Blueprint for Revolution: how to use rice pudding, Lego men, and other non-violent techniques to galvanise communities, overthrow dictators, or simply change the world

by Srdja Popovic

Besides, at that time we realized only too well that even if we begged all of our friends and family members to come out and support our movement, we probably couldn’t get more than thirty people to show up at a march. We could, however, spray-paint three hundred clenched fists in one evening, and one morning early in November the citizens of Belgrade woke up to discover that Republic Square had been covered by graffiti fists. At the time, when everyone was terrified of Milošević, this gave people the sense that something large and well-organized was lurking just beneath the surface. And, soon enough, it was.

The other crucial decision we made was that Otpor! wouldn’t be a movement centered on charismatic leaders. This, in part, was a practical consideration: as soon as we got big, we realized, the police would tear into us with all their might, and a movement without easily identifiable people in charge would be harder for the authorities to take down in one swoop. Arrest any one of us, went the logic, and fifteen others would take his or her place. But in order to hide in plain sight, we had to be sneaky. We needed to spark a series of small and creative confrontations with the regime. We wanted to capture that Rimtutituki moment, that special and hopeful feeling that resistance was not futile and that victory was within reach.

With Otpor!’s brand stronger than ever, our little demonstrations became the hottest parties in town; if you weren’t there, you might as well have kissed your social life goodbye. And none were cooler, naturally, than those who managed to get themselves arrested—being hauled off to jail meant you were daring and fearless, which, of course, meant you were sexy. Within weeks, even the nerdiest kids in town, the sort who wore pocket protectors and prided themselves on bringing their own graphing calculators to school, were being shoved into police cars one evening and scoring dates with the most attractive women in their class the next.

In the early days of Otpor!, I said, laughter was our greatest weapon against the regime. Milošević’s dictatorship, after all, was fueled by fear: fear of our neighbors, fear of surveillance, fear of the police, fear of everything. But during our time of fear, we Serbs learned that fear is best fought with laughter,

In one protest against Milošević, for example, Otpor! activists in the Serbian town of Kragujevac took white flowers—which represented the dictator’s despised wife, who had worn a plastic one in her hair every day—and stuck them onto the heads of turkeys, a bird whose Serbian name is one of the worst things you can call a woman. The freshly accessorized turkeys were then let loose in the streets of Kragujevac, and the public was treated to a comical display of Milošević’s ferocious policemen running around and foolishly tripping over themselves as the birds scattered and squawked all over the place. The best part about it all was that the cops didn’t really have a choice, as to let the turkeys run free was to signal to Otpor! that their insubordination would be tolerated. But once you’ve seen a burly cop chasing a turkey, like a character from an old-fashioned cartoon, can you ever be afraid of him again? It was an example of creative thinking that turned the security forces into a punch line in front of all the morning commuters and plenty of smirking journalists who arrived on the scene to take photos, and all it took was a trip to the poultry farm and a bit of imagination.

But people who lived in Pinochet’s Chile during the 1970s were plucked off the street and thrown into secret jails just like in Egypt. And instead of trying to swarm the streets, they started encouraging taxis to drive at half speed. Just imagine, I told the young woman, that you wake up in Santiago and go to the store to buy some empanadas, and suddenly you see that all the taxis are moving in slow motion. Then imagine that spreading—imagine every car, bus, and truck driving at ten miles an hour as well, clearly stating their drivers’ displeasure with the regime. Within a matter of days, people are walking at half their normal pace down the sidewalks. The city barely moves. Before all this happened, I told the Egyptian woman, people were afraid to talk openly about despising Pinochet, so if you hated the dictator, you might have imagined that you were the only one. Watching the slow drivers and walkers, however, and understanding their actions to be a subtle protest against the regime, you could be certain that everyone hated the tyrant. Tactics like these, Chileans used to say, made people realize that “we are the many and they are the few.” And the beauty was that there was no risk involved: not even in North Korea was it illegal for cars to drive slowly.

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.

Every dictator, I explained, is a brand. Usually that brand is wrapped in a national flag, and it very often relies on some narrative about stability—Pinochet’s famous quote was “Me or chaos.” Often, a dictator’s brand represents defiance of the United States, of Israel, of whomever. And like all brands, dictators are desperate for market share and exposure. That’s why Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez hosted his own TV show, called Aló Presidente. Broadcast for hours at a time, it featured Chávez making speeches and acting out skits. In one episode he dressed up as a baseball umpire and declared that his political opponents were “out.” Dictators such as the colorful Chávez are like any other brand, addicted to airtime and always seeking to increase their slice of the market. But if you look past the advertising and the propaganda posters, all dictatorships are baked from the same basic ingredients: corruption, nepotism, mismanagement, social injustice, violence, and fear. So why do people choose to go along with them?

It’s because in a dictatorship, I said, there aren’t any other brands.

We revere the warriors, but have the warriors really shaped history? Consider the following: the main outcome of World War I was World War II, and the main outcome of World War II was the Cold War, which in turn gave us Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the war on terror, and so on. But what did the world get from Martin Luther King Jr.? Civil rights and a black president in 2008. And what was the historic legacy of Gandhi? The independence of India and the end of colonialism. And Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement during the 1980s, what did he achieve? The end of Communism in Eastern Europe. And who was Lech Walesa? Just an electrician at the Gdansk shipyards, a hobbit if there ever was one.

He knew instinctively that when you have a vision of tomorrow, you can’t pick the big cataclysmic fight as your first confrontation. In the beginning, everybody is a nobody. And nobodies need to find the battles they can win.

“Pick battles big enough to matter, but small enough to win.”

A big part of a movement’s success will be determined by the battles it chooses to fight, and a lot of that has to do with how well it understands its opponent. Many centuries ago, Sun Tzu reflected on this idea when he told readers of The Art of War how important it is to always put your strong points against your enemy’s weak points.

This is why you see so many activists campaigning for better and healthier food. That’s because no matter what a person’s religion, skin color, or political belief may be, there isn’t a single human being out there who doesn’t need to eat. Everybody relates to food, and we’re all affected by it.

Harvey Milk did what all of us who are passionate enough to get involved with one cause or another do, which is to talk bravely and expect people to listen. If you are reading this book, I assume you care at least a little bit about making a change for the better in the world. At one point or another in your life, you’ve probably tried to petition, organize, march, or do something else to raise people’s awareness of some very important topic or another. Maybe you just tried to convince a friend or a parent that their politics were all wrong. I’m willing to bet you a scoop of Israeli cottage cheese that I know what happened: you spoke passionately about saving the endangered North Atlantic salmon or about buying iPhones for chronically sad Bulgarian orphans, but people just nodded politely. I’m being cynical, of course, but only because I want to be absolutely clear about this very important principle of nonviolent activism: namely, that people, without exception and without fail, just don’t give a damn.

in a nonviolent struggle, numbers are the only way to achieve a victory. You need to go where the numbers are.

First, assume that most people are disinterested, unmotivated, apathetic, or downright hostile. Then, take a piece of paper—even a napkin can do the job—and draw a line. Mark yourself on one side of it, and then try to think who could stand together with you. If the answer is just a few people, start over—no matter how committed you are to a cause, or how troubled you are by a problem—and try again. When you’ve managed to place yourself and your friends and just about the rest of the world on one side of the line and a handful of evil bastards on the other, you’ve won. Make sure that the “line of division”—the phrase was used by an Otpor! buddy of mine named Ivan Marovic—that separates you and the bad guys gives you as many allies as possible.

But knowing what minor battles you can win and how to get numbers to your side is only half the challenge. The other is ensuring that you can offer your newfound followers something that they can believe in. And for that, you’re going to need to develop your vision of tomorrow.

And here’s the tricky part: every time we run this exercise, in which we ask people to imagine what’s important to their fellow countrymen, no one ever speaks of things like civil rights, or freedom of religion, or the right to assemble. Those are big things. Instead, people—in the Maldives, in Syria, in Serbia—talk about the little things: they want respect and dignity, they want their families to be safe, and they want honest pay for honest work. That’s it. It’s never sweeping stuff. Too often, however, dissidents fail to realize that it’s the mundane things that move people. Well-educated and passionate, these aspiring revolutionaries focus on lofty quotations from historical leaders and abstract ideas of liberty, forgetting that their constituent is a tired shopkeeper whose needs and thoughts and beliefs are far more basic.

The elderly have always been hugely important in successful nonviolent campaigns. They have much time on their hands, and they care about their grandkids more than anyone else in the world.

Proper revolutions are not cataclysmic explosions; they are long, controlled burns.

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.

whether you’re fighting Miloševićs or Assads, their strength will always lie in their ability and readiness to engage in violence. It’s the one thing that these regimes excel at. And these guys have trained armies at their disposal. So a violent campaign against a dictator already starts out at a disadvantage. You’re attacking the enemy where he is strongest.

a violent campaign can make effective use of only your physically strongest activists. Those are the guys who can battle in the streets, lug the heavy equipment around, and work the machine guns. Everyone else in your society who might otherwise want to support you—grandmothers, professors, or poets—won’t be able to take part. And to take down a dictatorship, you need to build a critical mass with everyone on your side. It’s almost impossible to do that with violence.

Every tyrant rests on economic pillars, and economic pillars are much easier targets than military bases or presidential palaces. Shake them, and the tyrant will eventually fall.

Every regime, Sharp argues, is held in place by a handful of pillars; apply enough pressure to one or more pillar, and the whole system will soon collapse. All leaders and governments, Sharp believes, no matter where you find them, rely on the same sorts of mechanisms to stay in power, which makes their power more transient than it seems. No power is ever absolute.

Dictators invest much in appearing infallible, making it hard to forget that they are merely men overseeing other men and dependent on the labor and compliance of many to stay in power. A dictator’s authority comes from the willing consent of the people who obey him.

A dictator really needs ordinary citizens to go to work in the morning and make sure that the airports and television studios and soldiers’ pension plans run smoothly. And it’s important to understand that these average Joes who follow his orders just want to do their jobs and go home; even when they wear uniforms and get violent, they’re not necessarily evil and they’re not necessarily beyond redemption. As I told the Syrians, the policeman bashing their heads with a riot shield is probably happy to do so, not because he fears and despises freedom but because he’s being paid overtime. And as long as he’s paid, as long as everything keeps working smoothly, the dictator is safe on his throne. The activist’s first task, then, is to make sure the normal course of affairs comes to a screeching halt—to make sure the pillars are shaken.

Go ahead and game it out if you’d like, but let me save you the trouble. The answer is that there’s nothing you can do. It’s not only that the amorous demonstrators aren’t breaking any laws; it’s also their attitude that makes a world of difference. If you’re a cop, you spend a lot of time thinking about how to deal with people who are violent. But nothing in your training prepares you for dealing with people who are funny.

Good activists, like good stand-up comedians, just need to practice a few acquired skills. The first is to know your audience.

It also adds the necessary cool factor, which helps movements attract new members. Finally, humor can incite clumsy reactions from your opponent. The best humorous actions—or laughtivism—force autocrats and their security pillars into lose-lose scenarios, undermining the credibility of their regimes or institutions no matter how they manage to respond. Politicians, whether they are democratically elected or harsh dictators, usually share an inflated sense of self-importance. After too long in power, and after seeing their own Photoshopped face too many times in newspapers and on the covers of magazines, they start taking themselves too seriously. It’s as if they start believing their own propaganda. This is why they make stupid mistakes when challenged with laughtivism. The high and mighty can’t take a joke.

If Syrians saw Assad’s thugs as bumbling buffoons, the Syrian activists slowly realized, the regime would lose one of its major deterrents: its ability to terrify.

One of the first things the activists did was buy several buckets of red food coloring. Then they waited for nightfall, crept up to a few fountains located in major squares throughout Damascus, and dropped the red dye into the water. The next morning, as the capital awoke to its morning gridlock, all of the fountains looked like they were spitting out blood, an apt visual metaphor for Assad’s brutal oppression. Enter the Keystone Kops: furious at the spectacle, the police sent entire squads to deal with the problem, but they soon learned that the only way to rid the fountains of their bloodlike hue was to wait for the coloring to circulate out of the system. In the meantime, Damascenes were treated to amusing scenes of cops crowding the fountains with confused looks on their faces, awaiting instructions from their superiors and generally looking like they had no clue what they were supposed to be doing. It took a week for the water to return to normal.

They also had to deal with Ping-Pong balls. Thousands of them. The trouble all began when a group of Syrian activists started inscribing anti-Assad slogans like “Freedom” and “Enough” on masses of Ping-Pong balls, which they then dumped out of huge garbage bags on to the narrow—and steep—streets of Damascus.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, the merry pranksters secured a few hundred USB speakers, tiny little sticks that could play a few songs out loud. To these they uploaded popular hymns of the resistance—“Assad Is a Pig” and so on. Then they concealed the miniature speakers in the worst places they could find: rancid garbage cans, piles of manure, and anywhere else that reeked. Soon the cities were alive with the sound of music. Illegal, anti-regime music. Ordered to put an end to the forbidden songs, the cops had to find the speakers and destroy them. But to do that, they had to roll up their sleeves and shove their hands into one disgusting mess after another, all in full view of the public.

So how did GIRIFNA spread its message? They adopted the color orange as their symbol and encouraged their supporters to carry oranges everywhere they went. It worked, and soon more and more people mysteriously started carrying oranges as they went about their errands. You’d see oranges everywhere. And it was perfect, because it was low risk. After all, who is going to get arrested for carrying a common fruit? Nobody. And on the off chance that trouble came their way, the GIRIFNA supporters could either eat their orange, toss it aside, or play dumb. It was a cheeky solution to a very real problem.

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.

What Mohamed Adel and his brave friends understood well was that humor offers a low-cost point of entry for ordinary citizens. At the time of the Egyptian Revolution, I remember watching serious political analysts on TV shoveling bullshit into my living room with claims like “The people will eventually get tired of coming to Tahrir Square and the movement will fizzle out.” But those guys didn’t understand the game. If you’re in your twenties—as a majority of Egyptians are—would you even think of missing the best party in town?

Political humor is as old as politics itself, and satire and jokes have been used to speak truth to power for centuries. But the laughtivists of the modern age have taken humor to a new level. Laughter and fun are no longer marginal to a movement’s strategy. In many cases, they are the strategy. Today’s nonviolent activists are launching a global shift in protest tactics away from anger, resentment, and rage and toward a more powerful form of activism rooted in fun. And, surprisingly, all of this works even better the harder dictators crack down on it.

Making oppression backfire is a skill, sort of like jujitsu, that’s all about playing your opponents’ strongest card against them. Before you can do that, though, you need to understand exactly how oppression works. It’s important to realize that oppression isn’t some demonic force that bubbles up from some deep, festering well of evil in the blackened hearts of your opponents. Rather, it is almost always a calculated decision. In the hands of authorities everywhere—from dictators to elementary school principals—oppression achieves two immediate results: it punishes disobedience, and it prevents future problems by sending a message to potential troublemakers. Like so much we’ve been talking about, all oppression relies on fear in order to be effective: fear of punishment, fear of getting detention, fear of being sent to a gulag, fear of embarrassment, fear of whatever.

Sharp realized that dictators succeed because people choose to obey, and while people might choose to obey for many reasons, for the most part they obey out of fear. So if we want people to stop complying with the regime, they have to stop being scared. And one of the scariest things in any society, whether it’s a dictatorship or a democracy, is the great unknown. That’s why kids are afraid of the dark, and that’s the reason that your average citizen sweats bullets when he walks into the oncologist’s office for the first time.

We called our preparations for being arrested “Plan B,” and it worked wonders. Soon, instead of speaking of prison in hushed tones, our friends and acquaintances spoke of it dismissively, even humorously. They knew what to look forward to. Being in prison was still scary, sure, but it was much less scary than the dark things we used to imagine before we gained experience and started educating one another. And we covered for each other too. If the police actually got one of us, we all had legal documents signed and ready, giving a few lawyers sympathetic to our cause power of attorney. Finally, we had elaborate phone lists in place, so that if any of us got arrested there was always someone notifying parents and friends and loved ones. And, of course, there were piles of pre-made press releases sitting on top of desks and tables ready to be sent out to the media seconds after shit went down, with only the names of the activists and the address of the jail left blank and waiting to be filled in.

With Plan B, the fear of the unknown melted away. Getting arrested soon meant that you joined an exclusive club and that you wouldn’t be facing the full weight of the security forces all by yourself. Not only that, but once we stopped being scared and started getting organized, the police realized that the harder they cracked down on us, the worse it got for them. Their oppression was backfiring.

Now imagine the scene when the people who are arrested are finally let go. Upon stepping out into the street, these kids are greeted by throngs of adoring fans shouting at the top of their lungs, hooting, whistling, and applauding. We called it the rock star reception tactic, and it worked beautifully. Before too long, being arrested made you sexy even if you were a pale and pimply nerd.

Since getting arrested was now the coolest thing you could do for your social life, Otpor! decided to capitalize on this marketing bonanza. We printed up three different colored T-shirts with the Otpor! fist on them, each color representing how many times its wearer had been arrested. Within weeks, the black T-shirts—with a fist in a white circle—became the hottest fashion item in Belgrade, cooler than anything either Abercrombie or Prada could design (this was the 90’s after all). That’s because the black T-shirt was given to people who’d been arrested more than ten times.

The trick for activists looking to make oppression backfire lies in identifying situations in which people are using their authority beyond reasonable limits.

When you think of power, remember that exercising it comes at a cost, and that your job as an activist is to make that cost rise ever upward until your opponent is no longer able to afford the charges.

Believing that change can happen to you, dreaming big and starting small, having a vision of tomorrow, practicing laughtivism, and making oppression backfire: these are the foundations of every successful nonviolent movement.

The first step involves understanding the nature of compromise. Asked a long time ago to define democracy, the writer E. B. White said that it was the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time. He wasn’t kidding, but he left out one key component, namely, that for such a system to work, a great degree of give-and-take is necessary. And compromise, sad to say, isn’t sexy.

This is the risk of jeopardizing the first, and arguably the most important, tactical unity: the unity of message.