Got Strategy? How About a Grand Strategy?

Grand Strategy is a plan of action to achieve the major or overall goals of your movement. It’s different than campaign-level strategy, or strategy for specific nonviolent actions (which should include dates, times, location, weather, people, contingency plans, signage, etc. and so forth.) Grand Strategy is a broad view of the arc of the movement. It might be as simple as a couple of sentences, such as, “remove the dictator from power through mass noncooperation when he steals the next election” or “Use nonviolent actions such as strikes and boycotts to non-cooperate with Corporation X until living wages are assured”.

Why is this important? Crafting a grand strategy can help your movement come to consensus about the goals and about the means of achieving those goals. It helps to keep the focus of the movement clear. For example, a grand strategy that says, “Change the government from a dictatorship to a democracy using a series of nonviolent campaigns to remove the pillars of support and society away from cooperation with the regime” is quite different than, “change the government from a dictatorship to an oligarchy using guns and militia to murder the opposition groups.”

Think about the movements you’re a part of … what does their grand strategy appear to be? Do they have one? Do you agree with it? If not, how might you approach a grand strategy for your movement? These are important questions to ask yourself and your movement colleagues.

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Did the Dandelion Insurrection novel have a grand strategy? You bet! It’s on page 49. How else could the movement have organized a leader-full structure that could self-organize effectively without knowing their shared goals and the means of achieving them!? Even fictional movements like The Dandelion Insurrection benefit from having a grand strategy to help them oust a not-so-hidden corporate dictatorship.