, sent the WTO ministers home in disarray. Scarcely two months later, as many as two hundred fifty thousand people marched in San Juan, Puerto Rico, demanding an end to US bombing practice on the island of Vieques. Thousands of New Yorkers have demonstrated repeatedly against police murders of unarmed men of color, sometimes enduring senseless provocation by the police themselves. In April as many as ten thousand demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C. to disrupt the meetings of the IMF and World Bank. A few weeks later, four thousand demonstrators braved the Thai military to disrupt the meetings of the Asian Development Bank in Bangkok. It seems this wave keeps growing and growing.

Many of these actions are militant, confrontational, and creative. Young environmentalists, human rights activists, and anarchists are expressing their sense of urgency, their playfulness, their self-determination, and their outrage through nonviolent direct action. The result is a whole different kind of mass demonstration. From my perspective as an activist and trainer for the last twenty-odd years, I want to reflect on how nonviolence itself is being shaped and pushed by a new group of practitioners. New styles of demonstrations call for new techniques in nonviolence preparation, too, and I want to suggest what those might be.

The WTO protests and the IMF/World Bank protests in Washington are my best examples, since I was at each, training and participating in the actions. I went to both demonstrations partly because it’s my lifelong dream to overthrow corporate capitalism (putting it simply!). In addition, I was invited in both cases as part of a team from Training for Change. Matt Guynn co-trained with me in Seattle; Antje Mattheus, Amy Steffen, and Jim Cummings from TfC all participated in the D.C. trainings with me.

Images of the "Battle in Seattle" usually focus on broken windows, graffiti, tear gas, riot police, rubber pellets, and handcuffed demonstrators lying on the ground. All of these actually happened. Matt and I were caught in some of the skirmishes between police and protesters, and Matt witnessed others. Both of us were tear gassed, and I was hit with rubber pellets. We also saw, over and over again, how activists enforced their own discipline of nonviolence, showing common sense, compassion, and determination. At one point, as we sat in the street in front of a police barricade, some demonstrators urged us to rush the police line. Instead, the crowd pressured the hotheads to sit down, and chanted "Peaceful protest! Peaceful protest!" When riot police sprayed tear gas and pepper spray on protesters locked onto heavy objects in the middle of an intersection, the demonstrators screamed in rage, defiance, and pain -- and regrouped and boldly took back the intersection. In another situation, protesters isolated a few who began breaking the windows of Niketown, chanting, "Nonviolence! Nonviolence!" With riot police in armored personnel carriers in hot pursuit, demonstrators often spontaneously acted as peacekeepers, reminding each other to "Walk, go slowly!" and kept an eye out for people in wheelchairs and parents with small children. Drummers and musicians kept people dancing, even in the middle of a downpour, and channeled anger into determination. The positive energy extended to motorists unexpectedly caught in the middle of a march, construction workers on scaffolds, residents in apartment buildings, and in some instances even to the police and National Guard troops themselves.

The media generally praised the D.C. police force for being more restrained than the Seattle police. From my perspective, as a trainer during the week leading up to the actions, the D.C. police were no less repressive than the Seattle police -- simply more cunning.

As we prepared for our actions, the police pressured us constantly. Noisy helicopters hung over our heads for hours at a time. Police informants attended our decision-making meetings. Protesters were frequently stopped for minor traffic infractions, and several were arrested simply for carrying blockade-building materials in their cars. The evening before the World Bank meetings began, police surrounded six hundred peaceful demonstrators, forcing them to create a traffic obstruction, and then arrested them for obstructing traffic. Even tourists who witnessed the event spoke of entrapment. (One of our trainers, Nijmie Dzurinko, went to jail with this group.) On the last morning of training, the police and fire marshals swept through our training site and closed it down, impounding many personal belongings, puppets, and medical supplies. I and the other trainers spent the rest of the day giving workshops in noisy, crowded churches, parks, and alleys. (Miraculously, after the IMF and World Bank delegates had gone home, the fire code violations suddenly disappeared and we could go back into our space.)

Given this background of harassment, disruption, and surveillance, protesters on the streets sometimes taunted police -- and never assaulted or threatened them. On the contrary, some protesters suffered beatings by plainclothes officers. Police in cars and on motorcycles rammed some groups of demonstrators. A mounted officer broke one person’s leg. And yet protesters chanted, "It’s not about the cops -- it’s about the IMF!"