Ordinary People’s Extraordinary Courage, Impact, and Hope: Tentative Conclusions

Abstract

Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Darfur. As anyone familiar with world history knows, humanity’s record over the last hundred years is grim. Yet as this book illustrates, even as humanity’s collective capacity for good has been overshadowed, there has been hope. The practice of courageous resistance has been just as strong as the record of injustice over the last one hundred years. The inspiring examples of courageous resistance in this book show that ordinary people, often with few resources, can display extraordinary courage and yield impressive results. Courageous resisters have ended or reduced injustice in amazingly varied contexts—from dangerous harassment and environmental degradation to torture, disappearance, and even genocide. These cases show also that voluntary, other-oriented (largely selfless), high-risk, conscious, sustained, and nonviolent resistance to injustice occurs at individual, collective, and institutional levels.

Society is a very mysterious animal with many faces and hidden potentialities… [I]t is extremely short sighted to believe that the face society happens to be presenting to you at a given moment is its only true face. None of us knows all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population.

—Vaclav Havel