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CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE An Overview
Gene Sharp
EXAMPLES OF NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE
Many of the most dramatic and politically significant conflicts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been waged by nonviolent struggle. Some of these struggles have filled our television screens and front pages. We remember the Solidarity struggles in Poland in the 1980s; the disintegration of the dictatorships in Czechoslovakia and East Germany in 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall; the successful defiance of the attempted hardline coup in the Soviet Union in 1991; and the undermining of the Milosovic regime in Serbia in 2000. We also remember the brave student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, as well as the earlier mass demonstrations and the killings in 1988 in Burma. Less often we remember that little Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania waged nonviolent struggles and won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Also, the African strikes, student boycotts, and defiance were major factors in the collapse of the apartheid system in South Africa.
It was nonviolent struggle that ended the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines in 1986. The civil rights campaigns with boycotts, sit-ins, bus rides, and marches shook legalized segregation in the US South in the 1950s and 1960s. Czech and Slovak noncooperation and defiance held off full Soviet control for eight months following the August 1968 invasion. General strikes and noncooperation were major weapons in two phases of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956–1957. Still earlier in the twentieth century were the successful nonviolent insurrections against military dictators in El Salvador and Guatemala in 1944 and the remarkable Norwegian nonviolent resistance by teachers and others during the Nazi occupation. In 1943 wives of arrested Jewish men with great courage massed in the streets of Berlin until their husbands were finally released.
More recently, the predominantly nonviolent revolutions against long-entrenched autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011 launched the Arab Spring. These struggles were stunning in their mass mobilization, nonviolent discipline, fearlessness, and speed.
Such struggles go further back, not only to the struggles Gandhi led in India for independence and social justice, not only to the women’s suffrage movements in several countries, but also to the labor union strikes for recognition and improved working conditions. These struggles have not required people to become believers in moral nonviolence, to be saints, to die, or to become or to follow a charismatic leader. Sometimes it is even impossible to identify the “leader,” because the action is conducted in a disciplined way by groups without prominent individual leaders.
Of course, there have been important nonviolent struggles that were ill reported or neglected by our media of public communication. These cases include the nine-year nonviolent movement of noncooperation in Kosovo, which under certain conditions could have been so successfully concluded as to make the later war and military intervention quite unnecessary.
Nonviolent action probably goes as far back as the first human beings. We have long possessed the human capacity to be stubborn, to refuse to do what we are told, and to persist in doing what has been forbidden to us. That capacity, when applied by groups of people, can become nonviolent strug
gle. There have also been prophets, saints, and others who have espoused rejection of violence for moral or religious reasons. Such injunctions have also been important in many situations, but they are a different phenomenon. The two phenomena should not be confused.
Nonviolent struggle has mostly been used by people who otherwise would have used violence. However, for various reasons, they have recognized that the technique of nonviolent action offered them significant advantages over violence, including greater chances of success. Usually their opponents have had vastly superior military capacity. Often the potential resisters understood that although there likely would be casualties during the nonviolent struggle, the numbers of wounded and dead during violent struggles and the extent of physical destruction are always vastly greater. They may also have recognized that although in a violent struggle the fighting forces are usually only able-bodied young men, potentially the whole population can participate in a nonviolent struggle.
With few exceptions, the people who have chosen to resist with these nonviolent weapons have seen them to be the most practical way to conduct their struggle. In these cases, the nonviolent character of the resistance has been simply a requirement for the effectiveness of this type of conflict. These situations undoubtedly constitute the vast majority of the applications of nonviolent struggle.
This phenomenon of nonviolent struggle has been demonstrated to be very powerful. Yet the understanding of it has been very limited. Far too frequently, the reporting has lacked perceptiveness, and the commentaries have been superficial or erroneous. Both reporting and analyses can be improved for future nonviolent struggles. For that improvement to occur, it is essential that reporters and commentators understand this technique more accurately and also have some basic insight into its nature and modes of operation.
DEFINITION OF NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE
These struggles have not been unique. This type of action has spanned many cultures, traditions, circumstances, and religions. Throughout human history, a multitude of conflicts have been waged in which one side has fought by psychological, social, economic, or political methods, or a combination of these, against opponents able and willing to apply violent repression.
These types of action are identified by what people have done or are doing, not by what they believe. In many cases, the people who are using these methods believe violence to be perfectly justified in moral or religious terms. However, for the specific conflict they currently face, they have selected methods that do not include violence. Only rarely does a group or a leader have a personal belief in a philosophy or religion that espouses rejection of violence as a principle. Nevertheless, a struggle conducted with nonviolent methods because of pragmatic or even accidental reasons may become viewed as acting in a morally superior way.
Belief that violence violates a moral or religious principle does not constitute nonviolent action. Nor does the simple absence of physical violence, as in passivity or submission, mean that nonviolent action is occurring. The type of activity employed identifies the technique of nonviolent action, not the simple absence of violence. It is also widely taken for granted that nonviolent struggle by its nature usually takes much time to succeed, whereas violent conflict produces successes quickly. Both claims are factually false.
There are three main types of activity that constitute nonviolent action. At least 198 specific methods have been identified. The first large class is called nonviolent protest and persuasion. These are forms of activity in which the practitioners are expressing opinions by symbolic actions to show their support or disapproval of an action, a policy, a group, or a government, for example. Many specific methods or forms of action fall into this category. These include written declaration, petition, leafleting, picketing, wearing of symbols, symbolic sound, vigil, singing, march, mock funeral, protest meeting, silence, and turning one’s back. Such activities may be termed nonviolent protest. They do not constitute the full range of nonviolent action or nonviolent struggle. In many political situations, these methods are quite mild, but under a highly repressive regime, such actions may be dramatic challenges and require great courage.
The second class of methods is noncooperation—an extremely large class that may take social, economic, and political forms. In these methods, the people refuse to continue usual forms of cooperation or initiate new forms. The effect of such noncooperation by its nature is more disruptive of the established relationships and the operating system than are the methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion. The extent of that disruption depends on the system within which the action occurs, the importance of the activity in which people are refusing to engage, the specific type of noncooperation, which persons and groups are refusing cooperation, how many of them, and how long the noncooperation can continue. The methods of social noncooperation include social boycott, excommunication, student strike, stay-at-home, and collective disappearance.
The forms of economic noncooperation are grouped under (1) economic boycotts and (2) strikes. The methods of economic boycott include a consumers’ boycott, rent withholding, refusal to let or sell property, lockout, withdrawal of bank deposits, revenue refusal, and international trade embargo. Labor strikes include protest strike, prisoners’ strike, slowdown strike, general strike, and economic shutdown.
Political noncooperation is a much larger subclass. It includes withholding or withdrawal of allegiance, boycott of elections, boycott of government employment or positions, refusal to dissolve existing institutions, reluctant and slow compliance, disguised disobedience, civil disobedience, judicial noncooperation, deliberate inefficiency and selective noncooperation by enforcement agents, noncooperation by constituent government units, and severance of diplomatic relations.
The methods of nonviolent intervention all actively disrupt the normal operation of policies or the system by deliberate interference—psychological, physical, social, economic, or political. Among the large number of methods in this class are the fast, sit-in, nonviolent raid, nonviolent obstruction, nonviolent occupation, overloading facilities, alternative social institution, alternative communication system, reverse strike, stay-in strike, nonviolent land seizure, defiance of blockades, seizure of assets, selective patronage, alternative economic institution, overloading administrative system, seeking imprisonment, and dual sovereignty and parallel government.
These identified methods have developed in the past as a result of the imagination and ingenuity of participants in conflicts who were conducting their struggle without violence. The use of these or many other similar methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention constitutes applications of the technique of nonviolent action. Some of these methods can be employed as a substitute for violence against other groups in one’s society or against groups in another society, against one’s own government or against another government.
Many times, only the methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion are used in attempts to influence opinions. Such action may affect the moral authority or legitimacy of the opponents. However, those are the weaker methods. Many of the methods of noncooperation are much more powerful in that they reduce or sever the supply of opponents’ sources of power. These methods require significant numbers of participants and usually the participation of groups and institutions in the refusal of cooperation.
The methods of nonviolent intervention usually require fewer numbers of participants but are generally, in the short run at least, more disruptive of the status quo. These methods are, however, likely to be met with extreme repression, which the participants must be prepared to withstand while persisting in their nonviolent defiance. Unless the numbers of participants are extremely large, it may not be possible to maintain the application of these methods for long periods of time.
Those who plan to engage in a nonviolent struggle must choose the methods they will use with extreme care. To be most effective, the methods will need to be chosen and implemented in accordance with a gran
d strategy for the overall struggle. The methods should strike at the opponents’ vulnerabilities, make use of the resisters’ strengths, and be used in combination with other methods in ways that are mutually supportive.
The effects of the use of the diverse methods of nonviolent action vary widely. Such effects depend on the nature of the system within which they are applied, the type of the opponents’ regime, the extent and proficiency of their application, the normal roles of the persons and groups applying them in the operation of the system, the skill of the groups in using nonviolent action, the presence or absence of the use of wise strategies in the conflict, and, finally, the relative ability of the nonviolent opposition to withstand repression from the opponents and persist in their noncooperation and defiance.
The nature of the opponents’ regime is obviously important, including its means of administration and repression and its competency in responding to nonviolent struggle. However, these characteristics are not by themselves decisive in the face of skilled and powerful nonviolent struggle. Often the roles of third parties may also be significant.
The most important reason that even dictatorships are vulnerable to nonviolent struggle is that, contrary to common perceptions, all hierarchical systems and all governments, no matter how dictatorial, are dependent for their necessary sources of power on the populations and the constituent or subordinate groups and institutions over which they claim dominance. The power of any regime, including dictatorships and even totalitarian systems, will be determined by the extent and degree to which it has free access to its needed sources of power. These include acceptance of its authority or legitimacy, human resources, skills and knowledge, intangible factors, material resources, and sanctions or punishments.
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