Nonviolent methodologies were used effectively for the first time by Gandhi in South Africa and later in the fight for independence against the British Empire in the early 1940s. Of course the ‘first time use’ of nonviolence does not mean that Gandhi was the first to use nonviolent methods, it means he was the first to give them a distinctive philosophical basis.

The aim of nonviolence is to reduce to the minimum the possible presence of violence in mankind and in human activities.