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

Without organizational unity, everything will fall apart. That’s one of the few guarantees that I can give you in this book. Politics, by definition, is about factions vying for power.

That’s because 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. It’s actually the victory lap.

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.

Gene Sharp, a man who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times now,

Untrue? Nobel nominees are kept secret.

the Machiavelli of nonviolence.

The goose egg, according to Bob, is what you want. The phrase comes from the army, where officers poring over large-scale maps never surround their target with a neat black circle; instead, they draw a fast and furious shape that looks a lot like a goose egg. The goose egg is the ultimate target, and before you begin planning anything, you have to know exactly what it is.

If I could wave a magic wand and put you exactly where you want to be five years from now, where would that be?” You’d be amazed how many of them have no clue. And, to be fair, it’s hardly their fault: their entire lives, they’ve been trained to think only of the next step. When they’re in high school, they’re told to focus on college. When they’re in college, they’re encouraged to think about their summer internships. As summer interns, they obsess over jobs. Then they get these jobs and worry about promotions. It’s a vicious cycle, and not because it’s a rat race. I’m pretty sure that some rats love racing. The reason this sort of life is brutal has little to do with its fast and exceedingly demanding pace, but a lot to do with the fact that it allows so little time and space to think about what is it that we truly want. And as a friend with a love of sailing once very poignantly told me, the captain who does not know where he wants to go will never find a ship to take him there.

Once the dream is strategically broken down into distinct steps, and once each step is considered in terms of logistical demands, your chances of achieving it are much, much higher. But you have to start by imagining the finished product, and all the while never forget the words of Winston Churchill, who said, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

It's annoying when things this straightforward still need to be said in so straightforward a fashion.

nonviolence is so much more powerful than violence because it will allow anybody, no matter where they live or how frail they are, to engage the enemy.

GRAND STRATEGY. Gene Sharp defines this all-important principle as the “overall conception which serves to coordinate and direct all appropriate and available resources (economic, human, moral, political, organizational, etc.) of the nation or other group to attain its objectives in a conflict.” It sounds like a handful, but Sharp breaks it down nicely by bringing it to a more human level, telling us that grand strategy includes “consideration of the rightness of the cause, assessment of other influences in the situation, and selection of the technique of action to be used,” as well as evaluations of “how the objective will be achieved, and the long-term consequences.”

STRATEGY. This, Sharp tells us, is “the conception of how best to achieve objectives in a conflict . . . 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. There’s no need to trouble Gene Sharp for a definition here, as tactics are simply the very limited plans of action you devise at any given point. The Pass of Caradhras is under the cautious eye and wicked magic of Saruman? Try the mines of Moria. Boromir slain by orcs? Team up with his younger brother Faramir. Is the Black Gate closed? Then try to get to Mordor via the secret path of Minas Morgul. Unlike strategies, this realm of tactical planning is often immediate, may be constantly changing, and demands a keen understanding of the realities on the ground and an imaginative approach to optimally utilizing all available resources.

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. Sometimes movements are fortunate enough to have both kinds of people on board, those who are good at devising strategies and those who excel at tactics. Even less frequently, these two skills come alive in the same person; that’s how we get Napoleons or Alexander the Greats. Much more often, however, we tend to confuse these two, and—like Occupy Wall Street, say—declare that our tactic is our strategy or vice versa. Good planning, and applying the all-important principle of the inverse planning sequence, can solve some of these problems. But if that doesn’t work, there’s one more thing to keep in mind, and that’s momentum.

We treated activism like an action movie, realizing that unless it always moves forward to something bigger and louder and cooler, it will just bore the audience. Think of it this way, and planning kind of takes care of itself, with everything falling into place.

Violence scares people, and when people are scared, they look for a strong leader to protect them. And this relates, as does everything else in this book, to the pillars of power. As my friend Slobo says, people in violent struggles are always trying to knock down pillars by pushing them, but in nonviolent campaigns people are working to pull the pillars to their side.

You and I might have thought that everybody knows about Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, but the truth is that lots of people in lots of places have only heard of one way to solve intractable problems—violence—and so education is an important first step in spreading a nonviolent discipline.

outbreaks of violence are always more common whenever “you” are meeting “them,” whether “them” means the security forces or members of an opposing political party.

During the Otpor! campaigns, we Serbs were clever enough to realize that by putting the most beautiful girls in the front ranks of our marches we minimized the chances of the police beating us from the get-go, as even the sadistic security forces were reluctant to start their day by roughing up women. And by having girls in the first rows of protestors, we were able to create a physical buffer between the cops and those on our side who were most likely to tussle with the police—rowdy young men.

we deputized student volunteers who were identified by red ribbons on their sleeves as “protest police” working to isolate potential troublemakers in our ranks before they could get violent with the police or one another.

All this nonviolent discipline, it is important to note, works internally to keep your movement peaceful and externally to demonstrate to others that you can be a good leader.

They should have taken a moment to assess their position and realize that they weren’t ready to knock out Iron Mike himself. Really, they’d done something amazing. After all, the Chinese government is not one to make concessions to anyone, let alone a bunch of kids. So just by getting the Communist Party to consider some of their concerns, the student activists had already pulled off a big coup. The best move for them to make next would have been to announce their achievements far and wide, proclaiming, with a great degree of truth, that they had just succeeded in subduing the mighty Chinese government. Then level two of the game would have begun almost immediately, with the students using their clout to push the envelope just a little bit further, using the skills they’d acquired during the first round of confrontations to improve their positions.

The movement’s fate, to a large extent, was sealed: their goals were pure, but their failure to understand their challenge as a series of small acts rather than one cataclysmic showdown left them with little chance. Even when martial law was declared and various high-ranking army officials risked their careers and their safety to reach out to the student movement in one last-ditch effort to protect the kids, the movement remained obstinate. It didn’t know how to play the game. It didn’t know when to declare victory, and so it waited too long, only to be crushed.

We knew our goose egg was democracy, and that we still had a long way to go before we got there. So we plastered signs all over the country, informing the newly elected democratic government that the same people who had brought down Milošević were now keeping an eye on the new rulers, and that any attempt to bring back the old system would mean unleashing the same people power that had claimed the scalps of the former regime.

If you recall Gandhi’s salt march, you’ll remember that he worked in incremental steps and declared all his little victories along the way. That’s because he understood the game of nonviolence instinctively. When his attempts to curry favor with the British Raj by highlighting India’s loyalty to the crown soured, he needed a different entry point. Announcing a revolution, he knew, would most likely invite a major crackdown and produce nothing more substantial than a flare-up of patriotic enthusiasm followed by even stricter oppression—which is exactly the fate that befell the activists of Tiananmen Square. What Gandhi needed was an easy opportunity to allow his followers to slowly and comfortably learn the rules of civil disobedience, hone their skills, and bolster their courage. He found all of that in salt.

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.

Causes like democracy, human rights, and transparency are slow-growing crops that require hard work, clear strategies, and strong civil institutions in order to blossom and survive. It’s your responsibility as an activist to finish what you start, because, as we see all around the world, revolutions without proper resolutions can be just as bad as what came before them. You must ensure that whatever changes you bring about are going to be durable and stable.

be careful not to fall in love too easily with the new elites and heroes your movement may bring to prominence. Corruption and the abuse of newfound power can mar the positive achievements of even the best-run nonviolent revolutions, and many times a dictator’s old shoes will seem very comfortable to the new inhabitants of his palace.

But we do have hope for the future, a relatively open media, and democratic institutions that allow us to elect our leaders and hold them accountable for whatever they do and do not deliver. And, most of all, we have the self-confidence that comes from having achieved a successful nonviolent revolution. There’s a great sense of empowerment that arises from being able to improve the lives of everyone in your society, and that’s a feeling that all good activists share. It’s also one that stems from a simple, serendipitous thought, one that at some time or another has inspired plenty of people to take a stand for something they believe in: the realization that it was up to them to make a difference. They knew, as I hope you do as well, that it has to be you.

typical NIMBY types—a creature as common to the suburbs as pigeons in the city.

Q

accept the fact that most often there won’t be any cavalry riding to the rescue. There won’t be somebody else who is bigger, braver, or better-looking than you descending from Mount Olympus to solve your problems. This is yet another lesson I learned from Tolkien: it has to be 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 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 results, I swear that there is no more fulfilling or happier way to live than to take a stand for something you think is right.

“Whatever happens from here,” he said, “is up to you.” And then he turned the microphone toward the crowd and walked away.

To make sure you’re not a victim of Murphy’s Law, do these two simple things. First, do your homework and be as meticulous as you can: make mental lists and charts and avoid leaving anything to chance whenever possible. Second, be serene and learn to accept setbacks as nothing more than a part of the back-and-forth of making a difference.

With people power, then, just like with a stock portfolio, the key is to diversify. Rather than seeking out just the people who are like you, or the people you think are cool, or the people who answer any sort of narrow description, try to anticipate your needs and staff your movement accordingly. If you have in mind a string of street performances to raise awareness, for example, it may be time to befriend a bunch of jugglers, mimes, and puppeteers. If you are thinking of some sort of online action, grab a few bottles of Mountain Dew Code Red and suck up to some programmers. If you want to become media darlings, recruit a few friends with experience in writing and journalism. Find talented graphic designers like my friend Duda and listen to their ideas. The bigger and more colorful your coalition, the stronger your chances of success.