The Bhagavad-Gita is composed, forming the central part of the epic poem Mahabharata, which, through the metaphor of warfare, teaches detachment and freedom of the spirit.

In the episode of the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel according to Matthew, Christ condemns the law of retaliation and its doctrine of “an eye for an eye”, encouraging people not to resist and to “turn the other cheek” to the aggressor who strikes the left one.

In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Étienne de La Boétie argues that the monarch’s power depends on the population’s willingness to obey. He supports non-violent and disobedient resistance, which should lead to the fall of tyrants.

American pastor Adin Ballou, close to Christian anarchists, describes slavery as “a crime against humanity and a sin before God” and advocates non‑violent abolitionism.

In Resistance to Civil Government, the American abolitionist philosopher Henry David Thoreau calls for disobedience and protest through passive resistance.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi settles with his family in South Africa. There he confronts racism and oppression. In the same year, Leo Tolstoy publishes The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a work in which Gandhi faces the foundations of what he will later call non-violence.

During a protest in Johannesburg against the registration of the Indian population, Gandhi calls for the application of satyagraha. Together with activists who adopt his method of civil disobedience, he is imprisoned and beaten. He becomes a major figure in the struggle against apartheid.

Gandhi and Tolstoy begin a correspondence that will end with the Russian writer’s death the following year.

Indian writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. A fervent supporter of India’s independence like Gandhi, he nevertheless diverges from Gandhi’s nationalist ideas.

To translate the Sanskrit word ahimsa, Gandhi coins the term “non-violence”.

Gandhi leads an act of tax resistance against Indian salt, which only the British are authorised to produce and which they tax heavily. Over twenty-four days, he walks nearly 400 kilometres with seventy-eight satyagrahis to denounce colonial injustice regarding this essential commodity.

African-American activist Rosa Parks refuses to obey segregation rules and give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. A boycott of the bus company follows, led for more than a year by the pastor Martin Luther King Jr., marking the beginning of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Hundreds of thousands of supporters of equal civil rights march in Washington. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famous speech I Have a Dream. He is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

For the first time since the beginning of the conflict, American judges acquit pacifist activists opposed to the war in Vietnam.

The United Nations General Assembly declares 2 October the International Day of Non‑Violence.

French philosopher Jean-Marie Muller, a specialist on Gandhi and non-violence, publishes The Imperative of Disobedience, in which he presents the virtues of acts of resistance for democratic balance.

The international civil-disobedience movement Extinction Rebellion, which campaigns against climate collapse, is founded in the United Kingdom.