The Third Wave of Nonviolent Revolt

http://www.reason.com/links/links092106.shtml

Reason Magazine
September 21, 2006
The 50 Habits of Highly Effective Revolutionaries
The third wave of nonviolent revolt
by Jesse Walker

When the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic left office in
October 2000, he was felled not by NATO's bombs but by his
own police and soldiers' refusal to enforce his orders. For
nearly a decade, a merry band of militants called Otpor
("Resistance") had been treating his regime to a mix of
Gandhian disobedience and Yippie-style pranks, planting the
seeds of rebellion across the country and helping assemble a
broad, nonviolent anti-government coalition. When Milosevic
refused to acknowledge that he had lost the 2000 election to
Vojislav Kostunica, the opposition called a general strike.

For a taut description of what came next, turn to Nonviolent
Struggle: 50 Crucial Points, a new book by three veterans of
Otpor, Srdja Popovic, Andrej Milivojevic, and Slobodan Djinovic:

"By October 5th, the country has come to a virtual
standstill. Hundreds of thousands of protestors pour
peacefully into Belgrade. The police, with a few exceptions,
acknowledge their orders but refuse to obey them. By the end
of the day, the protestors control the parliament building
and the state-run television and radio stations. European
leaders call for Milosevic to step down.
"On October 6th, Milosevic acknowledges defeat, and the head
of the Army congratulates Kostunica on his victory."

Nonviolent Struggle is a guide for dissidents in other
countries who would like to replicate Otpor's success. The
"crucial points" of the subtitle range from the sources of
political power to the importance of time management. The
volume is illustrated with photos from Serbian street
protests, giving its pages a vaguely leftish flavor, but the
text sometimes reads like a business book. (I don't think
Che's Guerrilla Warfare includes a chapter called "What is
Multilevel Marketing?") It was published with a grant from
the United States Institute of Peace, an organization
created and funded by Congress, but its authors can be harsh
critics of American foreign policy, arguing that nonviolent
people-power revolts are preferable to wars and embargos.

"You need to look at the repertoire of sanctions," says
Popovic, who served three years in Serbia's parliament after
Milosevic was ousted. "If the UN decides to freeze the
accounts of a country's leadership or ban them from
traveling, that's very useful for the movement. But if they
decide to put an oil embargo on the country, it's the people
they're sanctioning, not the leadership." The embargo
against Serbia, he argues, was "a typical example" of a
policy that actually helps the targeted dictator. "The
regime had an excuse for the poor economic situation, mafia
connected with the regime got loaded with money, and the
people were poor, they were unhappy, and they had a great
reason to hate the international community."

"Sanctions don't just mean less economic activity," notes
Milivojevic, who is now studying history at Berkeley. "They
have a real impact on young people. If you were born
sometime from the early to the late '70s, you were reaching
maturity just as the war was starting. That would be a
period when you would start exploring more, through
education, through travel, through the simple osmosis of
people coming to where you live. That generation didn't have
nearly as much access to outside ideas and information."

The isolation has had long-term effects, he argues, not just
on the ability to overthrow Milosevic, but on the ideas
influencing the country now that Slobo is gone.

And the bombing campaign? "Bombing countries and applying
violence helps dictators to maintain power," Popovic argues.
"When countries perceive a military threat from the outside,
the people rally around the leadership. An obvious example
of this is 9/11 in the United States of America. Bush's
approval ratings were highest on September the 12th."

Milivojevic thinks the effect of the attacks was more mixed.
"After the bombing, there was a marked shift in the
Milosevic regime's methods. It just became more repressive.
But a part of that repression was turned into increasing
support for Otpor." In the short term, he adds, the bombing
prevented political action. ("Society essentially shut down.
You were principally concerned with self survival.")
Afterwards, Otpor was able to adjust. "The movement appeared
before the bombing. And it started to grow before the
bombing. If it was a different movement, it might have been
destroyed by this. Happily, it wasn't."

So the bombs were essentially a condition you had to react
to? "Yes," says Milivojevici. "Obviously, all things being
equal, it's a condition that most people would rather not
react to."
On the face of it, it shouldn't seem surprising that the
authors of a book called Nonviolent Struggle would speak so
skeptically about war. But this trio -- like their
publisher, the Belgrade-based Center for Applied NonViolent
Action and Strategies (CANVAS) -- carefully eschews ethical
arguments for avoiding coercion, preferring to stress the
practical benefits. Nonviolence makes it harder for the
government to demonize you, they argue, and it makes it
easier to attract popular support. Besides, the government
has greater firepower; if you use violence, you're fighting
on its turf. And if you do manage to overthrow the state,
it's better to approach the inevitable faction fights that
follow with skills honed in nonviolent struggle than skills
honed in gunplay.

The past century's advocates of nonviolence have come in
three waves, each with a particular style. The first was
represented by Mohandas Gandhi, the man who freed India from
British rule. Gandhi was a canny strategist, but it was his
role as a moral leader that captured the public imagination,
to the point where many Americans now seem to believe that
India was liberated through the sheer force of Ben
Kingsley's personality. At their best, the activists who
followed Gandhi fused a strong sense of morality with a
sharp understanding of politics and public relations, a
combination represented by figures like Lech Walesa and
Martin Luther King. At their worst, they became more
interested in asserting their moral purity than in actually
accomplishing their goals, transforming nonviolence from a
form of action to a passive, self-righteous lifestyle.
It was frustration with the latter group that fueled the
second wave. The key figure here is Gene Sharp, author of
1973's three-volume study The Politics of Nonviolent Action.
Interviewed by Peace magazine in 2003, Sharp complained that
"there are many people in peace organizations who don't like
conflict. A few years ago, I gave a talk about national
defense by prepared nonviolent resistance. Someone in the
audience was very shocked, and accused me: 'All you are
doing is taking the violence out of war!'" Sharp himself had
been a conscientious objector in the Korean War and an
associate of the Christian pacifist A.J. Muste, but he was
happy to adorn the backs of his books with endorsements by
military figures and to draw former soldiers into his
circle. When he collected examples of nonviolent tactics
that had been used in the struggles of the past, he didn't
have trouble, say, interposing examples drawn from the civil
rights movement with examples drawn from the movement's
segregationist foes. There's no doubt his own sympathies
were with the black protesters, but he was happy to borrow
tactical insights from forces he disagreed with, too.

Unlike Gandhi, Sharp has never led a revolution of his own
-- though he has advised dissidents in hotspots ranging from
Burma to the West Bank to the Baltic states. But his work
attracted attention just as the world saw a series of
nonviolent revolutions whose leaders were rarely Gandhian:
uprisings against the Shah in Iran, Baby Doc Duvalier in
Haiti, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the Soviet
puppet states in Eastern Europe. Sharp's more hard-nosed
style was ascendant.

And then there was Otpor. More to the point, there were the
revolts that followed in Otpor's wake, led by groups that
modeled themselves directly on the Serbs: Pora ("It's Time")
in Ukraine, Kmara ("Enough") in Georgia, Zvakwana ("Enough
is Enough") in Zimbabwe. This was the third wave. Otpor had
learned from Sharp and his circle -- retired Col. Robert
Helvey, formerly of the U.S. Army and later of Sharp's
Albert Einstein Institution, trained some of its activists a
few months before the general strike -- and it discovered
useful tactics on its own, too. (When Otpor had its first
exposure to Helvey's training and Sharp's books, the group
already had 30,000 members.)

After Milosevic was deposed, the same faces started to
surface in different countries, spreading potent tactics and
skills as they created a sort of People Power International.
Between the direct links, the similar slogans, the use of
foreign funds, and the fact that so many of the target
governments were friendly to Russia's nationalist regime,
conspiracy theories began to fly, all of them hinging on the
idea that these revolts were simply exported from the West.

When you look at those theories closely, they fall apart.
Without any guns to fall back on, a movement needs strong
local support to succeed; groups that depend on foreign
patrons are the groups most likely to lose. "Belarus and
Zimbabwe are very clear negative models," says Popovic. "If
you have international organizations picking among the
opposition, selecting their favorites, not cooperating among
each other, and micromanaging -- this is the worst way to
help the organization."

But there is one grain of truth to those conspiracy yarns.
There is a core group of activists using every method they
can -- how-to manuals, hands-on training, educational films,
even a video game that simulates a nonviolent revolution --
to spread the know-how necessary to overthrow a dictator.
And for the most part, they aren't afraid to get help from
western governments and NGOs, even if they're apt to turn
around and oppose those same states' policies in other
contexts. Their style is the style of a hip young
entrepreneur, savvy to the power of buzz and branding. You
can see it on display in Nonviolent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points.

Lest I take the business comparison too far, I should note
that Milivojevic believes his book's "'business models'
aren't actually business models. They're social science
models that the business community had adapted," and which
political rebels can now adapt as well. But the Otpor
generation does have a more capitalistic cast than, say,
A.J. Muste, who cut his teeth in the labor movement. It's no
surprise that when The New Republic profiled Peter Ackerman,
a Drexel Burnham trader turned co-founder of the
International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, it headlined
the piece "Regime Change, Inc."

No one will mistake Nonviolent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points
for The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but the
authors hope it will reach an audience not ordinarily
inclined to read tomes on nonviolent strategy. "The idea is
to get the book into as many hands as possible, as quickly
as possible," Milivojevic says. It is being distributed both
in paperback and on disc -- the latter form ideal for, say,
quietly smuggling the text from South Africa to Zimbabwe --
and it can be downloaded for free at the CANVAS website.
[http://www.canvasopedia.org/content/special/index.htm ]
Translations are on the way: Dissidents in other countries
have already requested editions in Farsi, Russian, and
Spanish. If Otpor-style revolts break out in Tehran, Moscow,
or Bogotá, don't be surprised.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is author of Rebels on the Air:
An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).