While many people may think of violence as the type of resistance that can truly create change, history has proven otherwise. Throughout the years, non-violent action has proven to be effective more often than not, as discussed by the Afghani Jamila Raqib in her Ted Talk. Raqib smartly chose to communicate with her audience through Ted Talks, since they are free, easily accessible and aren't time-consuming. In her speech, Raqib aims to convince her audience of the power of non-violent resistance by using different approaches such as sympathy to heighten their emotion, known figures to strengthen her argument, and evidence to appeal to their logic.
Starting off her speech, Raqib gains her audience's sympathy and establishes her credibility and authority by narrating some miserable episodes about her childhood. She appealed to her audience's sympathy by opening up about her past in Afghanistan and living in a battle field since she was only six months old. Raqib's credibility and authority were established seeing that she was born in a war zone and worked for 13 years as a teacher for controlling conflict through non-violent struggle for troubled people, giving her valid experience to talk about the subject. Not only does Raqib understand the importance of non-violent resistance but also comprehends how violence users feel due to the suffering she experienced during the soviet's invasion.
Raqib mentioned known figures, who succeeded in achieving political and social change through non-violent struggle, to strengthen her argument. The speaker briefly named Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who were the masters of nonviolent civil disobedience. Although Gandhi and Martin Luther King are most acknowledged for using non-violent resistance, Raqib assures that non-violent action has been used long before they popularized it. Raqib states that "most of the rights that we have today as women, minority, workers these rights weren't handed to us, they were won by people who fought for them and who sacrificed for them" (Raqib).
