Vol. 16 arrived with work to do: published as a double issue, it marked the journal’s relocation to Texas State University at San Marcos and the formal beginning of Greg Moses’s editorship. It opened with a “Transitions” section — an editorial note explaining the handover from Barry Gan, who had received the journal from founding editor Ha Poong Kim, followed by three vision statements from Gan, Sanjay Lal, and Moses reflecting on what the journal should mean and where it should go. Gan’s statement argued that what distinguished the journal’s exemplars was their uncompromising refusal of violence as a means to peace — that using violent means implicitly endorses a principle opposed to peace, moving us further from Kant’s kingdom of ends and King’s beloved community, and that The Acorn should continue examining these questions with philosophical rigor. Lal’s statement called for philosophy to hold a prominent place within Peace Studies alongside its empirical work, arguing that questions about moral worth, the rationality of nonviolent response, and the cultivation of nonviolent character are precisely where philosophical expertise is most needed — and that the journal’s exemplars themselves demonstrate philosophy’s indispensable connection to practical action. Moses’s statement cast the journal’s mission in explicitly epistemological terms: philosophical concepts must remain open to choice, and The Acorn is devoted to inquiry that actively chooses in the direction of peace, welcoming divergent definitions, new logics, and conceptual paths “we never imagined.” The issue also introduced the renamed Gandhi, King, Chavez, Addams Society (GKCAS), adding Cesar Chavez and Jane Addams to the society’s roster of exemplars, and marked the new subtitle: Philosophical Studies in Pacifism and Nonviolence. Two bibliographies — Marilyn Fischer’s essential bibliography of Jane Addams’s writings on peace, and Orosco’s bibliography of Cesar Chavez — signaled the expanded scope of the journal’s intellectual community.
The features section ranged across striking terrain. Orosco contributed a substantial article, “Abolition as a Morally Responsible Response to Riots,” drawing on King’s and Chavez’s responses to structural violence — prompted in part by the 2015 Baltimore uprising — to argue that a genuine nonviolent response to urban unrest begins not with moral condemnation of rioters but with interrogating the economic and cultural conditions that generate uprisings in the first place. Gan offered a version of his keynote address for the United Nations celebration of the International Day of Non-Violence (October 2, 2016), hosted by the Permanent Mission of India to the U.N., titled “Seeds of Duty,” which returned to Gandhi’s insistence that duties precede rights — that a politics grounded in duty toward others is more generative than one centered on rights claims. Gail Presbey reported from the 2016 World Social Forum in Montreal, where participants from across the Global South debated decolonizing knowledge, capitalist extraction, and the limits of the WSF’s own consensus model.
The Author Meets Critics forum centered on Predrag Cicovacki’s book Gandhi’s Footprints, with critics Sanjay Lal and Carlo Filice. Cicovacki opened by framing a central paradox: Gandhi is universally revered but rarely emulated. His resolution — that Gandhi’s vision can be followed without being imitated, particularly his insistence on spiritual grounding within a materialistic world — was pressed by both critics. Lal argued that the transformative depth of Gandhi’s spiritual aspirations should not be softened into conventional wisdom. Filice asked how Cicovacki’s account could handle the tension between Gandhi’s commitment to unified reality and the apparent distinction between spirit and matter, and whether Gandhi’s nonviolence could accommodate principled exceptions. Cicovacki replied by turning to Tagore’s influence on Gandhi.
Three book reviews rounded out the issue. Tom Hastings reviewed War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing (ed. Lawrence Rosenwald), praising it as the essential text for courses in American peace history and noting its central revelation: that the United States has a long, pluralistic, and largely hidden tradition of antiwar thought stretching from pre-colonial Indigenous peacemakers through the present — far richer and more racially diverse than standard history texts acknowledge. Sanjay Lal reviewed Anuradha Veeravalli’s Gandhi in Political Theory: Truth, Law, and Experiment, finding that Veeravalli makes a significant contribution by demonstrating how Gandhi’s non-dualistic framework — his insistence on the unity of means and ends, theory and practice — offers a rigorous alternative to the post-Enlightenment dualisms that underlie modern violence, though Lal presses on tensions in Veeravalli’s handling of Gandhi’s asceticism and brahmachari experiments. Court Lewis reviewed Sara Trovato’s Mainstreaming Pacifism: Conflict, Success, and Ethics, whose central argument — that Machiavelli’s concept of effettualità can be redeployed to show that “lower” effectual forms such as dialogue, ideals, and vulnerability are just as politically effective as fraud and force — Lewis found both original and strategically useful, since it defends pacifism on pragmatic grounds that do not require prior ideological commitment from the reader. The issue closed with an afterword written in the weeks following the 2016 U.S. election, connecting Gandhi, King, Chavez, and Addams to the political urgency of the moment and affirming that this heritage of nonviolent resistance remained “eminently worthy of study and reflection.”
The Acorn Journal 