This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century

by Mark Engler

The landmark civil rights uprising that took so much of the country by surprise was no sociological freak. Nor was it happenstance that a clash with segregationists put the normally hidden injustices of racism on stark public display, prompting a stunned Northern media to spread outrage nationally. To the contrary, these were the consequence of a premeditated strategy of conflict.

Without taking up weapons, and with little money and few traditional resources, people forming nonviolent movements succeed in upending the terms of public debate and shifting the direction of their countries’ politics. Nonviolence in this form is not passive. It is a strategy for confrontation.

Sharp came to argue that nonviolent conflict should be understood as a political approach that can be employed strategically, something that social movements can choose because it provides an effective avenue for leveraging change.

most participants in that satyagraha, as Gandhi called the campaign of defiance, did not embrace nonviolence out of a sense of moral commitment. Instead, they chose to employ nonviolent struggle because they believed it worked.

nonviolent action could be “a technique of struggle involving the use of psychological, social, economic, and political power” and that it can be used even against viciously repressive regimes.

“the greater his cruelty, the weaker does his regime become.”

To win, activists did not need to express love for their adversaries or make hated opponents see the errors of their ways. In fact, insistence on converting the enemy could be counterproductive, Sharp believed. He argued that “the demand for ‘love’ for people who have done cruel things may turn people who are justifiably bitter and unable to love their opponents towards violence.”13

“ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” and “power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”

“Don’t talk ideology, just issues. . . . Build organizations, not movements. . . . Focus on neighborhoods and on concrete, winnable goals.”

The Alinskyite tradition held that community organizations should be pragmatic, nonpartisan, and ideologically diverse—that they should put pressure on all politicians, not express loyalty to any.

First, Alinsky believed in identifying local centers of power, particularly churches, and using them as bases for community groups.

Second, instead of picking a galvanizing, morally loaded, and possibly divisive national issue to organize around—as might a mass movement—Alinsky advocated action around narrow local demands.

collective identity formation over the achievement of strategic goals.”

“The approach of so much of the present generation is so fractured with ‘confrontations’ and crises as ends in themselves that their activities are not actions but a discharge of energy which, like a fireworks spectacle, briefly lights up the skies and then vanishes into the void.”19

As Piven would later summarize their conclusions, the experience of these revolts “showed that poor people could achieve little through the routines of conventional electoral and interest group politics.” Therefore, what remained as their key tool “was what we called disruption, the breakdowns that resulted when people defied the rules and institutional routines that ordinarily governed life.”28

movements without centralized hierarchies often require even stronger guidelines and more explicit operating procedures if they are to be effective.

“Frontloading” was a means of creating well-defined norms and practices for the movement without the direct, heavy-handed oversight typical of the hierarchical political parties.

“Civil rights litigation often speeds up the process of social legitimation, because it forces people to take sides in public, but it is almost never the first step.”

In transactional politics, progress comes through the steady accumulation of small victories. Transformational change, in contrast, often occurs in more dramatically punctuated cycles.

Yet by the time this pillar gives way, other indications that a momentous shift is occurring are usually plentiful. From Milosevic’s downfall in Serbia to the revolutions of the Arab Spring and beyond, the signs have been much the same: professors and intellectuals are in open revolt, journalists are disseminating news through underground channels to bypass censors, workers are on strike, judges are asserting that a ruler’s abuses of power violate the law, political parties are demanding greater representation in official bodies, religious leaders are preaching about the moral justification for resistance, musicians are singing protest songs at rallies, and youth groups are taking to the streets.

Examining the first data set of 323 campaigns, she found that nonviolent movements worldwide were twice as likely to succeed as violent ones.

Reviewing the data, Chenoweth found that, in fact, “no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.”