Johnny J. Mack is a social entrepreneur and scholar-practitioner with expertise in the subject areas of peace, conflict, and social change and movements. He has traveled extensively throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, working in the fields of peace, development, conflict, and nonviolent social change.

Dr. Mack’s seminal work “After Confrontation, Then What?” challenges the putative logic of nonviolent social change theory and practice. Particularly, he rearticulates nonviolence beyond the traditional understanding of nonviolent struggle as principally, nonviolent resistance. Dr. Mack’s research includes extensive study of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s logic of nonviolence and the US Civil Rights Movement. He explicates Dr. King’s logic of nonviolence using King’s call to restructure the social edifice, and particularly its Triple Evils of poverty, racism and militarism, with a revolution of values that is effected through peaceable power. This framework articulates Dr. King’s peaceable power as direct, structural and cultural nonviolence with correlating strategic, conscientious, and cultural action correlates. Mack, thus, argues nonviolence is a meta-logic, with direct, structural, and cultural forms that counter-pose Johan Galtung’s seminal conflict and violence triangles. He constructs a counter-pose of violence and nonviolence as alternative paths of change as articulated in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 book Where do we go from Here, Chaos or Community?

Dr. Mack’s professional expertise includes serving as senior executive in healthcare, mortgage banking, community development, and nonprofit organizations. He is founding president of Communities Without Boundaries, International, a nongovernment nonprofit organization that works to build peace through development research, education, and technical assistance in under-privileged, conflict, and post-trauma-conflict communities around the globe. He also serves as president of the Drum Major Institute, a New York based NGO founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Atty. Harry Wachtel. He is a founding member of the board of directors of Realizing the Dream, Inc., with Ambassador Andrew Young, Martin Luther King, III, and William B. Wachtel. He founded the National Institute for Community Empowerment, Inc., a national intermediary in the community economic development field. Dr. Mack is also principal and managing partner of the Jonymak Group, LLC, a global research and consulting firm that works across sectors – private, public, and community – focusing on strategic, advisory, development, and public affairs services to business, government, and nonprofit organizations.

In addition to holding degrees in business and theology from Oakwood University, Dr. Mack is a certified public account. He is a senior advisor on domestic policy to Search for Common Ground and the Henry Hart Rice Fellow at the School for Conflict Analysis & Resolution at George Mason University in Virginia, where he earned both the masters and doctorate degrees in Conflict Analysis and Resolution.