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

by Mark Engler

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.

He began arguing to his pacifist colleagues that people turn to war and violence not because they are wicked or hateful. They resort to violence because they do not see any other option for resolving intractable conflicts.

Violent crackdowns against unarmed protests end up exposing the brutality of a ruling force, undermining its legitimacy, and, in many cases, creating wider public unwillingness to cooperate with its mandates.

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.”

Nonviolent action did not start with the Indian independence movement. Sharp documented a variety of earlier precedents, going back to the use of noncooperation by the plebeians of Rome in 494 BC. And there were intellectual forerunners as well. Thoreau produced influential writings in the 1800s, as did Tolstoy—who even carried out a correspondence with the young Gandhi.

Sharp likened the 198 methods to the various weapons in the arsenal of a conventional army: each has different range and effects, and each is adapted to distinct circumstances. They can be used separately or together. And their wise selection can help determine the outcome of a battle.

I do wonder if the tactics being used today in the resistance movement might be "fighting the last war." Marches, protests, these things were effective in an era of MLK but are they as effective now? Social media has made it incredibly easy to organize protests but has it made protests more effective? If anything it seems like the large number of protests easily organized makes them easier to ignore or write off.

Trainers who have been inspired by the emerging field of civil resistance—and who have waged campaigns of nonviolent conflict in places such as Serbia, South Africa, Poland, and Zimbabwe—have worked to codify a new organizing tradition based on the lessons gleaned from past mobilizations. As a result, activists today can benefit from the experiences of their predecessors in a way that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.

As King had contended, the point of creating a public crisis in Birmingham was not to introduce Connor or other authorities to violence. Rather, it was to expose the violence routinely inflicted upon the black community under Jim Crow segregation. “We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive,” King wrote. “We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.”

What kind of opportunities exist today for similar actions?

Sharp wrote the Venezuelan president a letter recommending his book entitled The Anti-Coup, which explains how nonviolent action can be used to repel an armed putsch by a minority group that does not have the backing of the population.

One, Saul Alinsky, is widely regarded as the founding father of community organizing; having cut his teeth bringing people together in the ethnically diverse neighborhoods near Chicago’s meatpacking district in the 1930s, he would become an author and troublemaker of national renown by the start of the social upheavals of the 1960s.

To fight the slum conditions facing this neighborhood, Alinsky formed committees of local leaders, packed the offices of bureaucrats with hundreds of angry residents, and steered marches in front of the homes of local officials. It worked. “Many confrontations and several months later,” author Mary Beth Rogers writes, “Back of the Yards claimed credit for new police patrols, street repairs, regular garbage collection, and lunch programs for 1,400 children.”

“What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

As he writes in his book Roots for Radicals, “We play to win. That’s one of the distinctive features of the IAF: We don’t lead everyday, ordinary people into public failures, and we’re not building movements. Movements go in and out of existence. As good as they are, you can’t sustain them. Everyday people need incremental success over months and sometimes years.”11

“Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change. . . . To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that’s the way the game is played—if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’”

Practicing what is sometimes called “stop sign organizing,” those working in this vein look for concrete, winnable projects—such as demanding that city officials place a stop sign at a dangerous intersection in a neighborhood. The idea is that small victories build local capabilities, give participants a sense of their power, and spur more ambitious action.

The "resistance" movement has spawned a number of groups around the country, organizing people who previously were not involved in politics beyond voting. So far, at least in my area, a lot of the focus has been on electing more liberal leaning candidates to offices and influencing current elected officials. I believe that practicing more of this "stop sign organizing" could go a long way for these groups to gain momentum and organizing experience.

Fortunately, the world of social movement thinking is now experiencing a renaissance on this front, with traditions of strategic nonviolence occupying a critical space in the discussion. Civil resistance recognizes both conditions and skills as relevant in shaping mass mobilization.

These skills include the ability to recognize when the terrain for protest is fertile, the talent for staging creative and provocative acts of civil disobedience, the capacity for intelligently escalating once a mobilization is under way, and the foresight to make sure that short-term cycles of disruption contribute to furthering longer-term goals.

Demonstrations continued until February 4, when Milosevic finally backed down and acknowledged the opposition’s municipal victories. The announcement was a high point for movement forces, and yet winning the local elections was never their ultimate goal—they wanted Milosevic out. That did not happen.

We should always be cognizant of these minor victories and how they can be used by those in power to usurp the momentum of a movement. Just because one bill was voted down doesn't mean total victory, and getting a few more left leaning politicians elected to power doesn't really mean much either.

In October 1998, they decided to found a group called Otpor, or “resistance” in Serbian.

Seeking to spark an unarmed rebellion, Otpor would set out to distinguish itself from the mass protest movements of the past. But it would also organize differently than the structure-based groups in the country—namely, Serbia’s opposition political parties and its established trade unions. Forging a middle path, it would use provocative, creative actions to produce a series of crises for the Milosevic regime and eventually accomplish what previous efforts could not.

satire has been a perennial tool of dissidents;

Its a tool, its easy, but is it effective?

“My friends who had been involved with the political parties were frustrated with their way of organizing,” says Marovic, “because it was sluggish, and because it couldn’t reach people who weren’t already connected to their networks. They couldn’t bring in people from the outside like we could with our protests.

The fist had strong patriotic associations, recalling the icon of the Yugoslav Partisans who fought against Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. The allusion was a bow to the country’s older generation, which had first-hand memory of the earlier resistance movement. But it also had pop appeal: the Partisans were the subject of a 1970s TV show beloved by the country’s youth, a sort of Serbian version of the A-Team.

When authorities in the city of Novi Sad tried to surround their postwar reconstruction efforts with official pomp—even though the new bridge the government constructed over the Danube River amounted to little more than a temporary pontoon—activists responded by ceremoniously building their own toy bridge over a pond in one of the city’s central parks. The stunt left authorities with two bad options: look cartoonishly repressive by arresting people for playing around with a Styrofoam prop, or let Otpor continue to mock the regime.

Because they were seeking to maximize their own power, the political parties were always guarding their turf. “They had no common goals and no common sense,” remarked Milja Jovanovic, one of Otpor’s leaders. Each of the political parties had ambitions to rule, and this meant that they were perpetually arguing among themselves. “One thing they all had in common was that they all wanted to be in charge,” Marovic argues. “So they spent a lot of energy fighting each other. A lot of energy was wasted that way.”

Otpor had no interest in becoming another feuding party, and it was not concerned with jockeying to place its own members into political office. Therefore, it was willing to work with people from a wide range of ideological backgrounds. “We knew that defeating Milosevic and securing free and fair elections was something we could all agree on,” says Marovic. “So we agreed to put our other differences aside until Milosevic was gone.” Years later, sociologist Vladimir Ilic conducted a survey of more than six hundred Otpor participants. One respondent described the movement’s ideological diversity as a liberating force. Otpor, he explained, “gave you the sort of freedom the political party denies by its very definition, and this is probably why many party members joined in its activities.”

Without any internal bureaucracy or centralized authority, Otpor succeeded in creating a cohesive movement identity among tens of thousands of Serbians. Two key tools it used to achieve this were frontloading and mass training.

The number of people in a given session might be small—seven or eight participants was typical—but, when repeated hundreds of times, the trainings integrated extraordinary numbers. In a very short amount of time, people could go from being total outsiders to becoming team leaders in their towns. And the training process was exponential. New chapters were outfitted with manuals and toolkits enabling them to host their own trainings. By the time Otpor had twenty thousand members, so many trainings were under way in so many different localities that the obvious locations for gatherings—community centers and youth clubs—were constantly booked.

Throughout their two years of escalating dissent, the activists consistently worked to cultivate sympathy from within the security forces, sending care packages of food and cigarettes to soldiers and commiserating with individual police officers about poor pay and working conditions. The activists’ goal was to make sure that, when presented with a hard choice, the army and the police would side with the opposition rather than the regime.

Another factor was a lack of defining purpose following the revolution in 2000. Otpor participants had been united by a clear mission of overthrowing the regime. With this accomplished, the organization floundered. Although it stayed intact for a time as a watchdog group, its membership waned. In postrevolutionary Serbia, the strong institutional structures of the country’s political parties proved more durable than Otpor’s decentralized network—with the politicians showing themselves adept at negotiating for the spoils of power and patronage that came with the fall of Milosevic.

“Obedience is at the heart of political power,” he wrote. “Rulers or other command systems, despite appearances, [are] dependent on the population’s goodwill, decisions, and support.” Sharp’s idea was straightforward: if people refuse to cooperate with a regime—if civil servants stop carrying out the functions of the state, if merchants suspend economic activity, if soldiers stop obeying orders—even an entrenched dictator will find himself handicapped.

The pillars allow for better strategic thinking on the part of those trying to force change. Activists can more clearly predict what it will take for a regime to fall. They can scheme about how they might undermine one or more of the various sources of social support for the system—removing the backing of the clergy, for example, or prodding the press to adopt a more critical posture—and thus place the rulers on an ever-wobblier foundation.

The court challenges that did prevail were largely won once a majority of the public had already shifted in favor of gay marriage. Early lawsuits, therefore, were noteworthy less for what they accomplished with judges and more for providing opportunities to rally supporters, educate the public, and make their case in the media. “In the real world, before the courts will act, there is almost always some shift in social legitimacy,” writes Linda Hirshman, author of a history of the struggle for LGBT rights in the United States. “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 the pillar of entertainment, actors who had remained closeted for fear that their sexuality would cost them roles began coming out in greater numbers than ever before. Perhaps most prominent was Ellen DeGeneres, who appeared on the cover of Time in 1997. Popular TV shows and movies began featuring openly queer characters, and by presenting these characters in a sympathetic light they normalized LGBT relationships for millions of Americans.

As Chenoweth explains, “Researchers used to say that no government could survive if five percent of its population mobilized against it.” But she saw that the threshold was not even that high. 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.”

This is a very surprising number. The population of the US is about 321 million people, so 3.5 percent is11,235,000. Population of Washington state is 7.21 million, so 3.5 percent of that is only252,350.

He believed that people were not motivated by abstract values or ideology. “In the world as it is,” he wrote, “man moves primarily because of self-interest.”

“Organizing should target winning immediate, concrete changes,” taking on issues that speak to the self-interest of the group of people that is organizing. Ideally, the demands should be neither divisive nor ideologically loaded.

The use of symbolically loaded demands and the acceptance of settlements that adhere to the Gandhian rule of the “minimum consistent with the truth” are not hard-and-fast tenets in momentum-driven organizing. Instead, they represent some of the approaches that activists have taken in addressing a broader issue: what might be called “framing the victory.”

A third approach to framing the victory happens at a different level—namely, that of individual protest actions. Whether activists like it or not, the media will often judge the success of a protest based on whether events unfold as organizers intended. If activists advertise that they will produce mass arrests, press reporters will evaluate their success based on whether a significant number of people are actually taken into custody. If organizers claim they will prevent a store from doing business for a day, the media will focus on whether storeowners are able to sell anything during that time.

At one point, as their movement was gaining steam, Belgrade activists announced that they would undertake an audacious feat: blockading one of the area’s major international highways in defiance of the regime. They subsequently did so and sent the photographic evidence to the media, which reported their bold accomplishment. What the activists conveniently neglected to mention was that they carried out their protest at a time of the day when traffic was at a lull, and relatively few vehicles were affected. Moreover, their blockade held for all of fifteen minutes—long enough to take some decent photos, but not so long that the cops had time to bust the participants. These details did not prove to be a problem. The activists had indeed blocked the highway, just as they had promised, and they could mark another win in their ledger.

What worked was something different. “A group of people started camping out in Zuccotti Park,” Krugman explained just weeks after Occupy launched, “and all of a sudden the conversation has changed significantly towards being about the right things.

Time and again, in uprisings that steal the spotlight and illuminate injustices that are otherwise ignored, we see three elements—disruption, sacrifice, and escalation—combining in forceful ways. The persistent reappearance of these elements provides compelling reason to examine their strange and combustive alchemy.

Factories are shut down when workers walk out or sit down; welfare bureaucracies are thrown into chaos when crowds demand relief; landlords may be bankrupted when tenants refuse to pay rent. In each of these cases, people cease to conform to accustomed institutional roles; they withhold their accustomed cooperation, and by doing so, cause institutional disruptions.”

These can be massively effective. By going after the incentive structure and causing real monetary pain you can bring a lot of attention. Unfortunately its very hard to organize enough people to do this on a scale necessary to inflict this kind of pain, at least with the federal government. Could be easier on the state and municipal levels.

Authorities could allow activists to hold the space indefinitely, permitting a staging ground for continual protests against the area’s financial institutions. Or police could act on behalf of the country’s wealthiest 1 percent and shut down dissent, a move that would perfectly illustrate the protesters’ claims about what American democracy had become. It was a no-win situation for the state.

Thinking in terms of creating dilemmas for their adversaries can be a useful way for activists to devise more effective interventions. At the same time, perfect dilemmas are very difficult to construct. In truth, any individual action can only do so much. More important than coming up with a single, brilliantly conceived act of nonviolent resistance is a willingness to string together multiple protests in a way that creates a sense of heightening drama.

she emphasized that movements must progressively advance through new stages of activity, always avoiding stagnation. Gene Sharp, influenced by this analysis, stressed that to sustain a long struggle, activists cannot deploy just one tactic. Rather, they need to create a sequence of actions that builds over time.

Occupy wall street fizzled out because it stopped escalating. How can the resistance continue to escalate? Phone calls and emails will only work for so long, there must be action we demand and we must progress further and further to get it.

Just as Alinsky gave civil rights campaigners too little credit for their savvy maneuvering in catapulting segregation into the headlines, so Occupy activists often receive slight acknowledgment for their success in propelling inequality to the fore of national discussion. In fact, some have gone so far as to question whether Occupy Wall Street really accomplished anything at all. In mid-2012, political analyst Andy Ostroy concluded that the movement “has had no material impact on American life.”

Prior to this book I also held this view. There hasn't seemed to be any policy changes made in response to Occupy, and wealth inequality has only gotten worse in the time since.

Even judging by more realistic standards, there is legitimate debate about whether Occupy lived up to its full potential. Momentum-driven organizing distinguishes itself from unstructured mass protest in that it seeks to be deliberate in harnessing and sustaining the power of disruptive outbreaks. Its goal is to allow mobilizations to endure through multiple waves of activity. Occupy fell short in this regard. Like many other mass protests, it was not well equipped to last beyond a brief cycle of revolt.

The movement did not have the frontloading that would have allowed it to convey an overarching strategy. Because it lacked a culture of mass training, methods of transmitting the movement’s norms to new participants remained informal. And the diverse crowds of Occupiers never developed a shared theory of how they would leverage change.

Occupy’s shortcomings were real. But reflection on them should not obscure the impact that the movement did have. It is important to remember that Occupy was a drive that started with extremely minimal financial resources, no staff, no offices, and no established membership lists. Throughout its peak months, it drew primarily on its own momentum rather than on any sources of outside support. Yet, despite its lack of institutional backing, it accomplished precisely what far more muscular organizations had tried, and failed, to do in the years before. Its mixture of disruption, sacrifice, and escalation ended up having concrete implications, both small and large.