Joan Bondurant

Early life and intelligence work

Bondurant was born on 16 December 1918 in Great Bend, Kansas. She was gifted in the piano, and graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in music.

Scholarly career and later life While in India, she met Mahatma Gandhi, and became interested in his nonviolent approach to politics. Returning to the US, Bondurant obtained a doctoral degree in political science at the University of California, Berkeley (1952). She then published Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (1958), a widely reviewed and influential book on Gandhian politics.

Later, she took a job teaching at University of the Pacific.

Selected works