Des de les protestes sobre el canvi climàtic i els drets dels immigrants fins a Ocupa Wall Street, la Primavera Àrab i #BlackLivesMatter, una nova generació està desencadenant accions d’estratègia no-violenta per influir en el debat públic i forçar el canvi polític. Quan els moviments en massa apareixen a la pantalla dels nostres televisors, els mitjans s’entesten a definir-los com a espontanis i imprevisibles. En aquest llibre, però, Mark Engler i Paul Engler analitzen l’art que s’amaga darrere d’aquests esclats de protesta i examinen els principis bàsics que s’han utilitzat per provocar i guiar els moments transformadors. Amb idees incisives d’activistes contemporanis, així com noves revelacions sobre l’activitat de figures revolucionàries com Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Gene Sharp i Frances Fox Piven, els germans Engler demostren que les persones amb pocs recursos i poca influència convencional són les que organitzen les convulsions que estan transformant la política contemporània. 'Manual de desobediència civil' demostra que la no-violència es pot utilitzar com a mètode de conflicte polític, disrupció i escalada, i argumenta que si els esclats de rebel·lió sempre ens agafen per sorpresa, deixem passar l’oportunitat de comprendre un fenomen crucial, i també d’aprofitar el seu poder per crear el canvi necessari.

Political analysts Mark and Paul Engler uncover the organization and well-planned strategies behind outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest. The author's trace the evolution of civil resistance, providing new insights into the contributions of early experimenters such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., groundbreaking theorists such as Gene Sharp and Frances Fox Piven, and contemporary practitioners who have toppled repressive regimes.

This is a pretty interesting book that mostly tells a bunch of stories about what it calls "momentum-driven organizing" - basically large strategic nonviolent protests. This is laid out as separate from "structure-based" organizing, in the tradition of unions, community organizations, etc. The book argues that both of these traditions are necessary to create lasting and meaningful social change, and can complement or detract from each other depending on a variety of factors.

It lays out a few tenets for successful campaigns and goes through several case studies, including Otpor, ACT UP, the SCLC, and others.

I found this book informative and inspirational - it really helped focus my thinking about the limited amount of activism I have done, and will continue to shape my thinking going into the future. ( )

Both an intellectual history of strategic nonviolence and a tour through what makes it in/effective, this is a timely read. To win, activists don’t need to convert their direct opponents, and it can be counterproductive to try to love your enemy; instead, you convince others to support you by provoking conflicts that make onlookers sympathize and join. The authors contrast the organization ideology, as theorized by Saul Alinsky, that looks to build political strength within existing structures and sustain itself through small victories on concrete policy issues, with the movement ideology, which looks to create transformational change, as theorized by Frances Fox Piven. Piven argues that poor people especially have few resources for regular political activism; their power instead largely comes from the ability to withdraw consent and disrupt the regular operations of the system—rent strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, parades through streets. More modern theorists include Erica Chenoweth, who has calculated that active engagement of 3.5 percent of the population is enough to make big social changes. Building that committed minority has to be a priority; it’s through them that movements change public opinion. Active engagement means (1) showing up for marches, phone banks, etc.; (2) voting and prioritizing the movement’s issues in voting; and (3) persuading others through conversation/argument/action in whatever way is available to them.

The goal isn’t to persuade everyone, especially not with kindness—ACT UP, for example, was offensive to many (they interrupted meetings and threw blood on people) but still put AIDS on the public agenda, and a majority of whites thought that the Birmingham protests were a bad idea. ACT UP’s outrageous tactics kept the movement in the public eye, exposing the fundamental injustices of official policy, which made the backlash ultimately less important than the cultural change. Indeed, backlash was part of a necessary polarization in which fence-sitters decided which way they were going to jump, activists became more commmitted, and opponents also became more extreme and isolated from the mainstream. Having a radical group also made the moderate groups seem more reasonable. (The scary thing is how much of this the right in the US has understood, I hope not too late for us; post-November 2016, it’s pretty distressing now to read how conservatives are in an “impossible bind” because anti-immigrant statements energize the base but turn off more mainstream voters.)

It was particularly interesting to read about contemporary activists’ reactions to MLK in Birmingham and Gandhi’s Salt March—in both cases, they accepted tiny substantive concessions and activists thought these were defeats, but the effect on the public agenda vastly overwhelmed the minimal substance. The perception of success can be more important than success itself, which is why it can be useful for the movement to set and exceed its own goals (X marchers, a bigger march next year, etc.). Media coverage matters a lot, too. Successfully grabbing the spotlight often requires disruption of the usual, sacrifice of some sort by the protestors (such as going to jail; suffering makes onlookers pick a side and galvanizes previously lukewarm supporters), and escalation (bigger protests, bigger demands). This can produce serious injuries or even deaths, but as one advocate of strategic nonviolent protest pointed out, “Ché Guevara didn’t abandon guerilla warfare because people were getting killed.” Helpful to all of this is a “culture of mass training,” where new members are instructed on the relevant principles. Bill Moyers, believe it or not, also wrote about the importance of psychology: activists have to feel like they’re doing something, especially in the down times after big protests where the euphoria has dwindled.

Movements that use violence are empirically substantially less likely to succeed in the long term, but there’s an important caveat: what matters is whether the wider society considers an action to be violent. And we know which groups get the benefit of the doubt about whether they’re violent and which are perceived as violent or incipiently violent just because they exist in public. The authors argue that because violence can taint an entire cause, it’s not a good idea to mix and match tactics. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be more radical subsets of activists—ACT UP wasn’t violent, it was just a lot more confrontational.

How do you go from movement to lasting change? Not everyone can, as Egyptian protestors discovered to their sorrow. The authors suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood, though well established as opposition, didn’t lead the protests against Mubarak because they were doing ok under the existing system—they had something to lose by being more confrontational. But once Mubarak was gone, the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational strength allowed it to influence the new governing bodies that were put into place. ( )

This book is a comprehensive evaluation of the tools and strategies used in nonviolent movements, whether they be to overthrow dictators or to advance social change in representative democracies. Much of this book is based on the work of Gene Sharp (who actually passed away during the time I was reading this), who published his theories on nonviolence in 1973's The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Enger illustrates nonviolent movements in action through cases of the satyagraha movement that lead to India's independence from Great Britain, and the tactics and campaigns of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the American Civil Rights Movement.

Two other figures are also examined for their contributions to the theory and strategy of nonviolent movements. The first is Saul Alinsky, whose book Rules for Radicals (1971), served as a guidebook for organizing community organizations along nonpartisan and ideologically diverse lines towards pragmatic results achieved over the long term. A countering theory comes from France Fox Piven, who along with Richard A. Cloward published Poor People's Movements (1977), which argues that the most vulnerable communities lack the resources to manage long-term campaigns or gain political influence without using disruptive tactics such as boycotts, sit-ins, traffic tie-ups, and strikes. From Piven's point of view, the organizations created by Alinsky's organizing can become too complacent or risk averse once they've established themselves and made ties with political leaders. From Alinsky's point of view, the disruptive movements championed by Piven often fail to make lasting social change and run out of steam.

There are obvious beneficial ideas and strategies that can be drawn from each theory, and Engler argues that a hybrid approach was successful in India, the Civil Rights Movement, and more recently by Otpor!, the Serbian resistance to the tyranny of Slobodan Milošević. Otpor! was a decentralized movement which made it more difficult for the Milošević regime to target leaders for retribution, or for leaders to become too comfortably entangled in the government to the point that would not want to risk taking action. Despite the decentralized approach, Otpor! maintained strict guidelines on action known as frontloading that helped maintain consistency on message and strategy. Many Otpor! actions came in the form of satirical street theater performances which doubled as recruitment by inviting interested passersby to attend intensive training on nonviolence.

Engler also relates cases of how nonviolent movements are working in the contemporary United States. Marriage equality became reality in the United States not because of a Supreme Court decision, but because an organized movement worked for decades to shift public opinion. Movements can be divisive by design with ACT UP presented an example of a group who used provocative and polarizing direct actions that brought attention to people suffering from AIDS that could not be achieved by more pragmatic organizations who feared losing the few gains already achieved by the LGBT community.

This is an important book that summarizes the history of nonviolent movements, breaks down key tactics and strategy, and serves as a blueprint for future nonviolent revolutions. I think massive nonviolent movements will be vital to address the severe social and political issues we're facing in the 21st century and recommend that everyone read this book to get a sense of what needs to be done.

Favorite Passages:

This book is concerned with a specific phenomenon: momentum-driven mass mobilization. It contends that those who have most carefully studied these mobilizations—examining how to construct and sustain scenarios of widespread protest—come out of a tradition of strategic nonviolence. It argues that political observers watching the democratic upheavals of the twenty-first century should incorporate this tradition’s insights into their understanding of how social transformation happens. Those wishing to bring such upheavals into existence, meanwhile, do well to marry these insights with their existing approaches to leveraging change. - p. 3

Nonviolence is often written off as obsolete, an idea that has been mostly forgotten and is largely irrelevant in global affairs. Yet, every time it is cast aside, strategic nonviolent action seems to reassert itself as a historic force. Without taking up weapons, and with little money and few traditional resources, people forming nonviolent movements succeed in upending the terms of public debate and shifting the direction of their countries’ politics. Nonviolence in this form is not passive. It is a strategy for confrontation. - p. 3

Gene Sharp documented how unarmed uprisings could produce remarkable and sometimes counterintuitive results. Whereas violent rebellions play to the strengths of dictatorships—which are deft at suppressing armed attacks and using security challenges to justify the creation of a police state—nonviolent action often catches these regimes off guard. Through what Sharp calls “political jiu-jitsu,” social movements can turn repression into a weakness for those in power. Violent crackdowns against unarmed protests end up exposing the brutality of a ruling force, undermining its legitimacy, and, in many cases, creating wider public unwillingness to cooperate with its mandates. - p. 6

Walker and Cotton were not trivializing the violence of the police dogs. They took the risks of the campaign very seriously. As King had contended, the point of creating a public crisis in Birmingham was not to introduce Connor or other authorities to violence. Rather, it was to expose the violence routinely inflicted upon the black community under Jim Crow segregation. “We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive,” King wrote. “We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.”54 Walker and Cotton knew that the attacking police dogs would serve as a choice representation of the much more pervasive violence that flourished in the city. In his tactical foolishness, Bull Connor had become an ally in exposing the brutality of white supremacy. And he was just beginning. - p. 22

But in democratic countries with representative institutions, the conventional wisdom is that the process of altering the status quo looks very different. It means working through officials in high office. It requires prolonged and often painstaking back-room negotiations between various interest groups. And when reforms are achieved, they are never so stark or dramatic as a dictator’s fall. Or are they? As it turns out, this accepted vision of how political change occurs has serious flaws. At best, it presents an incomplete picture of how progress in our society is won. At worst, it is a wrong-headed story that stubbornly conceals the way in which many of the most significant gains of the past century have been secured, from women’s suffrage, to labor laws, to civil rights. It misses how people with few material resources and little access to conventional powerbrokers have sometimes been able to bring about transformations that mainstream politicians consider to be absurd and impractical—right up until the moment when these changes become common sense. - p. 87

In a democratic nation, monolithic thinking likewise trains citizens to focus on the top. The vast majority of people are taught early on to hold this view. Most history books chart the rise and fall of business tycoons and ambitious politicians. The message is further reinforced when the bulk of our political reporters spend their time writing about the activities of these same actors. Legislative victories are credited to the policymakers who sign the final bills into law rather than to any movements that might have made passage of the bills possible in the first place. The public absorbs this bias, conflating the process of democratic reform with the decisions of charismatic leaders who manipulate the course of the nation’s affairs. - p. 95

If there is a common trait in the most prominent movements of the past century—whether they involved efforts to end child labor, redefine the role of women in political life, or bring down an apartheid regime—it is that they took up causes that established powerbrokers regarded as sure losers and won them by creating possibilities that had not previously existed. As the pillars give way, barriers long seen as too daunting to be overcome suddenly appear surmountable. - p. 114

Momentum-driven organizing necessarily places a greater focus on the symbolic. In their mass mobilizations, activists in this tradition need not abandon a push for concrete gains entirely. But instead of measuring their results only by incremental wins at the bargaining table, they use other metrics as well: movement in opinion polls, growing numbers of active participants, the ability to generate resources through grassroots channels, and the responsiveness of different pillars of support to their mobilizations. Organizers of civil resistance cannot be content with empty declarations of victory or with merely “speaking truth to power.” They must be hard headed in assessing their progress in winning over advocates and sympathizers from outside their immediate networks, always guarding against tendencies to become insular “voices in the wilderness.” - p. 140

Practitioners of nonviolent conflict have regularly shown themselves willing to be intentionally divisive, making use of a complex yet critical phenomenon known as “polarization.” In doing this, they grapple with an undeniable tension: broad-based support is vital if campaigns of civil resistance are to prevail. And yet many of the tactics of nonviolent disruption tend to be unpopular. People prefer calm speech and reasoned dialogue to the ruckus of confrontational protest. In many cases, creating a galvanizing crisis around an issue involves inconveniencing members of the general public, potentially alienating the very people that advocates want to win over. Moreover, when a vocal minority speaks out, it can inspire its most ardent enemies to begin organizing in response. Notwithstanding these dangers, the experience of social movements—from the civil rights movement in the 1960s, to ACT UP in the 1980s and 1990s, to the immigrant rights movement in the new millennium—shows that polarization can also be a powerful friend. 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. - p. 199

With the passage of time, successful movements are often celebrated as heroic and noble. But, while they are still active, their tactics are never beloved by all. Accepting that reality is part of using conflict and disruption as tools for change. - p. 224

The need for disruptive movements to reignite on a persistent basis raises the question of how even very committed people can sustain their efforts over the course of decades and generations. One way to do this is to build communities that reach beyond the realm of traditional political struggle. Although the building of alternative communities and institutions can be a potent force in social movements, it can also present challenges. Activists have long debated the question: Should we fight the system or “be the change we wish to see”? Should we push for transformation within existing societal structures, or should we model in our own lives a different set of social and political relationships that might someday form the basis of a new society? Going back centuries, different movements have incorporated elements of each approach, sometimes in harmonious ways and other times in ways that create conflicts between groups. - p. 271

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