Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World

by Srdja Popovic

Serbia’s inflation was so bad that the price for two pounds of potatoes skyrocketed from four thousand dinars to seventeen billion in just one year. If that wasn’t enough, we were also at war with neighboring Croatia. And if you tried to speak out against the disastrous policies that led our economy to collapse and our security to wither away, you were arrested and beaten or worse. In 1992, I was a freshman biology student, and the future for us young Serbs looked very, very bleak.

It’s common for people launching nonviolent movements to cite Gandhi, say, or Martin Luther King, Jr., as their inspiration, but those guys, for all their many, many virtues, simply weren’t that hilarious. If you’re hoping to get a mass movement going within a very short span of time in the age of the Internet and other distractions, humor is a key strategy.

“Srdja,” Mohammed said bluntly, “we are all impressed with what happened in Serbia. But Egypt is very different. It can never happen there.” We weren’t fazed by Mohammed’s pessimism. “It can never happen here” is everybody’s first reaction, and I told Mohammed that I understood his doubts. The nonviolent activists in Georgia, I told him, had said the same thing when a bunch of young Serbs met them in Tbilisi just before they brought down their own dictatorship in 2003’s Rose Revolution, using Otpor!’s methods. And I had heard the same concerns raised in the Ukraine before Leonid Kuchma was toppled in the Orange Revolution in 2004, a year later in Lebanon on the eve of the Cedar Revolution, and three years after that in the Maldives, where pro-democracy activists ultimately deposed the country’s strongman. All of these revolutions were wildly successful, and all of them started with their organizers arguing that whatever happened in Serbia could never happen in their home countries.

The first step to building a successful movement, I told the Egyptians, was to get rid of the idea that whatever had happened somewhere else could never be replicated at home. This notion, I said, rested on two assumptions, one right and the other wrong. The first assumption—which is correct—is that every place is different, and that country A’s nonviolent movement can’t be copied and pasted onto country B. Even on my best days, I admitted to the Egyptians, I would never be able to motivate even a hundred Serbs to march with Mohammed and his April 6 movement for democracy in Cairo. Likewise, I would never be able to get a Saudi woman to mimic the winning techniques of the FEMEN protestors in Ukraine and flash her breasts at a rally for gender equality in Riyadh.

As an activist, you have two choices. The first is to do what Harvey Milk started out doing and seek to rally the people who already more or less believe in what you have to say. This is a great way for coming in tenth at anything. You’re always guaranteed a small and enthusiastic fan base—including your friends, your neighbors, and your grandma—who will support you no matter what. The beautiful thing about this method is that you always get to feel that you’re right and just and pure and good. The downside is that you never win. The other choice is much better and, surprisingly, not a lot more difficult. It requires listening and finding out what other people care about, and fighting your battles in that general vicinity. Milk, whose tenacity eventually got him elected to the San Francisco city council, realized that average straight people really didn’t care too much about the homosexual struggle for equal rights. That fight wasn’t going to be won on the merits of justice and equality alone. Milk needed to attack it from a different angle, and even though hard-core evangelical Christians across the country were using San Francisco’s gay community as a stand-in for all that was evil in America, Milk sought to stand up for his community by focusing on something that all San Franciscans lived in fear of: dog shit.

Remember, in a nonviolent struggle, the only weapon that you’re going to have is numbers.

If you ever visited the Maldives as a tourist, chances are that you landed at the main airport in the capital city, Malé, hopped on a puddle jumper, and then made your way straight to one of the hundred or so islands set aside for use as resorts. And because the regime depends on these resorts for most of its income, Gayoom and his goons made sure to keep them clean and trouble-free; the resorts, for example, remain the only place in the strictly Muslim Maldives where it’s legal to serve and drink alcohol.

Maldives had a well-earned reputation for brutality, enabled by a perpetual state of emergency and a license to imprison or beat whomever they wanted. Or worse: Gayoom’s goons excelled in devising creative and horrific punishments to visit on anyone who expressed a lick of criticism. Dissenters would be covered in coconut honey and left in the sands for the insects to devour, or handcuffed to palm trees and beaten or raped for hours, or locked inside corrugated metal sheds to bake in the stifling heat for years on some remote prison island. Opposition parties were forbidden, freedom of speech nonexistent. In this environment, opposing Gayoom hardly seemed possible, especially as the regime enjoyed a steady influx of tourism money.

As the highest point in the country is around nine feet, rising sea levels have always posed an existential threat to the Maldives, and people here knew that someday climate change was going to radically alter their lives. But that was something in the future, part of a long and slow process that would take place over decades. And yet, in a single instant, the Indian Ocean had washed half of the Maldives’ economy out to sea. Almost a quarter of the country’s inhabited islands were severely damaged. Ten percent of them were declared uninhabitable. Almost a full third of the population was affected by the devastation, and Gayoom knew that the aftermath of the tsunami wasn’t something he could handle on his own. He was going to have to appeal for international assistance.

If these guys wanted Assad gone, they couldn’t just count only on the young and the rich, or only on the poor and the peripheral. As we’ve learned from the Egyptians and the Maldivians, a revolution only picks up steam once two or more groups that have nothing to do with one another decide to join together for their mutual benefit.

If you’re up against David Beckham, Slobo said, you don’t want to meet him on the soccer field. You want to play him at chess. That’s where you can win. Taking up arms against a dictator is a silly way to face him down.

being nonviolent doesn’t mean that you’re not fighting hard. You just fight with other means, with other weapons.”

Not only can laughtivism break the fear and ferocious public image that cement an autocrat’s legitimacy, but it also serves to burnish the “cool” image of your movement. In Egypt, Mohammed Adel and his friends were great masters of the art of laughtivism. Humor quickly became a central part of their anti-Mubarak strategy.

airports are perfect microcosms of their societies, and if you study an airport closely enough, you’ll be able to learn a lot about the culture that built it.

as we learned in Serbia, the best way to overcome the fear of the unknown is with knowledge.

there’s always a way to make the bad guys pay.

In order to make oppression backfire, it pays to know which of the pillars of power you can use to bolster your case.

Harvey Milk, you’ll recall, finally won an election when he figured out that campaigning about quality-of-life issues would get many more people on his side than merely talking about the specific issues that interested primarily the gay community.

unity, in the end, is about much more than having everybody line up behind a particular candidate or issue. It’s about creating a sense of community, building the elements of a group identity, having a cohesive organization, leaving none of your men or women behind, and sticking to your values. It’s about doing plenty of things that make others feel as if your struggle is theirs as well. Often, it is about no more than holding hands in a crowded square or singing the right song. And it’s immeasurably important.

A mass demonstration, as anyone who has ever organized any successful campaign will tell you, is the last step you take, not the first. You urge the masses to march in the streets when you know you have enough of the masses on your side, and only when you’ve already done all the preparations necessary to bring your campaign to a showdown. The big rally isn’t the spark that launches your movement.

The first principle of planning is timing. Like comedy and sports and sex, timing is everything when it comes to activism, and for the same reasons. People are fickle, easily distracted, and largely irrational. Hit them when they’re paying attention to something else and all the best planning will be lost, but strike when the hour is right and you are guaranteed to win. Dictators, of course, do everything they can to make sure that no time will ever be right for resistance. They shut the opposition down at every turn. But even they are not above the natural rhythm of human life. Often this rhythm is the activist’s best friend.

Strategy is concerned with whether, when, or how to fight, and how to achieve maximum effectiveness in order to gain certain ends. Strategy is the plan for the practical distribution, adaptation, and application of the available means to attain desired objectives.”

tactics are simply the very limited plans of action you devise at any given point.

Strategic thinkers are wise and patient people who live for the long game. They think many steps ahead. As with artists, they put together their plans like mosaics, with each little piece neatly fitting in with the next one and with only the artist having a vision of what the final creation might look like. Tacticians, on the other hand, are mercurial fellows; masters of the now, they are often only as good as their instincts, and they possess the uncanny ability to abandon their plan midway through and adopt a better one if the situation on the ground so dictates.

The successful salt march, of course, didn’t bring Gandhi’s quest for Indian independence to fruition, and seventeen more years of civil disobedience would be necessary before His Majesty’s servants handed over control of their most lucrative colony to its inhabitants. But those years were progressively easier for Gandhi. That’s because he’d already been marked by the salt march as a leader who could finish what he started and who delivered results. For those reasons, he enjoyed unprecedented prestige among Indians. He wasn’t just a moral authority. He wasn’t just an advocate of good ideas and a giver of great speeches. He was—and you will pardon the highly technical terms here—a dude who knew how to get shit done. And once you’ve gotten down all the basics, like defining your cause, coming up with your symbols, identifying the pillars of power, and making oppression backfire, knowing how to get shit done at the higher levels of nonviolent action means knowing when to declare victory and move on.

Otpor! succeeded because it had an abundance of enthusiasm and creativity—two characteristics that must be in the hearts and minds of you and all those who are working with you.

If you walk away from this book with nothing else, please remember this: life is much more meaningful—and also much more fun—when you take charge and act. It’s sad to realize how much of modern life is designed to lull us into being comfortably numb; we’re expected to go about doing what we’re told because it’s easy.

The important thing for activists to realize is that everything comes down to community. It’s always about people. The ideas in this book are just a practical framework; they’re useless without a mind determined to make a difference and a heart that believes that making that difference is possible. Speaking from personal experience, and on behalf of all the nobodies who followed this sensible path to spectacular resuits, I swear that there is no more fulfilling or happier way to live than to take a stand for something you think is right. Even the smallest creatures have the power to change the world.