The Clean and Green Club

The fund appeal above is from a group I’ve supported often in the past. It’s a group that does great work. But I got only as far as the salutation before I knew it was going straight into the recycle bin. I stopped to scan it so I could share it with you, and then off it went into the mighty blue bin.

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From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation by Gene Sharp (The New Press, 2012)

Social change—eliminating such evils as hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change—has been at the core of my work for more than four decades. Long before I started wrestling with the idea of harnessing the business community to achieve these big goals through profitable products and services back in the early 2000s, I devoted significant volunteer time to making a better world.

And now that the government of my own country, the United States, is taking significant steps backward, I will occasionally step out beyond the business world and find inspiration and information from completely different channels.

This month’s book review is one of those. Gene Sharp is the preeminent applied nonviolence theorist in the US today. I first discovered his work in the early 1980s and read all the way through his very dense, three-part Politics of Nonviolent Action back then, after hearing him speak.

So I was excited to find a much shorter and more readable distillation of his work that I feel comfortable recommending here. It’s only 138 pages, but it may shift your thinking about how to not just achieve social change but actually overthrow dictators. In fact, Sharp has been cited as an influence by nonviolent warriors around the world, including the Arab Spring movement and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, among others.

While some agents of change see them as points on a continuum, Sharp makes a clear distinction between nonviolent and violent struggles:

• Strategic nonviolent methods—which use not just visible protests but many tactics involving withdrawal of cooperation from the regime—tend to work better and faster: “Withdrawal of support is…the major required action to disintegrate a dictatorship.”
• They create sympathy among the populace, while violent struggles create alienation and anger toward the agents of change
• They play to the strengths of the protestors, while violent tactics play to the government’s strength (since the government is always better armed and usually better trained in fighting)
• They create decentralized movements and alternative governance structures that spread leadership skills much more widely—and this becomes key when planning for and setting up the replacement government
• They generate a peace based on freedom and justice, and not on repression

Sharp has a strong preference for deeply strategic campaigns, and notes that while tactics might shift during repression, the overall strategy should be carefully nurtured; the repression is designed to get the movement to abandon its successful strategies, and thus is a sign of victory (pp. 90-91). And if the populace is willing to endure repression, repression or the threat of it will not longer be enough to prop up the dictatorship (pp. 106-107).

He suggests starting with small, low-risk campaigns that lead to relatively easy victories, celebrating them and then expanding the demands. And he provides some excellent strategy checklists, such as seven positive characteristics of successful nonviolent political defiance (p. 44) and eight factors to consider when preparing to take power (pp. 84-86). He even looks at how to win over the military in ways that don’t foster a coup d’état (pp. 100-101), and how to defeat a coup if one happens (pp. 117-118).

And he notes the importance of being prepared in the event of either rapid or slow-moving victory (p. 111)—something I learned the hard way when Save the Mountain, a movement I’d started—achieved its goals very quickly and had no second stream of activity to take up the energy; our organization, which could have played a role in many other campaigns, simply withered away. Expanding out to the level of ending a repressive government, if the activists are not prepared to create a government, someone else will step into the vacuum, with potentially disastrous consequences for freedom.

Successful nonviolent regime change will be more permanent and well accepted if it takes seriously the charge of protecting the rights of its citizens, including its minorities. Sharp points out (p. 122) that following the victory, the citizens are now well-schooled in how to bring down governments, will be resilient and resistant against future attempts to grab power at the expense of citizens, and willing to struggle together to achieve a free and just society.

The book concludes with a list of 198 nonviolent tactics grouped into six broad categories:

1. Economic noncooperation: boycotts (6 subcategories)
2. Nonviolent protest and persuasion (10 sub-categories)
3. Social noncooperation (3 subcategories)
4. Economic noncooperation: boycotts (6 subcategories)
5. Political noncooperation: strikes (7 subcategories)
6. Nonviolent intervention (5 subcategories)

Even if your current organizing has much more modest goals than regime change, this book will give you a solid grounding in theory and many practical tools. Highly recommended.

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