When we talk about creating a more peaceful and just world, much of our attention is understandably directed towards violence itself. We campaign to end violence against women, challenge oppressive institutions, call out racism, confront harmful behaviour and try to dismantle the systems that perpetuate injustice.
But there is another question that receives far less attention: if this is what we want to move away from, what exactly are we trying to move towards?
That question sat at the heart of my conversation with Hala Abdelnour, Founder and CEO of the Institute of Non-Violence. Hala has spent decades working across psychology, social work, addiction, incarceration, family violence and marginalised communities, including working directly with adults who use violence. Her perspective challenges some of the binaries we often rely upon when thinking about harm, accountability and social change.
For changemakers, it raises an uncomfortable possibility: if we want to create a nonviolent world, it isn’t enough to oppose violence. We also have to examine whether the ways we pursue justice reproduce some of the same dynamics of domination, exclusion and dehumanisation that we’re trying to leave behind.
Nonviolence Is More Than the Absence of Violence
Hala is careful not to offer a definitive meaning of nonviolence, but one idea she returns to is that peace and nonviolence cannot simply mean the absence of overt harm. They require an active commitment to justice and a continual attempt to live with integrity: bringing our actions and words into alignment with what we claim to value, while remaining open to recognising the ways we may still cause harm.
This distinction matters because it is possible to oppose violence while still participating in violent systems and relationships. We can advocate for equality while hoarding power. We can describe ourselves as anti-oppressive while excluding people from decisions that affect them. We can talk about empowerment while continuing to make decisions on behalf of the people we claim to empower.
The language of social change can easily become disconnected from its practice.
For changemakers, integrity therefore requires more than identifying with the right values. It asks whether those values are actually reflected in how we work, lead, collaborate, distribute resources and respond when someone tells us we have caused harm.
Accountability Doesn’t Have to Mean Dehumanisation
One of the more challenging implications of Hala’s work comes from her experience working with people who use violence.
When someone causes serious harm, our instinct may be to divide the world neatly into victims and perpetrators, good people and bad people. Those categories can serve important purposes, particularly when identifying responsibility and protecting people from further harm. But they can also become limiting if we begin treating a harmful behaviour as the entirety of someone’s humanity.
Humanising someone is not the same as excusing them.
Accountability still matters. Safety matters. Consequences matter. But if our goal is ultimately to reduce violence, we also have to ask what actually creates the conditions in which people can change.
This is particularly important because people do not exist outside the systems that shape them. Violence emerges within families, cultures, institutions, histories, gender norms, experiences of trauma, relationships to power and learned patterns of behaviour. Understanding those conditions does not remove individual responsibility; it gives us more places at which change might become possible.
For changemakers, this is a useful distinction well beyond family violence. We can hold people responsible for what they do while remaining curious about what produced the behaviour. In fact, understanding causes is essential if we want to do more than respond to symptoms.
We Need to Look at Our Own Relationship with Power
It is relatively easy to recognise abuses of power when someone else holds the power. It becomes much harder when we are the ones being asked to give some of it up.
Hala makes an important point about equity: we cannot hold onto all the power we currently possess while simultaneously claiming that we want inclusion and equality. Creating more equitable systems necessarily involves redistributing power.
This is where social change becomes personal.
It’s easy to say we want participatory organisations, but what happens when other people make decisions we disagree with? It’s easy to advocate for marginalised voices, but are we prepared to speak less so someone else can speak more? It’s easy to critique hierarchical leadership until relinquishing hierarchy means giving up our own authority, status or control.
Dismantling oppressive systems is not simply about replacing the people at the top. If the underlying relationships remain based on domination, competition and power-over, changing who occupies the powerful position may reproduce the same structure in a different form.
This also complicates what feminism asks of us. As Hala argues, feminism cannot simply mean women gaining greater access to power within structures built around patriarchal domination. A deeper transformation requires asking what comes after those structures and imagining different ways of relating to power altogether.
Changemakers Need to Know What They’re For
One of my favourite ideas from our conversation was Hala’s observation that so much work in the family violence space is framed around what must end: stop violence, end violence, challenge toxic masculinity. Naming these problems is necessary, but naming the problem does not automatically tell us what should replace it.
The same is true across social change.
Environmentalists know what they want to stop destroying. Anti-racist movements know which injustices they oppose. Feminists can describe the harms of patriarchy. Economic justice movements can identify exploitation. But eventually, every movement has to answer a more difficult question: what do we want instead?
Hala offered a simple metaphor: it is difficult to convince people to get on another boat if nobody knows where that boat is sailing.
Changemaking therefore requires more than critique. We need the imaginative capacity to articulate alternatives compelling enough for people to move towards them.
What does a nonviolent community actually feel like? How is power distributed? How are conflicts resolved? How do we respond when somebody causes harm? What does accountability look like? How do people experience dignity, belonging and agency? What kinds of relationships would exist between genders, cultures, communities and institutions?
We may not agree on one perfect destination, but without some sense of what we’re trying to create, our movements risk becoming permanently organised around opposition.
Beware the Changemaker Hero
This question of power also applies to how we imagine changemakers themselves.
We tend to tell the history of social change through extraordinary individuals: Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Gandhi and other highly visible leaders. Social media has arguably intensified this tendency by creating another model of individual influence in which visibility, followers and personal platforms become proxies for impact.
Hala describes this as a kind of “superhero syndrome”: the desire to become the next great figure who changes the world. But there is a contradiction here. If our pursuit of justice becomes entangled with our desire to be recognised as the person creating that justice, we can reproduce competition, hierarchy and ego within movements supposedly committed to liberation.
Social change has never actually been the work of isolated heroes. Behind every famous figure are communities, organisers, caregivers, thinkers, volunteers and countless people whose names never enter the history books.
Perhaps the better question isn’t, How can I become an influential changemaker? but What does the ecosystem of change need from me?
Sometimes that will mean leading. Sometimes it will mean supporting someone else’s leadership, building relationships, doing administrative work, caring for others, sharing resources or contributing quietly without recognition.
A genuinely nonviolent approach to social change may require us to become less interested in being the hero and more interested in helping the whole ecosystem thrive.
Nonviolence Begins With How We Practise Change
Perhaps the biggest lesson from Hala’s work is that nonviolence cannot simply be the outcome we hope to achieve someday. It also has to inform the way we travel towards that outcome.
That doesn’t mean avoiding conflict, refusing to hold people accountable or pretending harmful behaviour is acceptable. Nonviolence is not passivity. If anything, it asks something more difficult of us: to confront harm without losing sight of humanity, to challenge power while examining our own relationship with it, and to build alternatives rather than defining ourselves entirely through what we oppose.
It also asks us to practise the values we want our future systems to embody now.
If we want a more equitable world, we need to experiment with redistributing power. If we want communities built around dignity, we need to treat people with dignity even when accountability is required. If we want collective liberation, our movements need to become more collective. And if we want a society capable of transformation, we have to maintain the possibility that human beings can transform too.
As Hala’s work reminds us, creating a nonviolent future isn’t simply about stopping violence. It is about learning, together, how to relate to one another differently.
