Violence is easy to recognise when someone is being beaten, shot or killed. It becomes more difficult when nobody is holding a weapon. Poverty, discrimination, exploitation and repression can restrict a human life just as effectively, although they do so in very different ways and with very different consequences. Simply adding more categories to an ever-growing list of forms of violence does not really solve the problem. The more interesting question is what all these different situations have in common and why it makes sense to describe them using the same word.
Human beings do not simply react to what happens around them. They remember the past, imagine things that do not yet exist, make plans and undertake projects. Workers organise because they imagine different working conditions; people migrate because they imagine another life somewhere else; social movements emerge because people refuse to accept the present situation as the only possible future. This capacity to project towards a future and act in an attempt to construct it is what is meant here by intentionality. It does not mean that human beings can simply do whatever they like, because intentionality is always exercised within conditions that were not freely chosen.
Every person arrives in a world at a particular historical moment, in a particular family, culture, economic situation and political system. Nobody chooses their mother tongue, the wealth or poverty into which they are born, the education available to them or the prejudices they may encounter as children. These things do not determine what someone will do with their life, but they certainly condition what is possible. Someone born into security, with access to education, healthcare, money and useful social connections, starts with a very different range of possibilities from someone born into poverty, conflict or discrimination. Each person therefore lives within what can be thought of as a field of freedom, within which some possibilities are close at hand, others require enormous effort and some appear almost impossible. Yet the field itself is not fixed. Through learning, organisation, cooperation, resistance, invention and action, human beings continually attempt to transform their circumstances and enlarge what is possible.
No field of freedom exists independently of all the others. Human intentions continually encounter other human intentions, and the actions of individuals, institutions, companies and governments can enlarge or reduce the possibilities open to everyone else. Education can open possibilities that did not exist before; scientific knowledge can do the same; so can solidarity, political participation and economic security. Poverty, discrimination, exploitation, censorship and war can close them. Freedom therefore cannot be understood only as something possessed by an isolated individual. There is also a collective field of human freedom, constantly changing according to the relations that people construct with one another and the social conditions in which they live.
Seen from this perspective, violence starts to become easier to understand. Slavery is perhaps the clearest example because the intention of the enslaved person is explicitly subordinated to the intention of somebody else: their labour, movement, time and future are appropriated for another person’s purposes. Other forms of violence work differently and cannot simply be equated with slavery, but a similar direction can be recognised. Discrimination can close possibilities because of sex, race, religion or origin; political repression can prevent people from participating in decisions that determine their future; economic relations can become so unequal that one person enjoys an enormous range of possibilities precisely because another has very little practical possibility of refusing what is demanded of them. What these situations share is the appropriation, subordination or suppression of one human intention by another.
Violence can therefore be understood as the appropriation of intentionality. It does not only damage somebody in the present; it reduces their field of freedom and takes possession of possibilities that might otherwise have existed in their future. Humanisation moves in the opposite direction. To humanise is to struggle against the forms of violence that appropriate human intentionality and to transform the conditions that allow them to continue, thereby enlarging the collective field of freedom. This also gives nonviolence a more demanding meaning than simply refusing to hit or kill somebody. Nonviolence is an active struggle against violence which attempts, at the same time, not to reproduce the same logic of domination in the process.
This has quite a lot to do with journalism, because journalism does not simply collect facts from the world and pass them untouched to an audience. Every article involves decisions about what deserves attention, whom to speak to, what history is relevant, which information belongs near the top of the story and what can be left out altogether. A demonstration blocks a road: one journalist concentrates on the disruption to commuters, another asks why thousands of people felt it necessary to block the road, while another concentrates on the behaviour of the police. All three may report facts accurately and nevertheless construct very different understandings of what took place. Recognising this is not an argument against truth, accuracy or verification. It is an argument for recognising that journalists have a point of view and participate, whether they acknowledge it or not, in the construction of the collective narrative.
Journalism can appropriate intentionality too. A refugee can become a number crossing a border; a community living in poverty can become a social problem explained by politicians and economists; a protest can become nothing more than disruption. In each case, the people involved risk disappearing as protagonists of their own lives and becoming objects in somebody else’s account of reality. Even apparently sympathetic language can have this effect. Someone who has suffered an act of violence may certainly have been its victim, but if that person is reduced permanently to the category of “victim”, everything else can disappear: what they wanted before the violence, what they want now, what they are doing and what they might still become. Something similar happens when someone responsible for terrible violence is reduced simply to a monster. The condemnation may be understandable, but the label explains almost nothing about how the violence became possible.
And this is one of the problems with journalism that limits itself to condemnation. Saying that racism, war, torture, poverty or repression are terrible things may be morally correct, but it does not necessarily help anyone understand why they occur, which interests sustain them, which beliefs make them seem acceptable, whose voices have disappeared from the story or what would have to change for the violence to stop. Nonviolent Journalism cannot therefore mean pleasant journalism or journalism which avoids conflict. A journalism concerned with overcoming violence will inevitably find itself confronting governments, corporations, armies, institutions, ideologies and cultural practices. The question is not whether journalism enters into conflict, but what happens to human intentionality when it does. Does it reproduce the same movement by reducing people to enemies, categories and instruments, or does it help reveal the intentions and conditions that have disappeared from view?
There is another problem. Journalism is extremely effective at showing the forces that restrict human freedom. War, inequality, racism, ecological destruction, political repression and cruelty all deserve the attention they receive, but they are not the only forces acting in the world. At exactly the same time, human beings are organising, resisting, cooperating, inventing, caring for one another and constructing alternatives. These are sometimes dismissed as “positive news”, as though their only function were to make the audience feel better after the serious stories have finished. They are far more important than that because they reveal human intentions already acting to transform existing conditions. If journalism reports the violence but ignores the attempts to overcome it, then it is not simply being pessimistic; it is presenting an incomplete picture of reality.
Human beings act according to what they believe is possible, and journalism participates in shaping that horizon of possibility. If the image communicated day after day is one in which violence is inevitable, power is immovable and ordinary people are essentially helpless, that image itself begins to narrow the field of imaginable action. Journalism should certainly reveal violence and its causes, but it should also recover the intentions hidden behind statistics and categories, expose the concentrations of power that restrict them, and make visible the attempts already underway to transform those conditions.
This leads to a relatively simple definition: Nonviolent Journalism is journalism oriented towards increasing the collective field of human freedom.
Every article leaves something behind in the reader: information, certainly, but also images, interpretations, emotions and possibilities. The question for Nonviolent Journalism is whether what is left behind helps human beings understand the forces acting upon their lives and increases their capacity to participate in constructing what comes next.