Taking Risks for Animals: Zoe Rosenberg on direct action, open rescue, and the criminalization of compassion

At 18, Soul Tsalik refused to serve in the Israeli military and went to prison for his refusal. Now 20, he joins Nonviolence Radio to share how he came to see conscientious objection as a duty, and how he works with Mesarvot, a network supporting young Israelis who refuse military service. We talk about growing up in a militarized society, his commitment to Palestinian freedom for the “sake of all humanity,” and what it means to take responsibility for refusing to participate in violence. We ...

What happens when judges leave the courthouse to meet people in donut shops, community centers, and town squares? Danny Miller and Steve Silverman, organizers of Justice in Motion, share what they learned from taking judges on the road to connect with the communities they serve. Their conversation explores how public trust grows through personal encounters, how one person’s willingness to act can inspire others, and why protecting democracy requires participation beyond the courtroom. In the ...

Amir Bergen and Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin met as students at St. John’s College and began asking what the kind of dialogue they practiced there might offer a world divided by war. The Svet Peace Project began by bringing young people from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus together through literature, conversation, and shared inquiry, and has since grown to bring people together from around the world. On this episode of Nonviolence Radio, we hear the story of Svet and explore how education and dialogu...

What does it look like when communities become active participants in their own safety rather than waiting for someone else to protect them? In this episode, we speak with Roz Lee, Head of the U.S. Mission for Nonviolent Peaceforce, about the growth of unarmed civilian protection (UCP) in the United States. Although Nonviolent Peaceforce has long worked in places experiencing war and violent conflict, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis—the city where the organization was founded—made i...

What does it mean for a revolution to transform not only political structures, but our understanding of ourselves? On this episode of Nonviolence Radio, we speak with independent scholar and educator Safoora Arbab about the Khudai Khidmatgar, the remarkable nonviolent movement that emerged among the Pashtun people in the Northwest Frontier of British India. Arbab challenges familiar accounts that portray the movement as the achievement of a single leader, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, or as an example ...