Joan Valerie Bondurant (1918–2006) was an American political scientist and former spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II.^[1] She is best known as the author of Conquest of Violence: The Ghandian Philosophy of Conflict (1958), a book on Gandhian political philosophy.

Early life and intelligence work

Bondurant was born on 16 December 1918 in Great Bend, Kansas.^[1][2] She was gifted in the piano, and graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in music.^[1]

When World War II broke out, she learned Japanese, and was sent to work for the OSS in India, arriving in New Delhi in May, 1944.^[3]: 189

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).^[4] She then published Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (1958), a widely reviewed and influential book on Gandhian politics.^[5][6][7]

Later, she took a job teaching at University of the Pacific.^[1]

Her collection of personal and research papers was given to the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation of River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester in 2012 and was opened to researchers in 2015.^[8]

Selected works

• Bondurant, Joan V. (1988). Conquest of violence: the Gandhian philosophy of conflict (New Revised ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691022819. OCLC 17385168.
  • Bondurant, Joan V. (1958). Conquest of violence: the Gandhian philosophy of conflict (1st ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. OCLC 154176074.
• Fisher, Margaret Welpley; Joan V. Bondurant (1956). The Indian experience with democratic elections. Berkeley, CA: University of California. OCLC 989639.
• Fisher, Margaret Welpley; Joan V. Bondurant (1956). Indian approaches to a socialist society. Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, University of California. OCLC 845127212.
• Bondurant, Joan V. (1946). Sketches of India, with forty-one photographic illustrations. Ann Arbor, MI: Craft Press. OCLC 4579134.