Community Defense/Resistance

The idea of community defense is linked to the notion of nonviolent community resistance where some connections are made between the grassroots orientation to social defense and strands within community development. In order to pursue possible connections with community-level action, a community relies on popular action in a variety of forms, including petitions, rallies, strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, fasts, and alternative institutions.

Community defense is also known as nonviolent defense, civilian defense, and civilian-based defense. For example, the processes of invasion, conquest, genocide, slavery, and colonization have profoundly shaped indigenous women's lives in North America, and consequently, women have developed complex and diverse strategies for challenging oppression by organizing community-level actions. Another example of women community defense and resistance can be seen in the Women in Black organization. Its most common tactic consists of standing together in various public places, usually in complete silence. Responding to what they considered serious violations of human rights by Israeli soldiers in the Occupied Territories, vigils in many countries were started in solidarity with the Israeli group, but then embraced other social and political issues.

Especially notable were the Women in Black groups in former Yugoslavia, which confronted rampant nationalism, hatred, and bloodshed in the 1990s, often meeting with violence from nationalists and persecution by police. There is also the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace which is an umbrella organization of women's groups in Israel, established in November 2000, and committed to political, social, economic, and gender justice. They call on the Israeli government to end the occupation of Palestinian territories. Other examples of women community defense are CODEPINK: Women for Peace, an antiwar group with regional offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C., a grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end the war in Iraq, stop new wars, and redirect government resources into healthcare, education and other life-affirming activities; and Women for Israel's Tomorrow, which is a right-wing political women's group in Israel, commonly known as Women in Green. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is another well-known example of women community resistance. They are a unique organization of Argentine women who have become human rights activists in order to fight for the right to reunite with their children who were abducted by agents of the Argentine government during the years known as the Dirty War (1976-83), when many were then tortured and killed.

The central assumption underlying community defense is that rule by any government depends on widespread cooperation or at least acquiescence by most of the population. Many activist groups see community defense as something to be brought about through people's struggles, rather than implemented by governments on the basis of rational arguments. For example, women's resistance in Northern Ireland have become increasingly politicized and organized in their resistance to repeated incursions into the home by the security forces which have ruptured traditional boundaries around relations of motherhood, homemaker, and sexual privacy.