Nonviolent international support of social empowerment processes

During the last decades, there has been an expansion of new forms of global citizenship throughout the world which are concerned with the violence used to deal with conflicts. One of the expressions of these new forms of global citizenship is nonviolent international interventions, which support local empowerment processes developed by people who are resisting in nonviolent way and standing to defend their human rights advocacy initiatives in cases of impunity, land rights violations, environmental degradation or labour rights abuses, among other issues. This article presents the phenomenon of the nonviolent international interventions and explores how this phenomenon contributes to empower social local processes working on conflict transformation. I analyse the strategies used to support these processes and the results achieved in cases where disputes are characterized by high degrees of violence. The paper examines the case of Peace Brigade International to illustrate how this kind of global civil society organizations can support nonviolent struggles against authoritarian regimes in the context of the “Arab Spring”.