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

by Mark Engler

“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.13 They also meet some of the immediate needs of the community, far preferable, in Alinsky’s view, to the far-off calls for freedom and justice that regularly emanate from social movements.

“the poor have few resources for regular political influence,” their ability to prompt social change depends on the disruptive power of tactics such as “militant boycotts, sit-ins, traffic tie-ups, and rent strikes.” What was important was not the organizational structures these activities built, but the willingness of participants to interrupt business as usual.

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.

It was grounded in the idea that if social movements could win the battle over public opinion, the courts and the legislators would ultimately fall in line.

The military, the media, the business community, the churches, labor groups, the civil service, the educational establishment, and the courts, among others, are pillars that lend structural stability to a political system.

“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.”45

Local merchants were not so smug. They were keenly aware that the surge of negative media attention was damaging the city’s reputation and that the movement’s boycott was cutting into their profits. In short, they were ready to settle.

Often, perceptions of victory depend on how the media portrays a movement. Positive press coverage of a given protest mobilization or political settlement can create the sense that a movement is triumphant and rising. Meanwhile, press coverage that casts these same events in a skeptical or disparaging light can create a very different impression, fostering the sentiment that a movement is sputtering out and has accomplished little.

Mainstream political operatives believe they are those backed with the most resources and the strongest organizational coalitions. Strategic nonviolence suggests something else altogether: that even small and unknown groups can capture the public spotlight, provided they are willing to take the right

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.

One main way of doing this is through showing a willingness to endure hardship, to face arrest, or even to risk physical harm in dramatizing an injustice.

During his drive for Indian self-rule he argued, “No country has ever risen without being purified through the fire of suffering.”11

Nonviolent actions involving the possibility of arrest, reprisal, or physical trauma allow those who undertake them to display courage and resolve.

The idea that repression can actually help a movement, rather than hurt it, is a notion that stands a conventional understanding of power on its head. And yet, the ability of nonviolent demonstrators to benefit from the zealousness of authorities is a well-studied occurrence within the field of civil resistance.

Occupy also secured instrumental advances related to consumer banking. Bank Transfer Day, which took place on November 5, 2011, encouraged those who held accounts with major banks—specifically Bank of America—to switch their business over to credit unions. This campaign surged as Occupy gained steam, and when Bank Transfer Day arrived upward of 650,000 customers shifted $4.5 billion in resources from major banks to credit unions. As Salon’s Andrew Leonard wrote, riffing on an old joke, “$4.5 billion here, $4.5 billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money, even for JPMorgan-Chase.”

By taking an issue that is hidden from common view and putting it at the center of public debate, disruptive protest forces observers to decide which side they are on. This has three effects: First, it builds the base of a movement by creating an opportunity for large numbers of latent sympathizers to become dedicated activists. Second, even as it turns passive supporters into active ones, it engages members of the public who were previously uninformed, creating greater awareness even among those who do not care for activists’ confrontational approach. And third, it agitates the most extreme elements of the opposition, fueling a short-term backlash but isolating reactionaries from the public in the long run.

Frederick Douglass eloquently addresses this very topic: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” Douglass stated in 1857. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”25

Acts of sacrifice and political jiu-jitsu can help to foster an empathetic reaction: they convince the undecided to side with communities in resistance rather than forces of repression. When the process works, members of the public are alienated by the extremism of reactionary opponents, and they acknowledge that something needs to be done to address the movement’s grievances. They become passive sympathizers.

“It’s really quite simple. The state has a monopoly of violence,”