Bridges are often attacked by aggressors. Building a bridge that would survive any attack would be impossibly expensive, though designs allowing easy rebuilding would be possible. Also, bridges might be designed so that saboteurs could easily be detected. Laser detectors, perhaps?
Similar considerations apply to housing. In order to be able to reconstruct destroyed buildings, designs should be simple and straightforward, relying on readily available materials. Portable homes might be useful for moving people around the country. There is some research on cheap, effective housing for the Third World which may be applicable. Research could be done on materials to make tents long-lasting. Combined with telecommunications, tent-based activists would be hard to track down.
In the case of manufacturing, aggressors often take over plants for their own purposes. To resist, workers could go on strike, but torture against workers or their families could be used to break the strike. Another approach is to go slow and make “inadvertent” mistakes, as done in some factories taken over by the Nazis in World War II. A technological solution — raised by Johan Galtung, quoted in chapter 4 — is to design the factory so that vital pieces of equipment can be removed or destroyed. Replacements could be kept in a safe place, such as another country. Torture would be pointless, since it couldn’t get the factory going again. Actually, in many modern factories, the technological sophistication is so great that outsiders would not know whether the workers were resisting or not.
When hierarchies are flattened and groups of workers can operate without a boss, the workforce is better equipped to resist a takeover. Therefore, manufacturing systems that are tied to empowering the workers may be the best for nonviolent struggle.
Large-scale monocultures are vulnerable to disruption. A more resilient food system would include many local gardens and food-bearing trees. Relevant research here includes seed varieties robust to lack of fertilisers and pesticides, nutritious diets from wild natives, and methods for long-term storage of food.[9]
A transport system highly resilient to attack can be achieved by designing communities so that most travel can be accomplished by walking or cycling, in contrast with systems of roads or rail which can be interrupted by cutting off fuel. Powered vehicles are very useful for shipping goods, so it would be valuable to design vehicles that are simple to build and repair, use fuels that can be easily produced or stored throughout the community and, perhaps, in an emergency could be powered by human muscles.[10] There is likely to be a trade-off between the convenience of maintaining some forms of motorised transport and their vulnerability. Thus there is a general challenge to develop motorised transport technologies that cannot be easily disrupted by an aggressor.
Health
Many doctors and health workers have been involved in peace activism over the years,[11] but only some of this involvement is directly relevant to nonviolent resistance to aggression and repression. One of the ways that health professionals today help to oppose repression is by documenting cases of torture or execution. Governments routinely deny that they are involved in torture and extra-judicial execution; investigations and authoritative pronouncements by medical and forensic experts can help to expose such abuses. Some of the activities of physicians and medical researchers concerned about violations of human rights include:
• assessing cases of alleged torture;
• exhuming bodies (sometimes buried months earlier) and determining the cause of death;
• using genetic tracing to track down relatives of orphans whose parents have disappeared, presumed murdered;
• estimating the number of casualties in wars;
• carrying out psychiatric assessment of torture survivors;
• examining conditions in prisons;
• training health workers in skills related to the topics above and in the ethics of collaborating with regimes using torture.[12]
Technologies used for torture are mostly familiar: batons for beatings; electricity for shock; cigarettes to cause burns. Occasionally there is some innovation in torture, such as beatings on the soles of feet (falanga) in order to inflict pain without leaving physical traces. In such cases there is a place for research to develop new means of detecting torture. Turkish physician Veli Lök helped develop a method of detecting falanga using bone scintigraphy. Courts have used medical reports based on this method as proof of torture.[13]
As well as exposing abuses by repression regimes, another and bigger task for health workers is to promote a healthy society. A society in which people are healthy and self-reliant in health care is undoubtedly better prepared to resist aggression and repression. Maintaining health in the face of attack is a tall order. Aggressors might
• assault nonviolent protesters or bystanders;
• engage in forced labour and torture;
• impose a blockade that cuts off food and medical supplies;
• destroy power supplies or sanitation facilities, increasing the risks of disease;
• lay landmines;
• spread diseases, inadvertently or purposefully;
• launch military attack, including bombing.
When a population uses only nonviolent methods of resistance, full-scale military attack is less likely than when there is violent resistance. Nevertheless, it is important to be prepared for serious health consequences of aggression. In such a situation, it is unlikely that the conventional medical system could cope. A large influx of casualties would overwhelm hospitals. Emergency procedures, familiar to doctors working in theatres of war, are appropriate.[14] Disaster planning — usually the province of civil defence managers — is needed for the health sector as well as others.
More generally, many members of the community need to develop skills in diagnosis and treatment. Simple first-aid measures are often sufficient, even for some serious injuries. A society prepared for the adverse health consequences of aggression might:
• make first-aid training a regular part of nearly everyone’s continuing education;
• run medical disaster simulations, analogous to fire drills;
• provide subsidised packages of basic medical materials to every household and building;
• make widely available handbooks describing basic medical procedures;
• set up decentralised production facilities for basic medical items such as anaesthetics and antibiotics;
• promote a simple, nutritious, locally obtainable diet;
• support use of effective alternatives to conventional medicine;[15]
• engage in ongoing discussion and debate about self-help and low cost methods of promoting health.
These sorts of initiatives towards self-reliance in health care often conflict with the priorities of industrialised medicine, with its reliance on expert professionals, expensive technology and drugs provided by transnational corporations. Industrialised medicine is vulnerable in the face of attack, whereas self-reliant health care is resilient.
Miriam Solomon, a researcher into health and democacy, has thought about these issues. She draws attention to the rhetoric of the World Health Organisation (WHO) “on primary health care and health promotion, as embodied, for example, in the Ottawa Charter. That document urges a range of strategies, including political ones, for developing personal skills, strengthening communities, improving the social and physical environments, reorienting health services (away from the medical model), and incorporating health sensitive public policies in all sectors.” She notes that the same principles that apply to food, energy and so forth also apply to health.
9.
Methods used by farmers to survive the impact of warfare are relevant here. For example, in Angola farmers intensively cultivated tiny plots, grew the very hardy grains millet and sorghum, took up hunting and fishing, saved seeds to sow the next year’s crop and adopted mutual aid systems for planting, weeding and harvesting. Although some of these practices, such as choosing hardy grains and saving seed, reduced yields, they were more resilient in times of intense threat and stress. See David Sogge,
10.
Ivan Illich,
11.
Nick Lewer,
12.
An excellent compendium of materials is Carola Eisenberg and Susannah Sirkin (directors),
14.
An excellent practical reference is Hans Husum, Swee Chai Ang and Erik Fosse,
15.
Robert Burrowes suggested the points about diet and alternatives to conventional medicine.