Educational Institute
Preventing Violence Now is Offering
Month-Long Courses for Spring 2026, on Saturdays, 1:00-2:30 p.m. ET
Register Now!
HOW TO PREVENT POLITICAL VIOLENCE
Course Description: These courses, taught by world-renowned teachers, weave together cutting-edge knowledge with eternal wisdom to offer a deep, practical framework for understanding—and preventing—political violence. Rather than treating violence as an isolated eruption, we trace its roots across the full spectrum of human experience, from the inner life of individuals to the structures that shape societies. At the individual level, participants explore psychological and biological precursors to political violence: how identities are formed, how fear and threat hijack cognition, and how ordinary minds can be pulled toward radicalization.
Building outward, participants explore sociological and anthropological perspectives on how cultural narratives, social identities, and group dynamics shape the conditions under which political violence emerges and persists. Participants will examine how myths of belonging and exclusion, pride and humiliation, can either bind communities together or push them toward conflict. Political science and economics address how polarization, institutional design, governance quality, rule of law, and incentive systems that reward violence or make peace possible influence the likelihood of violence and the effectiveness of prevention policies. Throughout, the course emphasizes evidence-based strategies for deescalation, nonviolent intervention, community resilience, and structural reform, highlighting the interplay between individual agency and broader social systems in preventing violence and sustaining peace.
These courses aim to help equip ordinary people to resist fascism—defined as mental pathology in politics—from a deeper and more durable place. Lasting change is not driven by force alone, but by disciplined minds grounded in character. Indian independence activist Mohandas Gandhi, who helped bring down the British Empire, understood nonviolence as a demanding inner practice—a lifelong training of the self. American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., who helped end Jim Crow laws, insisted: “Intelligence plus character … is the goal of true education.” South African anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela, who helped end racial segregation to become the first president and “Father of the Nation,” stated: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
COURSE TOPICS
February 2026—Course I: The Individual Context of Political Violence
This course begins where all political violence ultimately takes root: the human mind and body. Drawing on biology, psychology, and symbolic (spiritual) meaning-making, participants will explore how fear, threat perception, identity formation, trauma, and moral narratives can incline individuals toward violence—or toward restraint. Approaching political violence as a public health challenge rather than a moral failing, the course emphasizes prevention over panic, clarity over confusion. Learners gain tools to recognize early warning signs of radicalization, cultivate mental resilience, and strengthen the inner capacities required for nonviolent restraint. The focus is not only on understanding violence, but on cultivating the inner conditions that make peace possible.
March 2026—Course II: The Social Context of Political Violence
This course examines how social forces transform private grievances into collective violence. Using sociological, anthropological, and political-economic perspectives, participants analyze how identity, belonging, recognition, and power shape political conflict. The course explores how cultural narratives, historical memory, inequality, and exclusion fuel phenomena such as terrorism, civil wars, revolutions, coups, riots, state repression, insurgencies, and genocide. Rather than treating these as distant or exceptional events, the course reveals the everyday social mechanisms through which violence becomes normalized—and how those same mechanisms can be redirected toward cohesion, dignity, and shared power.
April 2026—Course III: Structural and Existential Violence
This course confronts forms of violence that are often invisible precisely because they are normalized. Examining relative poverty as one of the deadliest expressions of political violence, participants explore how economic deprivation, environmental destruction, and institutional neglect shorten lives and erode futures. The course situates these harms within a planetary context, asking what it means to live in an era of ecological crisis and nuclear risk: “one world or none.” Psychological inquiry into collective despair, denial, and suicidality is paired with studies of collective renewal, moral imagination, and global solidarity. The central question is: how do societies choose between self-annihilation and transformation?
May 2026—Course IV: Solutions to Political Violence
The final course turns knowledge into action. Drawing on public health models of prevention, participants learn what reduces political violence with the greatest impact, at population level: institutional design, economic inclusion, community resilience, and societal healing. Also, participants learn how they can empower themselves at the personal level, not as powerless observers, but as informed agents capable of forging a more peaceful political culture—through collective responsibility, public education, therapy for humanity, and a new consciousness.
Optional reading material to be distributed before each class.
How to Register: Students can sign up here for one month at a time (at $100), or for the four-month series billed monthly) and earn a certificate at the end. Limited scholarships are available (students can apply by “replying” to this message with a one-paragraph statement on why they need the scholarship and what they hope to get out of the courses).
Sample Class: A sample class was offered on December 13, 2025, which can be viewed here:
Instructors:
Bandy Lee, M.D., M.Div.
Bandy Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist and a leading expert on violence. Formerly at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School, she now serves with Harvard’s Program in Psychiatry and the Law. She has advised the World Health Organization on global violence reduction and is author of Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures.
James Gilligan, M.D.
James Gilligan is a pioneering psychiatrist whose work revolutionized violence prevention and transformed prison mental health. Leading Harvard-based teams, he reduced prison homicides and suicides to zero for sustained periods and helped spark the “Boston Miracle” in youth violence reduction. He later led award-winning research in the San Francisco jails and authored Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Preventing Violence.
James Vrettos, Ph.D.
James Vrettos is a sociologist and criminologist whose work integrates scholarship, activism, and spiritual inquiry. Educated at Columbia, he has published widely on violence, deviance, and transformative justice. He taught for decades at John Jay College and Yeshiva University and helped organize early protests against New York City’s Stop-and-Frisk policies.
Special guest lecturers to be announced.
You can now register for the above important and timely public course series here!