Penina Migdal Glazer

The Process of Becoming a Courageous Resister

Whether a person becomes a courageous resister depends on how he or she reacts upon becoming aware of grave injustice. People must decide whether to courageously resist the injustice, stand by and do nothing while it occurs, or intentionally participate in the unjust activity. How one responds when facing these crossroads depends on the combination of the individual’s preconditions, networks, and the context at the time. This chapter explores how social science research suggests that these factors may work together in influencing people’s paths toward courageous resistance.

Ordinary Persons Doing Extraordinary Evil

One day in July, 1941, half of the population of the Polish village of Jedwabne murdered the other half. Until Polish-born historian Jan Gross described this, the accepted truth was described on a plaque in Jedwabne as the work of the Gestapo and Nazi occupation police. Gross concluded, however, that the Polish villagers had willingly tortured and murdered some 1,600 Jews of their village. Only a handful of the village’s Jews survived (Gross 2001).

Ordinary People’s Extraordinary Courage, Impact, and Hope: Tentative Conclusions

Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Darfur. As anyone familiar with world history knows, humanity’s record over the last hundred years is grim. Yet as this book illustrates, even as humanity’s collective capacity for good has been overshadowed, there has been hope. The practice of courageous resistance has been just as strong as the record of injustice over the last one hundred years. The inspiring examples of courageous resistance in this book show that ordinary people, often with few resources, can display extraordinary courage and yield impressive results. Courageous resisters have ended or reduced injustice in amazingly varied contexts—from dangerous harassment and environmental degradation to torture, disappearance, and even genocide. These cases show also that voluntary, other-oriented (largely selfless), high-risk, conscious, sustained, and nonviolent resistance to injustice occurs at individual, collective, and institutional levels.

The Individual as Courageous Resister to Social Injustice

In this chapter, we look at individuals who took a courageous stand when they confronted danger and injustice in their workplaces, communities, and wartime situations. We examine several cases of ordinary people called upon to confront authority when harm was being inflicted on others. We begin by exploring the cases of three individuals who clearly fit our definition of courageous resister. The first case involves a whistleblower in the U.S Customs Service whose situation began in the 1990s when she defied her supervisors after she saw fellow agents abusing travelers. The second case examines the role of a young American soldier who exposed injustices in an Iraqi prison. The third case centers on an American foreign service officer’s efforts against the direct orders of superiors to help Jews escape from Europe in the period leading up to World War II. The focus of the chapter then shifts to consider two cases that show some characteristics of courageous resistance but do not fully meet the definitional requirements. We explore the actions of a woman who testified at the post-Rwandan genocide war crimes tribunal in Arusha and the German officer who provided covert assistance to the Chambonais in their efforts to protect Jews from the Nazis. In each of these latter two cases, ordinary people clearly show courage in the face of injustice; yet their actions do not rise to the level of courageous resistance. We conclude this chapter by considering the commonalities and differences among all five cases and the social functions of courageous resistance.

Pathways to Courageous Resistance: Ordinary People, Groups, and Institutions Confront Injustice

In April 1994, the east African country of Rwanda exploded into a nightmare of mass killing. Following the lead of the Presidential Guard and military, the fiercely ethnocentric Hutu Interahamwe militia, purporting to be saving the country from disloyal Tutsi and Hutu moderates, urged the Hutu majority to purge the country of the “cockroach” Tutsi minority. Many Hutu civilians began killing their countrymen encouraged by incendiary rhetoric on the radio. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed men, women and children were slaughtered over a 100 day period, “Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes, and colleagues hacked colleagues to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients and schoolteachers killed their pupils. Within days, the Tutsi populations of many villages were all but eliminated”(Gourevitch 1998, 115).

Collective Resistance to Injustice: The Special Power of People Working Together

Courageous resistance is not solely the province of individuals. The focus of this chapter is collective resistance. Collective resistance occurs when people choose to challenge injustice together. Like the decision of the individual courageous resister, collective resisters’ decisions to participate are influenced by the dynamic interaction of their preconditions, networks, and contextual factors. In other words, the choice to respond to injustice as part of a linked, sometimes coordinated, effort depends not only on who the resisters are, but who they know and the nature of the environment. Cooperation with others also uniquely influences both the risks and the available resources of a courageous resister.

Institutions and Resisting Injustice

As the two previous chapters have shown, courageous resistance takes many forms. The context, including domestic and international laws and norms, shape both when courageous resistance is likely to occur and how successful it will be. Without laws or the threat of punishment to protect human rights, those striving for justice may not be able to end the evils they oppose. This chapter shows how new treaties and mechanisms for enforcing human rights have been created by courageous resistance. In turn, these new laws and mechanisms both shape later resistance and increase the likelihood of future success by those who struggle to protect human rights.