Martin Arnold (clergyman, 1946)

Martin Arnold (* 1946 ) is a German peace researcher and Protestant pastor i. R.

biography

Martin Arnold was born in 1946 on the Lower Rhine and grew up in the Hunsrück. In 1966 he volunteered for the German Armed Forces and began his career as an officer with a tank company. After 13 months, however, he decided to consciously live as a Christian and refused to do military service. He studied Protestant theology in Bethel / Bielefeld and Heidelberg, was vicar in Bielefeld and in 1977 he became pastor of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland in Leverkusen . From 1978 to 2010 he worked as a vocational school pastor in Essen, where he was released for several years for peace research in 2004. At the University of Marburg from 1999 to 2005, as a lecturer and member of the Marburg Center for Conflict Research, he held seminars on goodness in the Peace and Conflict Research course. In 2010 he was at the University of Siegen to Dr. phil. PhD.

Arnold is a member of the International Federation of Reconciliation - German Branch eV and founding member of the Federation for Social Defense.

Commitment to peace and the environment

In 1980, Martin Arnold founded the Essen regional group “ Living Without Armaments ”, which, together with other groups at the Essen Peace Forum, was committed to opposing so-called rearmament and published information on war and peace. In 1981 an action alliance, which started out from the Ohne-Armung-Leben-Gruppe, succeeded in driving out the exhibition “Your Army”, which had been regularly presented up to then, from Essen through actions and appeals to the Essen politicians, and to show an exhibition on social defense. The decision to refuse taxes for the military for reasons of conscience and to withhold part of his tax payment led Arnold in several steps to the Federal Constitutional Court in order to sue for the "recognition of reasons of conscience for the refusal to pay taxes for killing machines". The fee of 1,000 D-Marks, which the court demanded in 1993 after a change in the law for processing the lawsuit, prompted another action: Thousands of supporters transferred pennies to the court; more than 7,000 Deutschmarks were raised in this way. The lawsuit, however, was not accepted.

In 1985 Arnold and Reinhard Egel-Völp initiated the ecumenical campaign “Taxes on Plowshares”, which he headed until 1995. The aim of this action is that the churches give their employees the opportunity to refuse the part of their taxes used for armaments, and that they support the refusal of war taxes in the same way as the refusal to do military service with arms. “Taxes on Plowshares” is part of the Peace Tax Network , which received the 1993 Aachen Peace Prize.

In the 1990s, Arnold twice took part in civil disobedience actions against nuclear weapons at EUCOM (European Command Center of the US Armed Forces) in Stuttgart. In 1995, the action in which the EUCOMmunity group cut open the fence of the US headquarters and held a peace festival against nuclear weapons resulted in a fine of 1000 D-Marks for Arnold. In 1997 he was sentenced to 15 daily sentences for cutting open fences and entering the premises.

Since 2010 Martin Arnold has been involved in ways for Essen , in the Round Environment Table in Essen and in the Citizens' Initiative Network , an association of seven groups in the Ruhr area that are committed to traffic. The founding of the Mobility ~ Werk ~ Stadt goes back to his initiative, in which citizens work together with traffic experts as well as people from politics, administration and business to develop proposals for a new mobility concept for the Ruhr area.

Scientific research into the power of goodness

Martin Arnold has been a volunteer at the Institute for Peace Work and Nonviolent Conflict Resolution IFGK, a network of scientists who are committed to nonviolence, social justice and the preservation of livelihoods, since 1997. Arnold organized several study days there.

In 1998, together with people from peace research and peace movements, he founded the Gütekraft working group. Its aim is to scientifically research the background to the successes of Mohandas K. Gandhi , Martin Luther King and other non-violent actors and to disseminate the results. Between 1997 and 2005 Arnold held several seminars on benevolence / nonviolence as a lecturer at the Philipps University of Marburg in the Peace and Conflict Studies course. He supported the conception, creation and publication of the first scientific study on the power of goodness: Conflict transformation through the power of goodness by Burkhard Bläsi (2001).

In 2010 he received his doctorate in Faculty 1 at the University of Siegen . The aim of his 1000-page study The Effectiveness of Nonviolent Practice: Central Conflict Management Concepts in an Intercultural Comparison was to work out the success factors of concepts of nonviolent action: How can people or groups of people who are willing to use violence effectively counteract without using violence? Why can people successfully take action against oppression, exploitation or other serious grievances in a peaceful way? By comparing the concepts of Hildegard Goss-Mayr , Mohandas K. Gandhi and Bart de Ligt , who were able to achieve significant successes with their non-violent approach, Arnold shows that there are far-reaching similarities that justify an elementary concept of goodness to speak that can be used at all levels of society, regardless of the religion and worldview of those involved, in order to reduce grievances in a peaceful way.

Publications

• Explore kindness. Minden 1999 (together with Gudrun Knittel; text online)
• Power of goodness - Satjagrah: theorem guiding action on the path to reconciliation. 2001, in: Hummel, Hartwig (Ed.): Genocide - Approaches in the Science of Peace. Series of publications of the Working Group for Peace and Conflict Research eV (AFK), Volume XXVIII, pp. 206–220
• Power of goodness (Satjagrah): topic for peace and conflict research. 2001 IFGK Working Paper No. 16
• Power of kindness - on the way to reconciliation. 2001, in: non-violent action, issue 127, pp. 6-14
• What does goodness research investigate? 2003, IFGK Working Paper No. 18
• ... still learning from Gandhi? - Civil resistance, non-violence, kindness. In: Wissenschaft und Frieden, Issue 3/2004, pp. 22-25
• Kindness and tyranny. In: ArcheForum, issue 94/95, autumn / winter 2004, pp. 26-27
• Goodness. An impact model of active nonviolence according to Hildegard Goss-Mayr, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Bart de Ligt. With a foreword by Johan Galtung . 2011 Baden-Baden.
• Kindness - Hildegard Goss-Mayr's Christian nonviolence. 2011 Overath.
• Power of benevolence - Gandhi's Satyagraha. 2011 Overath.
• Kindness - Bart de Ligt's humanistic Geestelijke Weerbaarheid. 2011 Overath.
• From nonviolence to goodness. 2012 Berlin. In: Civil Disobedience and Nonviolent Action in the Movements. About the relationship between theory and practice . Published on behalf of the Federal Social Defense Agency by Christine Schweitzer , Aphorisma-Verlag, Kleine Texts 51, pp. 23–36 - Online: http://www.martin-arnold.eu/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ 2012-1223vNonviolence zuG% C3% BCtekraft.pdf

Web links

• Literature by and about Martin Arnold in the catalog of the German National Library