Rebecca Subar - When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice between Dialogue and Resistance

Rebecca Subars rich personal background and distinguished career advising political negotiators, organization builders, and movement strategists have positioned her as one of the worlds leading voices on conflict management. Here Subar combines profound insights from both practitioners and theoreticians, offering her readers invaluable paradigms on conflict transformation. When to Talk and When to Fight is the book many of us having been waiting for!

Saed Atshan, associate professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, Swarthmore College

With wit and humor, Rebecca Subar has written a book for aspiring social change advocates that eases the way into predicaments over whether to talk or to fight. With a storytellers savvy and drawing from deep practical experience, Subar offers nuanced consideration of unsettled questions on strategies for building social power and sensitively probes the role of values in political conflict. With new tools and models to face the challenges of our times, When to Talk and When to Fight is both an ideal for book clubs and group study in organizations and a guide for emergent campaigns to dismantle injustices.

Mary Elizabeth King, PhD., professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, University for Peace (a UN affiliate), and Distinguished Rothermere American Institute Fellow, University of Oxford

This is an emotionally and intellectually engaging masterpiece about lovers and fighters. It makes clear that the defining connection between talking and fighting is that the fight for policy change and passionate dialogue must both exist to change a narrative of trauma and injustice. This is a must-read.

Shawanna Vaughn, anti-violence and criminal justice activist, Silent Cry Inc.

As we face growing ecological, economic, and political crises, we need to know how to use all the available tools to create changeresistance and organizing, as well as dialogue and negotiation. When to Talk and When to Fight provides essential wisdom about how to deploy the right approach at the right time.

Mitch Chanin, cofounder of the Jewish Dialogue Group, climate justice organizer with 350 Philly

A beautiful, compelling, and timely approach to moving through conflict and building deep relationship to create change. For todays leaders navigating constant conflict, this book is an essential tool to help reach a future filled with liberation and connection.

Rev. Darlene Nipper, CEO, Rockwood Leadership Institute

When to Talk and When to Fight brilliantly bridges the worlds of bargaining table negotiation and social movement power building. Rebecca Subar creates an original framework for understanding why the two approaches are often in tension with one another and howwhen coordinated skillfullythey can be used together. A writer who is both a peacemaker and provocateur, Subar fills her book with illuminating stories and narrates with a wonderfully engaging personal voice, making the reading at once absorbing and enlightening.

Mark Engler, coauthor (with Paul Engler) of This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century (Nation Books, 2016)

In When to Talk and When to Fight, Subar argues against black-and-white binaries and promotes the validity of different strategies, depending on the mix of personal and community styles, principles and values, structural obstacles and biases, and the power dynamics between the opposing parties in a constantly churning and contradictory society. Subars style is engaging and challenging, a smart how-to book that is grounded in a deep personal understanding of social struggle and political advocacy.

Dr. Alice Rothchild, author of Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine (Just World Books, 2017)

Rebecca Subars book is a powerful and important exploration of the tensions between challenging unjust centers of power and negotiating our terms of victory. This book has forced me to ask tough questions about both the social justice strategies I am comfortable withand the strategies I need to get more comfortable with to be the most effective human rights advocate possible.

Sunjeev Bery, executive director, Freedom Forward

What makes this work so potent is that it is informed by Subars daily work as strategic advisor to leading social change groups and coalitions across the US. Her real-life experience as a conflict management practitioner in this time of profound racial upheaval makes When to Talk and When to Fight a timely guide for how we consider what strategies to use to liberate us from centuries-old systemic injustice and when.

Amadee Braxton is president of the Leeway Foundation, host of Solutions on WURD Radio, and a senior partner at Dragonfly Partners

The Strategic Choice between Dialogue and Resistance

Rebecca Subar

Graphics by Rosi Greenberg

When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice between Dialogue and Resistance

Rebecca Subar

Graphics Rosi Greenberg

This edition 2021 PM Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 9781629638362 (print)

ISBN: 9781629638522 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934729

Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com

Cover illustration by Rosi Greenberg

Interior design by briandesign

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PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Printed in the USA.

by Esteban Kelly

by Douglas Stone

To Nava and Yonah

To everything there is a time, and for every pursuit a season A time to throw stones and a time to gather stones A time of war and a time of peace

Ecclesiastes

I swear its not too late

Pete Seeger

Esteban Kelly

Life in the United States is starkly unjust. We fight our way through an economy still fueled by the aftershocks of chattel slavery run atop a massive land grab from Indigenous people. Like Rebecca, I work with communities that have a clear vision of how life here can be different. Many have been fighting back and fighting to advance that vision for generations. The groups Rebecca and I tend to guide mobilize people to build power in pursuit of such change. Rebecca calls these communities of fighters.

Typically, when I facilitate an internal strategy session or an anti-racism training for a group of fightersfolks I usually refer to as organizerswe dont do much fighting at all. We take pains to build virtual containers designed to hold hard work. We take the folks assembled in the room and focus on solidarity with workers and exploited groups building power in their communities and across the world. When theyre effective, groups gathered to fight for power spend most of their time and energy building relationships, nurturing liberatory communities, healing from persistent trauma, strategizing together, devising plans, solving problems, and sorting out our internal struggles. In short, we listen, we think, and we talk. We have that versatility of skills woven deep within our culture.