Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When Serb nationalist leaders were inflicting ethnic cleansing on Bosniaks in 1995, NATO was relatively swift about using military force to stop it; and it offered the same assistance to Kosovar Albanians in 1999. Today, Israel is three years into its genocide in Gaza, which now increasingly extends into the West Bank. Western governments would be horrified to even contemplate military force to end this much more catastrophic, and extensively-documented[1], genocide. The West’s still mostly liberal democratic governments are, with rare exceptions, not trying to do much of anything, by any means, to stop it. The most prominent and powerful Western governments are more committed to inflicting draconian punishments on those who are trying[2]—and trying nonviolently[3].

The West is already paying for this bend in its moral arc[4]. And it seems bound to pay increasingly more as the domestic and geopolitical consequences of the fecklessness of its leadership class unfold. There is, though, at least one “silver lining” opportunity arising from the West’s persecution of nonviolent resisters of genocide, and the resisters gaining ground anyway. The odds-beating small victories that the pro-Palestine movement has enjoyed nurture the forbidden hypothesis that nonviolent collective action can potentially stop a genocide. The mounting evidence for that hypothesis may eventually become a universal acid that dissolves the foundations of militarism.

Up to now, it has been received wisdom that genocides must be stopped by violence before they reach their conclusion, otherwise they end by reaching their conclusion. The mandarins of the West who most regularly remind us of this received wisdom might reconsider that wisdom, though, when the genocide-targeted people are Palestinians. Such mandarins habitually frame violence by, or on behalf of, Palestinians as “terrorism” and thus something forbidden to contextualize, even if the context is an ongoing genocide against Palestinians.

It has long been normative, in fact, to scold Palestinians for not having had a Gandhi arise among them. My sense is those who complain the loudest on this score (without reviewing the historical evidence of what typically happens to Palestinians who adopt Gandhian methods) do not really want a Palestinian Gandhi anyway. Such complainers often count nonviolent Palestinian resistance to colonial occupation as terrorism also. And for those most committed to rationalizing the killing and oppression of Palestinians, the latter commit “terrorism” just by continuing to live and breathe.

The West has acknowledged some genocides as unjust, though. With these genocides in mind, received wisdom in the West strains against the idea that anyone could put a nonviolent, anti-war ethos in service of an anti-genocide struggle. The common assumption was—and, in some contexts, remains—that whenever a potentially genocidal power targets people worthy of life for aggression, all pacifists and other war-resisters could only ever be useful idiots of the genocidaires.

Against this view, there is much evidence that nonviolent resisters can make valuable contributions to anti-genocide struggles. This evidence includes the fascinating, and often moving, documentation of successful operations to rescue individuals and families among the hunted. It is often other civilian individuals and small communities who carry out these nonviolent rescues, with rescuers sometimes explicitly committed to pacifism.[5]

In support of the received wisdom, though, there is little evidence that the typically small-scale anti-genocidal contributions of nonviolent actors can scale up to fully stop a genocide. The closest thing to a historical case for the genocide-stopping power of nonviolence is the disciplined success of Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s nonviolent army, the Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) against early 20th century British rule. Khan, a Pashtun ally of Mohandas Gandhi, and hailing from what eventually became the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, was an unusually persuasive teacher of nonviolence.

Khan is known for having persuaded a substantial part of his fellow Pashtuns to adopt nonviolence as a kind of intensification, rather than compromise, of their longstanding martyrdom-ready ethos. Khan successfully argued that his people’s courage to face death in honor-related struggle would be more honorable, and powerful, with all the killing taken out of it.  His hundred thousand-strong army of Khudai Khidmatgar recruits thus stayed unusually perseverant in nonviolence through some brutal and indiscriminately murderous British onslaughts against them during the struggle for independence. Khan’s nonviolent army did things like march into lines of British soldiers commanded to shoot at every man, woman and child in the non-dispersing crowds. This is as high stakes as “nonviolent direct action” ever gets.

In one such instance, the Qissa Khwani massacre of 1930, the British kept shooting into those nonviolent crowds for six hours, but did eventually lose their stomach for mass killing unarmed people. The backlash in British public opinion after that massacre contributed greatly to eroding British resolve to maintain its colonial possessions in what was then the British Raj. That erosion of resolve, combined with the perseverance and ubiquity of collective nonviolent action against British rule throughout the Raj, led eventually to Britain’s former colonial subjects there declaring independence and self-determination.

As the Qissa Khwani massacre illustrates, the idea that nonviolence could only defeat the British Raj because noble and kindly Britain embodied the moral antithesis of genocide is laughable. By bringing an end to the Raj, Khan and his army, his ally Gandhi, and the millions of others in the independence movement also ended the horrors of British colonial misrule. That misrule included not only the various indiscriminate massacres of noncombatants that the British inflicted, but also things like the millions-starving Bengal famine of 1943. So the Khudai Khidmatgar, together with the rest of the nonviolent Satyagraha movement, helped put a stop to some close-to-genocidal[6] behavior. So that can happen.

Consider also the Indonesian genocide against the East Timorese. Though armed international peacekeepers finally brought the genocide to an effective end in 1999, and the East Timorese resistance began with armed struggle in 1975, nonviolent resistance emerged as a deliberate resistance strategy alongside it in the late 1980s. Nonviolent international solidarity measures followed, including boycotts and vigils. Journalists Amy Goodman, Allan Nairn and Max Stahl also intensified international outrage at the genocide by taking fire while standing between the army and protesters during the Santa Cruz massacre of 1991. A largely nonviolent democracy movement in Indonesia brought an end, in 1998, to rule by U.S.-backed dictator Suharto, who had overseen most of the genocide. As noted above, United Nations peacekeepers were needed a year later to bring the genocide to a final close, but nonviolent action had laid much of the groundwork for that conclusion.

A more historically recent case of nonviolence against proto-genocidal violence was the Christian-Muslim solidarity work of the Women’s Peace Movement in Liberia. That movement arguably made the greatest contribution—a nonviolent one—to the end of Liberia’s brutal civil war in 2003. The movement also drew international attention that likely set the stage for the prosecution of Liberian president Charles Taylor for his war crimes (in Sierra Leone), and also for the election of the first woman head of state in modern Africa: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Such examples are probably exceptional, though, and among my examples, only the Indonesian genocide against East Timorese reached fully genocidal proportions. My guess is that for most genocides and attempted genocides that sufficient numbers of international genocide scholars and major human rights organizations recognize as such, some violent party ended them violently. Or the genocides ended by reaching the genocidaire-intended conclusion.

The violence of powerful armies, not violent resistance by the genocide-targeted, is what typically cuts genocides short—though violent resistance can help attract powerful sponsorship

There is a catch to violence’s record of success at halting genocides, though. Genocide-targeted populations opting for violent methods typically cannot stop their exterminators with their own armed resistance alone, or they would not be facing genocide in the first place. Genocide-targeted populations generally need state or imperial sponsors more powerful than the aggressor entity.

Armed guerilla bands of Armenian fedayi did not drastically reduce the scale of the Ottoman Empire’s genocide against Armenians. It was the British, French, Russian and U.S. forces who did that, by winning World War I. Participants in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising did not stop the genocide of Polish Jews. It was the Soviet Red Army that liberated the extermination camps in Poland in 1944 and 1945. The Mukti Bahini in Bangladesh did not themselves end U.S. Cold War ally Pakistan’s genocide against Bangladeshis in 1971. It was the Indian army. Armed wings of the Cambodian middle classes did not stop the Khmer Rouge genocide. It was the Vietnamese army’s invasion of 1978-1979. Armed Bosniaks did not stop the acts of genocide against them by Serb nationalists in 1995. It was NATO bombing of Serb strongholds around Sarajevo and Pale.

The closest thing to a genocide-targeted population violently stopping the genocide through its own violence was arguably the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front invading Rwanda from Uganda to stop the 1994 Hutu supremacist-led genocide. Yet that was still not a case of the specifically genocide-targeted Tutsis residing in Rwanda defending themselves with their own unaided violence.

Could nonviolent action have cut short any of these genocides as swiftly or conclusively? Probably not. In 2011, political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan published a well-regarded book reviewing the empirical evidence that nonviolence generally works better than violence to achieve a campaign’s ultimate goals—more than twice as well on average, according to their central finding. And they found nonviolent resistance works about 22% better than the violent kind even when a regime is violently cracking down. But Chenoweth and Stephan stop short of suggesting that nonviolent methods might ever be sufficient to stop a full-scale genocide.

Chenoweth wrote specifically, “…clearly a truly genocidal regime will be difficult to confront........

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