Stellan Vinthagen is a professor of Sociology and academic-activist. Vinthagen is the inaugural chair in the study of nonviolent direct action and civil resistance and director of the Resistance Studies Initiative at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. He is also a researcher in his native Sweden in the Department of Social and Behavioral Studies. , University West and at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, where he directs the Resistance Studies Programme. He is an academic advisor to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) and has a PhD in Peace and Development Research from the University of Gothenburg (2005).

Vinthagen investigates resistance, power, social movements, nonviolent action, and social change. He has written or edited ten books, the latest of which is A Theory of Nonviolent Action: How Civil Resistance Works (ZED Books, 2015). Vinthagen is also the author or co-author of numerous articles, e.g. “Sovereign power, disciplinary power and biopower: resist what power with what resistance?” 2014 (with M. Lilja) in Journal of Political Power; and “Dimensions of everyday resistance: an analytical framework”, Critical Sociology 2014 (with A. Johansson), and “Legal mobilization and resistance movements as social constituents of international law”, Finnish Yearbook of International Law 2013.

Having been active in many different social movements since 1980 (environmental, immigrant rights, anti-arms trade, peace, Palestinian solidarity, etc.), he has participated in over 30 non-violent civil disobedience actions. He has been an educator, organizer and activist in several countries, and has been in prison for more than a year in Sweden, Germany and the United Kingdom, among other nations. Between 1986 and 2000 he was one of the key organizers of the European Plowshares Movement, a movement that carries out direct, non-violent disarmament actions at military bases or weapons factories.