The Privilege Problematic in International Nonviolent Accompaniment’s Early Decades Peace Brigades International Confronts the Use of Racism

Peace Brigades International was one of the pioneers of international nonviolent protective accompaniment. In its first decades, however, it largely fielded un-uniformed teams made up of white citizens from influential European countries, the United States, Canada, and Australia. In doing so, it engaged and partly relied upon racist and classist constructions of interntationality in order to protect local activists under threat of political violence. This study documents and analyzes how individual PBI members and the organization itself confronted this uncomfortable reality—what I am calling the privilege problematic—in its first fifteen years. Four representative schools of thought present within PBI are identified and analyzed by way of thick descriptions. The search for final resolution to the privilege problematic in international accompaniment work is quixotic since one can never operate completely outside the prevailing dynamics of race and privilege that still permeate the social and political systems within which accompaniment is applied. Thus the early struggles with privilege by a founding organization take on added historical and analytical significance.