Gene Sharp – greenandprofitable.com

5 Ways Nonviolent Resistance Works BETTER!

Check out this TEDx talk by nonviolence researcher Erica Chenoweth. Chenoweth was originally quite hostile to nonviolent social change movements–until her own statistical analyses showed them (and us) that nonviolent resistance was far more effective than violent insurrection. Those who used it were more likely to achieve their goals, even “impossible” goals like unseating a government. AND they were more likely to achieve lasting change that didn’t just swing back with the next change in government. In fact, successful nonviolent revolutions were 15 percent more likely to avoid relapsing into civil war.

This validates what people like Stephen Zunes, George Lakey, Barbara Deming, MLK, Gandhi (also not a pacifist in principle, but totally committed on the strategy, BTW), my late friends Dave Dellinger and Wally and Juanita Nelson, Harvey Wasserman, Anna Gyorgy, and many others have said for decades.

I think I can shed some light on why this is true:
1) You can’t outgun the state. They have tanks, WMDs, and lots of person-power. Engaging in violence is letting them choose the battlefield and the tools. You probably can’t outgun the Oath Keepers either, unless you ARE the state.

2) When the state attacks unarmed civilians, it has a jiu-jitsu effect of creating sympathy for those who are attacked (as is happening in Ukraine right now, and happened so dramatically in the US South in the 1950s and 60s). But when armed radicals attack the state, it creates support for the government, who can then marginalize and isolate the opposition as “terrorists”–and have an excuse to clamp down further on civil liberties.

3) When a government falls by force of arms, the conquerors want to make sure they aren’t taken out next. Thus, the pressure to become more dictatorial, which erodes popular support. I am old enough to remember when the Sandinistas, thugs like Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, and even the Iranian mullahs were welcomed as heroes by the local population, until they turned out to be just as vile as their predecessors, if not more. Some of my older mentors in my youth had watched the same pattern in the USSR, first under Lenin and then under the even crueler thumb of Stalin.

4) But when instead of fissioning society apart, a government seeks to actively unite people across the spectrum and build a better society for all, they can create new institutions that are nearly universally seen as working for the people, rather than the power structure. Such government initiatives typically draw their inspiration from long-term organizing by nonviolent people’s movements. I just returned from South Africa, and one of the people I met there had been a white soldier defending apartheid. Like everyone else I met, black or white, he had enormous respect and admiration for Nelson Mandela, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the healing/unifying process after nearly 50 years of official apartheid (1948-94) and ingrained racism that dated back decades earlier. If this man, who carried a gun to protect white privilege, can embrace unity oriented black-majority governments, there is hope for all of us.

5) Nonviolent resistance is a shape-shifter. The forces of reaction can never fully predict how it will play out: what tactics and strategies will be invented, deployed, reinvented, and redeployed. It is extremely adaptable to circumstances. Decades ago, Gene Sharp codified a list of 198 nonviolent tactics. That was before the pandemic, and even before the Internet came into common use. A more recent list compiled by the King Center that continues the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. raises the number to 250. From the Old Testament refusal of the midwives Shifrah and Puah to carry out Pharaoh’s command to kill Hebrew baby boys–the first recorded act of civil disobedience that I’m aware of–to the creative use of vehicle caravans (often with only one or two occupants) as a way of demonstrating power and taking up space in the early days of the pandemic when it was unsafe to gather closely in the streets, nonviolent practitioners are natural tactical re-inventors.

Chenoweth points out one more thing: when open protest becomes too risky because of repression, concentration tactics like mass demonstrations may be augmented or replaced by dispersive tactics of quiet resistance (such as Ukrainians replacing road navigation signs with signage urging the Russian invaders to f themselves) that allow even elders, children, and people with disabilities to subvert the authoritarians.

And I personally have experienced the power of creative nonviolence over and over again, taking dozens of forms in movements or actions I participated in (and sometimes helped organize) and in moments of private personal action, including my mom castigating our landlord in front of 9-year-old me because she felt he was unwilling to rent to Blacks, my own one-person witness after the US bombed Libya. Some of these put me at personal risk, including standing with a small group of protestors in front of a much larger group that was hostile to us and probably included a number of people carrying firearms; in others, I took comfort in the strength of numbers. In all of them, I was convinced that nonviolence is more effective than violence in shaking up the power structure, and I’ve been part of winning campaigns (including, among others, the 1977 Seabrook Occupation and the 1999-2000 Save the Mountain campaign) often enough to see that truth validated.

What Role Can Nonstrategic Mass Movements Play in Social Change?

Are big protests a waste of time unless they’re part of an overall strategic plan? Nonviolent social change theorist George Lakey and I have been discussing this.

After my February post about Lakey’s idea that DT is creating enormous opportunities for social change workers, I got an interesting response from George (which I only just saw, thanks to a quirk in the WordPress interface). Please go read the original post and his response.

I believe my settings close comments after two weeks, and I couldn’t find a way to turn that off temporarily for this one post). So just to make sure there’s a way to keep the dialogue going, I’m posting my response here, as a new post, starting just below:

Marching at the Women's March on Washington with my wife and children — Marching at the Women’s March on Washington with my wife and children (from left: son-in-law Bobby, daughter Alana, wife Dina, me, son Rafael)

I agree with most of what you’d laid out here, George and certainly the key kernel that mass action makes the most sense as part of a well-thought-out and multidimensional campaign. And yet, I’m more optimistic than you about the power of a one-off mass action to build momentum for change. It has to be sustained, of course—but it can play a key role.

My own involvement with the Movement began because I attended a mass rally about Vietnam, at age 12 (1969). One of the speakers said something that was life-changing for me. But it was not until I was in high school that I began to realize that the real work of social change happened in the meetings to plan those marches, more than the marches themselves—and to participate as other than a drone showing up to other people’s events.
The reason all those no-nuke Alliances sprang up was because of what we did at Seabrook, a mass action.We inspired many other groups around the country to borrow our strategy, process, tactics, and even nomenclature, to organize affinity groups as we did, to educate about the issues around nuclear power and the safe-energy alternatives, and to be trained in nonviolent civil disobedience. And the reason we heard about Three Mile Island in the news two years later when we hadn’t heard about the earlier accidents at Enrico Fermi, Browns Ferry, and elsewhere was because of this national/international mass movement that started at Seabrook. It was having thousands at the site and 1414 arrested that pushed the issue into America’s consciousness. The first two Seabrook occupations almost a year earlier, much tinier, had almost no impact outside the local area.
Occupy could have been much stronger with leadership and goals, I agree. But still the movement had a great deal of impact. Like Clam, some of its process innovations have become part of the Movement. You talk about those turned off by Occupy, but what I saw was a generation of young people who moved from inaction, maybe even apathy, to deep, personal, and highly inconvenient action. They made sacrifices for social change. And I think a lot of them moved into actual organizing after the camps closed.
The recent Women’s March had very little strategy behind it but sparked the immediate and clear message that resistance is mainstream, that DT does not represent normal, and that oh yes, there was something we could do. And of course, it provided yet another opportunity for DT to make a fool of himself saying ridiculous things about the protests. I don’t remember another time when nonviolent protests unscrewed the legs of legitimacy from a government less than one day old. And again, a lot of folks who had never done anything political went from the march to the meetings. The thousands of hives of the resistance were enormously strengthened by that unstrategic mass event.

I’m glad you brought up the business community. This is where I have very strategically placed most of my own organizing in recent years: showing that business can create meaningful social change, not out of guilt and shame but out of enlightened self-interest: the profit motive. This is the subject of my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, as well as my “Impossible is a Dare” talks. It’s the opposite of mass organizing: small groups and even one-to-one conversations.

So yes, let’s incorporate big protests into a wider strategic view, as the Civil Rights organizers did. Let’s read Alinsky and Gene Sharp, MLK and Gandhi, Barbara Deming and Dorothy Day, and of course, George Lakey. Let’s study the successes AND weaknesses of all these movements including Occupy, BLM, and the current resistance. And lets create strategies that keep the needle moving, both publicly and behind the scenes, toward the world we want. Outside of my social change work through my business, I’ve been focusing my own parts of the resistance on the amazing opportunity to get people who haven’t been talking to each other not just talking but supporting and acting in solidarity. I see this work—and especially the chances for Jews and Muslims to work together in solidarity—as deeply strategic based on seizing the moment where a conversation is much easier to have under the lens of both groups being under threat.

PS: George, I apologize for the late reply. WordPress only showed me your waiting comment last night. I approved it immediately but wanted to bring my much clearer early-morning thinking to my response. [end of my quoted response]

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