How Nonviolence Protects the State

I would not recommend this book to people who want to understand the split between advocates for “nonviolence” and advocates for diversity of tactics, because the author sometimes disingenuously puts things in people's mouths. It is however helpful as a reference in arguments, since it contains a lot of recent-historical (USA-centric) examples.

In the first chapters the author attacks, often polemically, “nonviolent” tactics. Some of the convictions he presents as coming from advocates of “nonviolence” are obviously constructed.¹ In the last chapter the author advocates for organizing in small groups and forming temporary alliances and outlines his views on how violence could be used effectively.

In the examples, the definitions of violence of the discussed movements are used (but not always stated), so the definition is constantly changing, which did confuse me at times. Most discussed movements seem to define property destruction as violence. I don't know if he hand-picked them because they're easier targets or if it really is the prevalent opinion among these movements in the USA.

All in all an interesting read, but I wish the author had approached the matter a bit more objectively.

¹ For example, he expect us to believe that pacifists argue that it is possible to live a life without ever harming anyone (look, these pacifists still drive cars and eat food!).

Found the arguments convincing and provoked lots of (painful!) self-reflection.
But on the 'provoke' word...polemics have their place, and I appreciated the author's righteous anger and eloquence in getting across the material and epistemic injustices. But I don't know how successful that would be in changing the minds of others fully entrenched in a pacifist worldview - likely it would just result in defensiveness. Some other reviews have picked up on the referencing and use of anecdotes - more thick descriptions / fictionalised autoethnography might have come across more like a composite of Gelderloos's huge experience in activist communities rather than point-scoring.

There are a fair few strawpeople making an appearance, especially in the 'Nonviolence is Patriarchal' - which I found the least persuasive of all (hot topic: don't cite the Hebrew Bible, calling it 'the Old Testament', when you clearly haven't read it), which might bely the air of machismo that pervaded most of the book except the introduction and conclusion. A lot of points were made in the conclusion (especially about the nonexistence of 'violence' and 'nonviolence' as an essential duality) that I wish had been expanded on in the main body of the book rather than repetition of the same points, just with different historical examples. There was no analysis of dis/ablism as a violent structure, and how disability affects discussions of nonviolence versus diversity of tactics.

If the tone of the introduction and conclusion were sustained throughout, this book could have done a lot more to persuade pragmatic and even principled pacifists of the main argument: that resisting and transforming the violence inherent under capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism and so on, means sometimes deploying violent tactics.