making direct action accessible

Posted January 10th, 2008 by John

I've been trying to figure out how to effectively communicate to the wider community about non-violent direct action. When you've been part of a blockade or a direct action, it is easy to remember how empowering it feels. It's an act of love - quite a beautiful thing. But for many people, all they see are images on TV of police and blurry action that looks kind of ugly. It'd be great to try to figure out how to really make the idea of taking direct much more easy for everyday folk to understand and engage in. Any thoughts?

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Sending the protest message

On May 26th, 2008 anth2 said:

Hi John,

great question and hopefully one that generates more responses. One detailed response to your question is in a new article by Jørgen Johansen and Brian Martin, entitled "Sending the protest message". It's about what makes a protest action effective, about potential choices that organisers have and about how looking at how audiences are likely to respond to messages can give guidance.

Brian Martin is an Australian author based at the University of Wollongong and Jørgen Johansen is a peace activist, organiser, educator and writer, with experience over many years in many countries. He is the author of numerous books and articles and affiliated with Transcend Peace University.
see you at the camp
Anthony
Melbourne

re: making direct action accessible

On May 8th, 2008 Anonymous said:

Hi John, I think this is a real challenge. I suppose one tactic might be to find media outlets willing to cover the story from the participants' perspective, which probably means non-traditional media. For example, if you have religious participants, you could provide the relevant media (eg. Insights if they are Uniting Church) with a story and photos about the experience of being involved. They might be more likely to run a 'human interest' story on NVDA than a news report. Maybe we could also explore more use of YouTube videos as well. These sorts of things need to be planned in advance of the action obviously. Cheers, Justin