Constructive Resilience: The Baha ´ ’ı ´ Response to Oppression by Michael Karlberg Against the backdrop of dramatic struggles for social change in the twentieth century, characterized by non-violent opposition and civil disobedience, the Baha ´’ı´ community of Iran has pursued a distinctively non-adversarial approach to social change under conditions of violent oppression. This non-adversarial model has received little attention in the literature on social change. This article therefore seeks to bring the model into focus by outlining the Baha ´’ı ´ community’s experience of oppression, by examining the principles that inform their collective response to oppression, by discussing the results of their response, and by deriving from this a set of heuristic insights that can guide further inquiry into the dynamics of peace and change. By the end of the twentieth century, a large body of literature had emerged exploring the theory and practice of non-violent resistance to oppression. This literature was derived from the writings and actions of influential figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the movements they led and inspired, and the deeper ethical and spiritual traditions from which they drew their inspiration. Against the backdrop of these dramatic twentieth-century struggles, the Baha ´ ’ı´ community in Iran was pursuing a distinctively non-adversarial response to violent oppression that has received comparatively little attention—despite being ‘‘one of the few documented cases of a minority that has managed to resist peacefully’’ a sustained and systematic campaign of genocidal intent. 1 For more than 160 years the Baha ´’ı´ community in Iran has been a target of recurrent waves of hostile propaganda and censorship, social ostracism and exclusion, denial of education, denial of employment, denial of due process before the law, property looting and destruction, government seizure of individual and collective assets, arson, PEACE & CHANGE, Vol. 35, No. 2, April 2010 Ó 2010 Peace History Society and Peace and Justice Studies Association 222