The United Nations General Assembly has designated October 2 as the International Day of Nonviolence. October 2 is the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. For Gandhi, non-violence was at the center of his philosophy and actions. Thus it is appropriate to mark the day with an analysis of one aspect of non-violent action: the role of peace teams as observers in conflict situations.
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There have been a good number of efforts to create non-violent teams which could work internationally somewhat on the model that Mahatma Gandhi and his followers developed in India, the Shanti Sena, to work primarily in local communal tensions.(1) One of the first and most ambitious was the proposed "Peace Army" to be a 'living wall' between the advancing Japanese Army and the Chinese defenders of Shanghai in 1932. The effort, based in the UK, was offered to the League of Nations, but since the League was not planning to get involved, nothing came of the effort. Japan continued its conquest.
A second opportunity to show the effectiveness of non-violent inter-positioning came in August 1981 with the newly created US-Canada-based Peace Brigades International (PBI). In August 1981, there was a fear that US troop maneuvers in Honduras on the frontier with Nicaragua would be a prelude for a US or a US-aided attack on the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. PBI was able to draw upon an already existing team of people in southern California, some of whom were trained in radio transmission. The team had already trained together and built up a 'team spirit'. The team was able top move out quickly. Negotiations with diplomats from Nicaragua and Honduras were carried out at the UN in New York as part of the PBI secretariat was in Philadelphia, in easy reach of New York. After the US-Hondourous maneuvers finished, the fear of a real invasion ended, and the PBI team was withdrawn.
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