The methods involved in protest are more than traditional verbal and nonverbal messages. They are larger actions like protests, marches and boycotts. They can be divided into general categories:
General Methods of Protest
Violence and nonviolence, to a degree, are in the eye of the beholder. They are slippery concepts. For many, the word violence connotes something unfair; it is synonymous with wrongful injury. To clarify the concept, psychologists often define violence with several terms:
Psychological Distinctions About Violence
| Aggression: The deliberate cause of bodily injury. The term attempts to separate “violent” behavior from judgement of its morality. |
| Instrumental aggression: Injury intended to control another’s behavior; it is an instrument towards one’s goals. |
| Angry aggression: Injury intended to injure; it is not a means to a different end. |
Despite psychologists’ focus on aggression rather than violence, the definition, is still, to an extent, in the eye of the beholder. There is a judgement call involved in determining deliberate intent and whether a physical injury occurred. But the judgements have been focused. They have, to an extent, disentangled the behavior from a judgement of the morality of the behavior. This is a necessary step in understanding when and why people condone or condemn “violence”.
Nonviolence has been defined less frequently by psychologists. But it has been categorized by sociologists, activists, and philosophers. Gandhi emphasized a critical distinction between active and passive nonviolence.
Gandhi’s Distinction between Active and Passive Nonviolence
| Passive nonviolence: This is the absence of violence, with no tool in its place for resistance. It is non-resistance. |
| Active nonviolence: This is the replacement of violence with actions designed to resist efforts to impose a will on a group or individual. To avoid the perception of inaction and absence of resistance connoted by the term nonviolence, Gandhi used a different term, “satyagraha”, to label the active nonviolent resistance he envisioned. |
- Gandhi, like Martin Luther King, Jr., emphasized a spiritual/philosophical motivation as the basis for using nonviolence: If you hold all life sacred, you should not kill.
- Others have a emphasized a secular, political view of nonviolence, here called pragmatic nonviolence. The importance of this view is that it sets explicit conditions around nonviolence. In this view, nonviolence is not a panacea; it is not a universally successful approach. It should work under certain conditions; it should fail when those conditions are not established.