An 82-year-old nun is among a group of peace activists who break into a nuclear power plant to show how insecure nuclear weapons actually are.
Heather McCuen tells people to stop thinking “endless protest” will help a movement win. It’s about strategy, not just tactics, right?
Swedish activists drop teddy bears over Belarus to protest human rights abuses, resulting in the sacking of two Belarusian generals.
Al Jazeera’s defection tracker. I want a global one.
Tens of thousands of Russians protest, calling for Putin’s removal after harassment of oppositionists.
YoSoy132 movement is fired up (and organized) to take on the Mexican media establishment and its links to politics. Check out some of their slogans.
Nonviolent activists in Syria show remarkable discipline, resilience, and creativity in the midst of bloodshed.
Palestinians express greater confidence in nonviolent resistance as a method of struggle.
Draft-dodging takes its toll on the Syrian government’s capacity to repress.
Students in Quebec borrow a tactic from the Chilean playbook (first used against Allende, then against Pinochet).
Barbara Walter and I have started a new blog called Political Violence @ a Glance. Check out the About page to see, well, what we’re about. We have a great group of contributors lined up, a handful of posts already published, and plenty more on the way.
Feel free to cruise by.
–reposted from The Monkey Cage–
In case you missed it, the Meta-Activism Project is crowd-sourcing a new data set called “Civil Resistance 2.0: 198 Nonviolent Methods Upgraded.” Check it out here.
Soon they’ll also have a Global Digital Activism Dataset (click here for summary infographics), which identifies cases of digital activism around the world.
Both of these data sets are the first of their kind and worth checking out.
Also, I will be returning from an extended hiatus soon. Travel and writing deadlines have kept me away from the blog, but I’ll be reviving it soon.
So I have recently become aware of a number of cases where unarmed civilians have attempted to confront, disrupt, and/or expel armed non-state actors from their locales. Generally these civilians are not “pro-state;” they are often just as critical of the state as they are critical of the armed groups they oppose. Their primary aim is to end violent bloodshed, and to eliminate the institutions and practices in their cities or villages that perpetuate the bloodshed.
Such attempts are more complex (and perhaps more difficult) than typical anti-state campaigns. They involve confronting “invisible” adversaries who are not accountable to any particular constituencies, making it very difficult to identify and disrupt their pillars of support. Moreover, the most important factor in assuring success against a state adversary–broad-based participation–does not necessarily provide the same kind of leverage over non-state actors as it does vis-a-vis state actors.
Nevertheless, some movements around the world have succeeded (or made progress) in depriving violent armed groups the means with which to exploit or oppress them. Here are some examples:
A number of interesting questions arise. Under what conditions do civilians use unarmed methods to oppose and disrupt violence by non-state actors? Under what conditions, and by what mechanisms, do such efforts succeed? I know of a few people, like Oliver Kaplan, who have studied such phenomena. But it is clear that much more research must be done to understand how the dynamics of civil resistance change in environments like these.
If you are an activist in an authoritarian regime today, you need a plan–and a good one. With regimes threatening to drive pro-democracy resistance movements underground, it would be useful for opposition leaders to know their options, the different risk profiles of those options, and the variety of potentially effective methods they could use to avoid repression while keeping the momentum of the movement going.
Back in the days when I worked in emergency medical services (a long time ago), I participated in mass casualty-incident scenarios to learn how to effectively deploy our resources, anticipate and deal with curveballs (since nothing ever goes according to plan), and figure out how to save the most lives when real incidents occurred. Although simulations almost never go the way you plan, they give you opportunities to respond to unplanned events, which turns out to be as important as having a good plan in the first place. Moreover, lots of creative thinking can emerge out of these types of sessions. Well-designed red team/blue team exercises can help people to experience and prepare for a number of different scenarios without having to experience any of the adverse consequences of making mistakes in real life.
Military, marketing, and IT personnel often spend considerable time and energy on red team/blue team “games,” or “battlefield scenarios” that they use to map out strategy and to anticipate and respond to unforeseen events in constructive ways. The “red team” is often the one hatching up a plot to engage the opponent (e.g., a terrorist attack against a the US), and the “blue team” is given limited information with which to stop the red team within a given time frame (e.g., a way to thwart the attack). Red team/blue team exercises allow officers and strategists to develop a skill that is crucial for a successful nonviolent resistance: the ability to outmaneuver the opponent under adverse conditions.
Militaries and corporations often have massive resources and personnel to devote to simulations. They sometimes fly in “subject experts” to help design and implement the scenarios. Now, most civilians in most countries don’t have backgrounds in conducting red team/blue team exercises, nor are they in a position to “practice” nonviolent resistance in the streets or to fly in experienced activists to help them develop these skills. But when the stakes are high, as they are in Syria and many other places today, a few big strategic mistakes could end the movement.
How can nonviolent resistance movements strategize without subjecting themselves to detection or repression?
One way do so is by playing People Power: The Game of Civil Resistance. Developed by York Zimmerman and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, this game allows people to develop a scenario where their opponent in the game approximates their opponent in real life. The site says:
People Power is about politics, about strategy and about social change. As a leader of a popular movement you fight against tough adversaries who control the police, the army and bureaucracy, even the media. The only weapon in your hand is your strategic skill and ingenuity.
The game can be used by activists to develop strategic skills and experience in facing a militarily superior adversary. Part of the idea is to allow people to get used to making strategic mistakes (like choosing the same, predictable method over and over again, or failing to communicate the campaign’s message to a wider audience) against brutal opponents without winding up in prison.
It’s $10, but they will make exceptions.
Now, importantly, I wouldn’t suggest that playing a video game (if they could even access it in the first place) is going to improve oppositions’ chances against brutal dictators. That would be an especially arrogant and irritating claim.
But in the long term, I do think that strategic planning (and strategic thinking) is a crucial element to a successful nonviolent resistance. If activists today can improve those skills by playing a game, they should. If they don’t find a tool like this useful, they should invest some time in figuring out another way to do it. As Winston Churchill said, “Those who plan do better than those who do not plan even though they rarely stick to their plan.” He would know.
Julia Bacha talks about nonviolent conflict in the Palestinian Territories. A must-see (h/t to Mary King). Check out Julia’s award-winning film “Budrus” here.
