Nonviolence and The Grand Inquisitor

With more and more data being gathered on nonviolent civil resistance, quantitative and comparative social inquiry on this topic has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last decade. Social and political theory on nonviolence however, has lagged behind and has not kept up with numerous empirical implications that have been produced by the former. This project accounts for principal findings that have been identified in empirical scholarship on nonviolence, and while doing so, it engages with classical political theorists and scholars on nonviolence including Tolstoy; Gandhi; Gene Sharp along with contemporary works including Atack (2012) and Butler (2020). This project contributes a new framework based on concepts drawn from Dostoevky’s legend of the Grand Inquisitor (originally articulated in the novel, Brothers Karamazov [1880]), to explain the efficacy of nonviolence in the contemporary world. In contrast to Butler (2020) who argues that nonviolence can serve as a moral, political, and social obligation that can counter concentrated forms of violence and systemic conflict (such as that made possible the state), this framework reveals that nonviolence cannot be antecedently assumed to function as a valid socio-political commitment for masses. This is especially true with reference to periods of political instability including revolutionary uprisings, during politicides, genocides, and civil war.