Protesteren voor beginners neemt / Protesting for Beginners

Whether it's about climate change, racism, women's rights, or the war in Gaza: all over the world, people are taking to the streets again to demonstrate nonviolently. In "Protesting for Beginners, " Lodewijk van Oord takes the reader through the history of peaceful resistance against war, violence, and injustice. The basic principles that the comedian Aristophanes described in ancient Greece prove just as applicable in the twentieth-century practice of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. How does nonviolent resistance work? Why is one protest movement successful and another not? Van Oord also questions why some resistance leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, chose violence and why peaceful demonstrations sometimes degenerate into violence and lawlessness. What role does the ruling power play in this process? And why is humor so important in keeping the protest alive? " Protesting for Beginners" is a provocative essay that opens the door to a reappraisal of the right to rise up against injustice and fight for a free and just society.