Strategy Is For Everyone – And So Is The Path Of Most Resistance

A Review by Rivera Sun

“When everyone knows how to plan, you start to get
strategic behavior.”

These words from Ivan Marovic serve as my mantra as I
facilitate trainings in strategy for nonviolent campaigns. When I met Marovic
at the James Lawson Institute in
2014, he impressed upon me that everyone should
understand strategy, not just a handful of campaign organizers or hardcore
activists. His experience in the leaderless movement of Serbia’s Otpor! showed him that when the
populace has a widespread working knowledge of basic strategic principles for
civil resistance, the chances of successful – and strategically sound –
campaigns increased.

Today in the United States, we are facing so many pressing
issues that the movement of movements could quadruple in size and we’d still be
scrambling to address them all.  What we
need isn’t just more hands-on-deck; it’s better strategy.

Fortunately, Marovic’s new book provides an excellent resource
for improving the strategic wisdom of our campaigns. I’ve been a resistance
manual junkie since before I wrote The Dandelion Insurrectionand its accompanying study
guide to making change. As a trainer,
I read everything that comes out on the market, for better or for worse. I
despise handbooks that limit citizen action to the song-and-dance routines of
calling senators, signing petitions, and donating to electoral campaigns. I
tear my hair out reading the innumerable books that talk only about protest
actions. I’m always on the lookout for manuals with a rigorous understanding of
the disruptive, non-cooperative, and visionary potentials of civil resistance.

Marovic’s highly pragmatic, exquisitely useful book, The
Path of Most Resistance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Planning Nonviolent Campaigns,
was published by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) this year. (A
downloadable pdf version has been made available
here.) As an activist and a trainer, I highly recommend this resource. It
is perfect for all of us who are working for change, designing a civil
resistance campaign, or training people to think strategically.

I have spent the past four years teaching people from all walks
of life two things: what is nonviolent struggle and how can we make it work for
our causes? Ivan Marovic’s new book guides the reader through a step-by-step
approach to figuring out the nuts-and-bolts of making change. He combines old
classics (like Spectrum of Allies and SWOT charts) with new understandings. He
offers new tools in integrated ways, showing you precisely how to take your
analysis work and plug it into a comprehensive framework for campaign design.

And he does it with a lot of humor and wisdom. 

“I identified a need in the field for a step-by-step guide
allowing individuals to break down a complex nonviolent resistance campaign
into a series of manageable steps. A comprehensive guide which would include
resources, lesson plans, tools, etc.” – Ivan Marovic said in a recent webinar
talk about the book.

As an appetizer to reading his book, I also recommend
watching the webinar
from his book launch. His introductory remarks include many gems of strategic
wisdom and several of the highly-illuminating slides are not in his book. In
addition to being an engaging speaker, one of Ivan Marovic’s gifts is boiling
down complex ideas in understandable – but not oversimplified – ways. He
compares strategy for nonviolent campaigns to cooking: if you’re a master chef
who knows your ingredients and the nuances of cooking, you can improvise. If
you’re like the rest of us, you might want to get to know the fine art of
cooking before you try to cater a 100-person dinner. Nonviolent struggle is an
equally complex field – with high stakes and a lot of risks – and when it comes
to planning campaigns, a lot of us don’t have much experience. Ivan Marovic’s
book is to activism what America’s Test Kitchen is to cooking: he distills
knowledge from thousands of tests and case studies into basic principles for us
to cook up change. And then he goes a step further and puts it into nuggets of
chapters that we can use as strategic planning exercise with our friends and
fellow change-makers.

Check it out. Try it out. Put this step-by-step guide into
practice. If you’re tired of going to the same old boring protests, this book
is for you. If you’re up against impossible odds, this book is for you. If you
have passion and no idea what you’re doing, this book is for you. Strategy is
for everyone . . . and so is The Path of
Most Resistance.

_________________

Author/Activist Rivera
Sun syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and
the sequel, The Roots of Resistance.
Website: http://www.riverasun.com