A Georgetown University graduate and peace practitioner highlighted his experience on nonviolent action and civil rights programs in Africa at a Jan. 10 event hosted by the Georgetown University master of arts in conflict resolution program.
Nick Zaremba (GRD ’17) described his work as the program manager for the Africa division at the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Rule of Law Initiative (ROLI), which seeks to promote the rule of law internationally in order to build functional systems of justice, and as a program officer at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Zaremba’s talk emphasized the overlapping roles of nonviolent action, peacebuilding and the rule of law in various contexts.
According to Zaremba, nonviolent movements tend to be more successful because of how they employ different means of social disruption to involve more of the population.
“Even your next door neighbor, elderly man or elderly woman, not going to be able to take up a gun, maybe not even able to participate in a march or protest, but what they can do is go outside and bang their pots and pans, or sweep the streets of some kind of symbolic display of sweeping away corruption,” Zaremba said at the event.
To support his assertions, Zaremba presented statistics demonstrating that nonviolent civil resistance campaigns are both more effective in establishing long-term democracy and less likely to bring about civil war than violent campaigns.
Even so, Zaremba said the modern organizing landscape has rendered nonviolence movements increasingly less effective.
“Recent movements are also increasingly relying on digital organizing, via social media in particular,” Zaremba said. “And while this has some benefits, it’s also easier for governments to do surveillance on activists.”
Zaremba said his work with the USIP focused on resolving this issue by providing comprehensive training for community organizers, which proved particularly effective in reducing violence in areas of Sudan.
“The methodology supports grassroots activists to move from awareness raising and confrontation and movement building towards consolidating gains through negotiation and dialogue,” Zaremba said. “And it also teaches activists peace-building techniques such as negotiation, nonviolent communication and dialogue to reach sustainable outcomes.”
In his current role with the ABA, Zaremba manages programs that provide legal services and utilize ethical and accountability measures to build institutions that protect civil rights and liberties abroad. One such program, called Promoting Rights and Justice, works to develop the judiciary system in Gambia, a small nation located on the coast of western Africa.
“This includes activities like developing high courts rules and providing ethics trainings, providing tech solutions — a case management system, for example — improving human resources and communication with the public,” Zaremba said.
He said this work is part of a later stage of peacebuilding, following nonviolence campaigns and negotiations.
“You’ll notice that these countries all experience a nonviolent social movement that sparked a transition in democracy within the past 10 years, and I think that ABA’s programming is necessary to support the development of institutions to solidify democratic gains,” Zaremba said.
Another ROLI program Zaremba ran combined strategic litigation, a type of legal advocacy used to publicize an issue, and activist organizing to combat a discriminatory law in Ghana.
Zaremba said this program underscored the opportunity for collaboration between nonviolence and rule of law initiatives.
“When we started working in Ghana, we knew that just simply recruiting 25 lawyers, having them attend a few trainings, wasn’t going to work,” Zaremba said. “We needed to work with activists and movement leaders to ensure that both the lawyers and the movement leaders could come together and co-strategize and reinforce each other’s work.”
Zaremba said that after six years working in Sudan, the outbreak of a devastating civil war in April 2023 proved personally taxing, but added that the Sudanese-led effort to continue progressing toward peace reassures him.
“Within just a few months we were already reprogramming, and really it was Sudanese-led,” Zaremba said. “And that is what gave me hope, because ultimately we’re supporting their efforts.”
“I think in all the places we were working, to see the resilience of our local partners, that’s really what drives our work,” Zaremba added.
