Institute for Nonviolent Economics

Every Dollar
Will Be Tripled!

Area of Focus:

Peace and Localization:
The Institute works to show the connections between peace and localization--and between militarization and globalization As we work for a strong local economy in New Mexico, it is vital that we address the Los Alamos and Sandia Laboratories. The life-affirming economy that the Institute envisions does not allow for money to be made from the production of weapons or from the planning or carrying out of any form of violence or warfare.

The Means

“The means are the ends in the making.” Gandhi

Nonviolence:
“Satyagraha [holding to truth] is a force that works silently and apparently slowly. In reality, there is no force in the world that is so direct and swift in the working.” Gandhi

The Institute promotes nonviolent means of creating societal transformation. It works to counter globalization through non-cooperation and civil disobedience, and builds alternative structures through “constructive programmes,” to use Gandhi’s terminology. There are ample nonviolent methods--indeed the scholar Gene Sharp has culled 198 nonviolent practices from history!

Activism based in the wisdom traditions:
The Institute advocates a spiritually-based culture of activism. It has been said of the atom bomb that long before one is detonated, there already exists a spiritual death. The Institute holds that the same is true in our current global economic crisis. Indeed, corporate globalization reveals that we are out of relation with the natural world and with one another.

Cultural and Structural Nonviolence

The famous Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung expanded our notion of violence by describing three kinds of violence--direct violence (what we usually associate with violence, i.e. killing or hurting a living being physically or verbally), structural violence (undermining the well-being of life through institutionalized policies, ways of conducting business, legal mechanisms, etc.), and cultural violence (the beliefs, values, and ways of being that give legitimacy to structural and direct violence).
The Institute focuses on the structural violence of economic globalization as well as the cultural violence underlying it. Though structural violence is often silent, and thus particularly pernicious, the end result is often as grave as that of direct violence.

On the Positive Nature of Nonviolence:
Nonviolence signifies positive peace, not the mere absence of violence. It denotes the presence of justice, the active force that arises from a mind that has no desire to harm any living being.

The Problem

Regions throughout the world, including New Mexico, are experiencing the profound impacts of economic globalization in many ways. Though not the sole cause for the following problems, globalization is an important contributor to many current crises. For example, resources flow increasingly to money rather than need, and the divide between the rich and the poor is growing within and between countries. The global “casino economy” is highly volatile and little understood, and financial fluctuations can devastate peoples’ lives. The pace of life is becoming faster as people feel the pressure to keep up with the technologies of the global economy and to be competitive in this new context. Small businesses give way to larger scale enterprises and the global reach of transnationals becomes increasingly great. The average item on the grocery store shelf in the US travels 1500 miles–food is less nutritious, requires more packaging and refrigeration, and is cultivated for it's transport qualities. Biological diversity, and the resilience that accompanies it, is severely curtailed. Rural livelihoods are eroded as jobs are concentrated in fewer places. A global monoculture involves lost identities; plummeting self-esteem if one is not western, white, and urbane; and the meaning of life being reduced to consumption. Box retailers crowd out local stores and regional character gives way to Anywhere, USA. Environmental and labor laws, hard-won by our ancestors, are deemed "non-tariff barriers to trade" and "free" trade is becoming the highest law of the land.

The Vision

The Institute envisions a world in which people are fully trained in nonviolence and know their power to create a peaceful and just future for generations to come. The Institute believes that a human-scale economic system that values the natural world, community, global equity, direct democracy, biological and cultural diversity, and meaningful work can not only help to build such a future, but is fully possible.

Global and local economies could:

• Allow people to be sovereign over corporations and involve mechanisms for revoking charters when corporations do not serve the common good.
• Allow people to regulate the technosphere through open, informed, balanced, and democratic processes.

Diverse local economies could:

• Emerge out of regional ecosystems.
• Provide for local needs whenever possible, importing only when not.
• Allow for small businesses to link together to remain small.
• Privilege many forms of local ownership over absentee ownership.
• Link with one another in global solidarity and a spirit of internationalism to protect the local, globally.

About Sarah Laeng-Gilliatt,
Executive Director of INE

Sarah Laeng-Gilliatt holds a B.A. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in socially engaged Buddhism from the Naropa Institute. She has led ongoing public education events in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on spiritual economics. Also in New Mexico, she has pursued efforts to localize agriculture as co-coordinator of the Northern New Mexico Organic Wheat Project and by helping to make a directory of farmers willing to sell directly to consumers. Sarah has worked closely with Helena Norberg-Hodge of the International Society for Ecology and Culture and has studied with Vandana Shiva and Martin Khor of the Third World Network at Schumacher College in England. She has edited several books on the roots of nonviolence in various spiritual traditions as well as Nonviolence Speaks to Power: Speeches by Petra Kelly (1992). Sarah lives with her husband, Stefan, and their son, Julian, in Tesuque, New Mexico.

Advisory Board

Joni Arends, Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety

David Bacon

Craig Barnes

David Benavides, NM Legal Aid

Patricia Gay Webb, International Environmental Policy and Development

Brian Goodwin, Schumacher College, England

Sebia Hawkins

Anya Lyngbaek, Grupo de Ecologia y Tradiciones Agrarias, Mexico

Daeja Napier, The Brahma Vihara Foundation

Helena Norberg-Hodge, The International Society for Ecology and Culture

Mark Sardella, Local Energy

Michael Shuman, author, Going Local

Luis Torres, Private Consultant

Affiliations listed for identification purposes only.