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A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict explores how popular movements have battled entrenched regimes or military forces with weapons very different from guns and bullets. Strikes, boycotts, and other actions were used as aggressive measures to battle opponents and win concessions. Petitions, parades, walkouts and demonstrations roused public support for the resisters. Forms of noncooperation including boycotts and civil disobedience helped subvert the operations of government. And direct intervention in the form of sit-ins, nonviolent sabotage, and blockades frustrated many rulers' efforts to suppress people.
The historical results were massive: tyrants were toppled, governments were overthrown, occupying armies were impeded, and political systems that withheld human rights were shattered. Entire societies were transformed, suddenly or gradually, by nonviolent resistance that destroyed opponents' ability to control events. These events and the ideas underlying nonviolent action are the focus of this three-hour documentary television production.
The television series begins in 1907 with a young Mohandas Gandhi, the most influential leader in the history of nonviolent resistance, as he rouses his fellow Indians living in South Africa to a nonviolent struggle against racial oppression. The series recounts Mohandas Gandhi's civil disobedience campaign against the British in India; the sit-ins and boycotts that desegregated downtown Nashville, Tennessee; the nonviolent campaign against apartheid in South Africa; Danish resistance to the Nazis in World War II; the rise of Solidarity in Poland; and the momentous victory for democracy in Chile. A Force More Powerful also introduces several extraordinary, but largely unknown individuals who drove these great events forward, and lets them tell their stories.
Few who relied on nonviolent sanctions in the twentieth century did so because of a principled attachment to nonviolence. For some, arms were unavailable as a way to fight. Others had seen a violent insurrection fail, at devastating cost to life and property. But they had no desire to be passive: they wanted passionately to overturn the rulers or the laws that subjected them.
The greatest misconception about conflict is that violence is the ultimate form of power, surpassing other methods of advancing a just cause or defeating injustice. But in conflict after conflict throughout the twentieth century, people have proven otherwise. At a time when violence is still too often used by those who seek power, A Force More Powerful dramatizes how ordinary people throughout the world, working against all kinds of opponents, have taken up nonviolent weapons and prevailed.
A Force More Powerful was also released as a 110-minute 35 mm film which told three stories of nonviolent conflict - Gandhi's independence movement in India, the Nashville sit-ins, and the consumer boycotts in South Africa. It played in film festivals nationwide.
A Force More Powerful, the television series, has been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish.
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