Welcome to Turning the Tide

Turning the Tide is seeking partners to help run our popular nonviolence course. This year we hope to work with local activists in different parts of the country to organise and deliver 1-day taster workshops. We hope this will lead to a deeper partnership to deliver our comprehensive course in 2011. Find out more here.

Out now! Making Waves #21 focuses on nonviolent resistance in India, Colombia and Palestine. Plus book reviews and new resources.

If you are interested in

• positive change through nonviolent action,
• nonviolence training,
• information and resources on nonviolence,

then we hope you’ll find our website useful.

We are discovering new material and workshop activities all the time, so keep checking in with us.

Nonviolence for a change

All over the world, people join together to challenge injustice, overcome oppression and make a more just and peaceful society.

Turning the Tide promotes the understanding and use of nonviolence to help such groups become more effective.

Nonviolence is a way of actively confronting injustice - not doing nothing, not responding violently, but struggling creatively to transform the situation. In short, it's about doing conflict better; bringing about change without doing harm.

Turning the Tide takes its inspiration and learning from effective nonviolent movements including those of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Greenham Women, environmental and economic justice movements, land rights nonviolent activists and many more. We offer workshops, speakers, literature, a journal and advice.

Principles of nonviolence

We don't have a definition of nonviolence because we've learned it means different things to different people, but we use the following principles of nonviolence as the basis for our work:

• respect and care for everyone involved in a conflict, including the opponent
• a willingness to take action for justice without either giving into or mimicking violence
• refusal to harm, damage or degrade people / living things / the earth as a means of achieving goals
• a belief that everyone is capable of change and no-one has a monopoly of the truth
• how we act must be consistent with the ends we seek
• necessity of training so that nonviolence thinking and behaviour become part of our everyday lives.

Turning the Tide is a programme of Quaker Peace and Social Witness (QPSW). QPSW works with and on behalf of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain [off-site link].