The trifecta of civil resistance: unity, planning, disciplineHardy Merriman [1] 

Three attributes can make the difference between success and failure for nonviolent movements around the world: unity, planning, and nonviolent discipline.What makes nonviolent civil resistance movements effective?If we accept the axiom that in politics “power is never given, it is always taken”, the conclusion necessarily is that historic nonviolent movements were successful because, somehow, they wielded power that was greater than that of their opponents.This conclusion conflicts with, and opens up a direct line of questioning about, the widely-held assumption that power ultimately originates from control of material resources and capacity for violence.  If this assumption were entirely correct, nonviolent movements would categorically fail against better-armed and -resourced opponents.  What history reveals, however, is a timeline of many successful nonviolent struggles, extending back for more than a century, with protagonists and causes as diverse as humanity itself.  To list some examples:

In the 1930s and 1940s, Indians won their independence by engaging in massive noncooperation (economic boycotts, school boycotts, strikes, tax refusal, civil disobedience, resignations) that threatened to make India ungovernable and eventually convinced the British to leave;

During the 1950s and 1960s, the US Civil Rights Movement won equal rights through nonviolent campaigns such as the Montgomery bus boycotts and the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins that exploited weaknesses in the institutionalized segregation system and attracted supporters nationwide;

From 1965-1970, the United Farm Workers union grew from a small, practically unfunded local organization to a national presence through their successful use of strikes and boycotts against California grape vineyards;

In 1986 in the Philippines, activists joined with military defectors to rally millions to demonstrate against the US-backed dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.  With his options quickly diminishing in light of this nonviolent uprising, Marcos fled the country;

In 1988, Chileans overcame the fear instilled by the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and campaigned and demonstrated against him.  These actions so undermined Pinochet’s support that even his fellow military junta members were no longer loyal to him at the peak of the crisis, and he was forced from power;

From 1980-1989, Poles organized an independent trade union as part of the Solidarity movement and took back their country from Soviet rule;

In 1989, protests and strikes that became known as the Velvet Revolution led to a peaceful transition from communism in Czechoslovakia.  Similar actions led to peaceful transitions in East Germany, and in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in 1991;

Strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience and external sanctions beginning in the 1980s played a major role in ending apartheid in South Africa in the early 1990s;

In the following decade, Serbs (2000), Georgians (2003), and Ukrainians (2004) ended autocratic rule by mobilizing to prevent or resist fraudulent election results;

In 2005, Lebanese ended the occupation of their country by Syrian troops through massive nonviolent demonstrations;

In 2006, Nepalis engaged in mass disobedience and forced the restoration of civilian rule;

From 2007-2009, in the midst of violent insurgency and in the face of a military ruler, Pakistani lawyers, civil society groups, and ordinary citizens successfully pushed for the restoration of an independent judiciary and a repeal of state of emergency laws.

 

If people do not obey, rulers cannot rule

These and other movements of civil resistance succeeded because they were based on a fundamental insight about power: that nearly all institutions, organizations, and systems in a society depend on the ongoing consent, cooperation, and obedience of large numbers of ordinary people.  Therefore, if people choose to withdraw their consent and cooperation in an organized and strategic way, they can wield coercive power.  When people do not obey, then presidents, mayors, CEOs, generals, and other “power holders” can no longer rule with unchecked power. Nonviolent tactics, such as strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, the establishment of parallel institutions, and literally hundreds of other creative actions, were the instruments used to do this.  They were not used necessarily for moral reasons, but rather for pragmatic ones.  Some who adopted civil resistance had seen similar strategies work in other countries or in their own histories, and recognized that this type of resistance had the best prospects of success of the options available to them.

Skills and conditions

Amidst these inspiring nonviolent movement victories, however, history and the contemporary world also offer examples of failed or inconclusive movements.  The world watched Poland’s and Czechoslovakia’s nonviolent revolutions in the same year that it saw the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the last decade, large numbers of people used nonviolent tactics in Burma, Zimbabwe, Egypt and Iran, but those movements' goals have not so far been achieved.  In the successful self-determination struggle in East Timor, civil resistance was indispensable, but while it has helped propel civilian-based movements against occupiers elsewhere—in Palestine, West Papua, Western Sahara and Tibet—those struggles remain unresolved.

What accounts for the discrepancies among these and other cases? The factors that made these and other movements succeed or fail is a subject on which reasonable and well-informed people can disagree.[1]  Each situation is highly complex and establishing direct causality is difficult at best.  The arguments I most often hear by scholars, journalists, and others are that the trajectories and outcomes of these and other predominantly nonviolent movements were largely determined by structures, conditions and exceptional circumstances in which each movement operated. For example, arguments have been made that nonviolent movements are effective only in societies in which an oppressor is unwilling to use lethal force.  Others may claim that certain economic criteria (i.e. economic ideology, income levels, wealth distribution, the presence of a middle class) and educational levels are critical for successful movements.  Still others claim that the role of superpowers and regional hegemons supersedes the importance of other variables in determining a movement’s outcome. The number of additional structures and conditions a person can cite—i.e. ethnic diversity, political and cultural history, population size, land area—are numerous, and to be sure, many of these conditions can influence the course of a given movement.As a counterpoint to structural and conditional factors are factors based on a movement’s skills in waging conflict, i.e. what academics call “agency”.  Skills and agency refer to those variables over which a movement has some control: what strategy of action the movement chooses; what language it uses to mobilize people and keep them involved; how it builds coalitions; where and how it targets its adversary; and a myriad of other decisions involved in engaging in civil resistance.In my view, these skill-based factors are often significantly underemphasized or overlooked by those who come into contact with and analyze nonviolent movements.  Why this is so is beyond the scope of this article, but one reason may be that people doubt or do not know the premise on which nonviolent action is based—that through shifts in collective behavior, power can be re-allocated from entrenched and oppressive adversaries to people’s movements. Instead, they assume that there must have been exogenous variables or extraordinary circumstances that made this possible in the cases in which it has occurred.However, we can respect the role of structures and conditions in influencing nonviolent movements' trajectories and outcomes without downplaying the importance of agency and skills.  Indeed, agency and skills make a difference, and in some cases have enabled movements to overcome, circumvent, or transform adverse conditions.The importance, and sometimes primacy, of skills and agency are considered common knowledge in other disciplines such as business or military thinking.  Why should nonviolent struggle be any different in this regard?  A military general or corporate CEO would laugh if they were told that strategy was of marginal importance to the outcome of their endeavors.  Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War would not be so well known if people thought the outcome of contests and contentious interactions were always foreordained by material conditions. 

To return then to the opening question of this article—what makes nonviolent movements effective?—we can start to find answers by looking at strategic choices and best practices gleaned from historic movements.  There are a variety of agency-based factors and skills that can influence a movement’s outcome, but (for the sake of simplicity) if we distill those down to a few essentials, three attributes of successful nonviolent movements emerge: unity, planning, and nonviolent discipline.

Unity, planning and discipline

At first glance the importance of such attributes may seem self-evident.  Yet the profundity of these attributes and their overarching implications sometimes are missed when one views movements at a predominantly tactical and granular level.  Each merits elaboration. Unity is important because nonviolent movements draw their strength from the participation of people in diverse sectors of society.  Put simply: numbers matter.  The more people a movement has supporting it, the greater its legitimacy, power, and tactical repertoire.  Successful movements therefore continually reach out to new groups in their societies, e.g. men and women; youth, adults, and elders; urban and rural populations; minorities; members of religious institutions; farmers, laborers, business people, and professionals; wealthy, middle class, and lower economic stratas; police, soldiers, and members of the judiciary, as well as other groups. Successful movements also continually reach out to their opponent’s supporters, understanding that one of the strengths of sustained civil resistance in the service of a unifying vision is the ability to induce loyalty shifts and defections among its opponent’s ranks.  For example, the South African anti-apartheid movement’s ongoing civic disruption combined with its call for national reconciliation was able to garner widespread support and create unity for the cause of change, even among some white supporters who had previously supported the apartheid state.Participants in nonviolent movements must also make complex decisions about the course their movements should take.  Strategic planning is of central importance in doing this.  Regardless of the merit of one’s cause or the morally indefensible acts of one’s opponent, oppression is usually not overcome solely through spontaneous and improvised acts of resistance, even if such acts are well-executed.  Instead, movements gain traction when they plan how civil resistance can be systematically organized and adopted by people in society to achieve targeted and focused goals.  

Deciding what tactics to use and how they should be sequenced; developing galvanizing propositions for change based on the aspirations and grievances of the people who the movement aims to represent; planning what individuals and groups to target with tactics and what short-, medium-, and long-term objectives to pursue; and building lines of communication so that coalitions can be negotiated and built are just some of the issues around which nonviolent movements must creatively strategize.  Doing so requires a holistic analysis of the situation in which the nonviolent struggle takes place.  As part of their planning process, effective movements formally or informally gather information, listen to people at the grassroots, and analyze themselves, their adversaries, and uncommitted third parties constantly through the course of a conflict.Finally, a strategy is only effective if it is executed in a disciplined way.  The largest risk for a failure of discipline in a nonviolent movement is that some members may become violent.  Therefore, nonviolent discipline—the ability of people to remain nonviolent, even in the face of provocations—is often continually instilled in participants.  There are practical reasons for this.  Violent incidents by members of a movement can dramatically reduce its legitimacy while giving the movement’s opponent an excuse to use repression.  Furthermore, a movement that is consistently nonviolent has a far greater chance of appealing to a broad range of potential allies—including even an adversary’s supporters—through the course of its struggle.A full exploration of these attributes could fill books, and the subject of nonviolent resistance merits and is continually receiving further systematic study.  Each movement that emerges adds a body of knowledge to the collective understanding of this phenomenon, yet there is still much about the art and science of this form of political and social action that remains to be mapped and developed. But these three attributes—unity, planning, and discipline—are timeless, and as such provide a general framework through which members and supporters of movements, as well as those who report and study them, can quickly assess a movement’s state.  Is it unified?  Does it have a plan?  Is it disciplined?   The actions of those who embody these principles in nonviolent action have already blazed a path towards a more peaceful and just world.  The future will be shaped by those who continue to do so. [1] For the purposes of this article, I am defining “successful” movements as those that achieve their stated objectives and “failed” movements as those that do not achieve their stated objectives.  There is a temporal element in this definition as well.  A successful movement may achieve its stated objective (i.e. the Orange movement in Ukraine in 2004) but challenges in ensuing years to that movement’s achievement may cause backsliding (for more information on the Ukraine case, see the November 17, 2010 article “The struggle after people power wins [16]” by Olena Tregub and Oksana Shulyar on openDemocracy). Conversely, a movement that fails to achieve its stated objective (i.e. the Chinese pro-democracy movement in 1989) may create collateral effects in ensuing years that constructively advance the movement’s cause (for more information on the China case, see the November 17, 2010 article “Repression’s Paradox in China [17]” by Lester Kurtz on openDemocracy). 

While not necessarily changing the classification of a specific movement as “successful” or “failed”, these subsequent effects can be powerful and therefore are noteworthy in their own regard.

 [23]

Civil resistance as deterrent to fracking: Part One, They shale not pass

Philippe Duhamel [1] 

Can we mobilize and prepare the towns threatened by hydraulic fracturing with action plans so well-devised, so widely and transparently publicized, that unconventional energy developers wouldn't dare enter? See  Part Two here [12].

It's win before you fight. Using an innovatively designed civil resistance campaign as a nonviolent deterrent, the people of Quebec have so far been successful in defending

their land against hydraulic fracturing. Over the course of three years, plans to drill some 20,000 shale gas wells along the St. Lawrence River, between Montreal and Quebec City, have been thwarted to the point of being recognized as a de facto moratorium on this form of extreme energy extraction. As an organizer who helped build this movement, I’m here to share some strategic insights and tactical ideas.

The battle planned

What level of preparedness does a resistance movement need to display before it can avoid the need to engage physically in nonviolent battle?

What constitutes a cost high enough to deter the fracking industry and the government officials it seduces? What kind of organizing does it take to prevent countrysides from being turned into industrial wastelands drenched in fracking contaminants, dotted with methane-spewing drilling rigs and carcinogen-emitting holding ponds, criss-crossed by 24/7 trucking operations over pipelines running everywhere?

Can we mobilize and prepare the towns under threat with action plans so well-devised, so widely and transparently publicized, that unconventional energy developers wouldn't dare enter?

How many organized communities would be needed, each ready to sustain protracted action of the kind the world has seen unfold in the West Sussex village of Balcombe [13]?

This idea of a citizenry so fiercely indignant, so powerfully organized it could actually shield its land from the fangs of a strong, wealthy and inherently polluting industry is what inspired an emergent, integrated civil resistance design.

What the frack?

Sometime around 2007, stealthily, in typical blitzkrieg fashion as they do everywhere, unconventional energy developers moved into Quebec to test drill and frack for shale gas, appearing

Image: © Marie-Neige Besner.

right in the middle of people's fields and backyards. In 2009, environmental organizations issued their first few statements. In 2010, alarmed and intensely worried citizens started calling journalists, who found a compelling story: articulate, undeserving victims, and a secretive, maladroit, and insatiable industry. The issue suddenly got front page ink and prime time coverage.

Citizens from rural areas soon found each other and started organizing. Artists and celebrities, some of whom owned properties in targeted areas,  got involved. They helped further alert and mobilize public opinion through a viral video. An online petition gathered 130,000 names. Experienced activists informed by civil resistance theory and practice (including this author) felt compelled to join, moved by the outrage they felt, and what they feared might happen.

In January 2010, the leadership of the main labour and environmental organizations called a meeting of activists to rally support for a "generic" moratorium on shale gas development, defined as an immediate suspension of no specific duration of all exploration and fracking operations.

Labour and environmental leaders had reached a backroom deal with the main opposition party, the Parti Québécois. The Party would support the call for moratorium on shale gas in the St. Lawrence valley. One of the main environmental spokesmen was also being groomed for the position of future Environment minister.

Nobody seemed to have a strategy to deal with what would happen once we got a short-term moratorium. We were concerned that the anti-fracking movement may end up in disarray, or disband, once a short-term fracking moratorium was declared. By definition, a moratorium is temporary. It might be rescinded, potentially under a new government that would no longer have much use for a citizen movement.

La Campagne Moratoire d'une Generation (MDG), the One-Generation Moratorium Campaign, was founded on a mission to prevent "dirty energy", i.e. polluting fossil fuels  -  oil and gas, traditional and unconventional, whether found on the ground or offshore, including shale oil and gas  -  and nuclear energy, from being developed in Quebec. Luckily, because it lacked exploitable hydrocarbon resources and enjoyed an ample supply of hydroelectric power, the province never had developed meaningful fossil fuel resources.

In December 2010, a group of us  -  all volunteers who initially met at the Greenpeace local office in Montreal  - started circulating a call and proposal to leaders and groups who had kickstarted the fast-growing mobilization on the issue of fracking in Quebec:

“Let's get organized. We are not bluffing. Come May of 2011, we will be ready to take mass nonviolent action together.”

With three preliminary ingredients  -  an ultimatum to the Quebec government to impose a 20-year moratorium on fracking, a proactive nonviolent direct action training program, and a long-distance walk from Rimouski to Montreal  - our hope was to lay the groundwork and build unity around a preventative struggle strategy to put on hold all current fracking operations and pre-testing wells in the province.

Over the next couple of months, our enthusiasm and the depth of our commitment would be put to the test.

Resistance to resistance: the challenge of unity

Building unity around a preventative civil resistance strategy proved more difficult than we thought.

It is quite ironic. The first and hardest line of struggle is sometimes found with those who, at least in our mind, are our prime allies. 

Initially, the main visible activist leaders in opposition to shale gas did not respond to the proposal. They ignored our repeated requests for a meeting to discuss strategy. Apart from Greenpeace, which

has a history and ongoing practice of nonviolent resistance and direct action, the established environmental NGO's, the main spokespeople and the issue-advocacy groups focused on media campaigns simply ignored the idea, hoping it would go away. Then, seeing that the campaign didn't wither and was going to be officially launched, three of the main environmental leaders summoned us to quit the initiative, or be ostracized.

Our insistence on the need to go beyond a generic moratorium and to build a capacity for mass civil disobedience were the main sticking points.  Because the relationship was untested, and because an intentional civil resistance approach was relatively new to leaders who had become savvy in the game of traditional politics, the environmental leaders seemed to fear an uncontrollable fringe, as they equated civil disobedience in particular with violence.

It got ugly. Still we didn't stop. We chose not to respond in kind, and kept our eyes on the prize, confident that one day, we would all congratulate each other on a joint victory.

Walking the talk

One of the highlights of the One-Generation Moratorium Campaign, and one for which it is most remembered, is the month-long walk it organized in the spring of 2011 along an itinerary closely following the areas claimed for fracking by the industry.

On May 15, 2011, after the ultimatum and weeks of organising, a group of about 50 people, aged from 15 to 75, started out from the mid-sized town of Rimouski. From day one, with thumbs up at our banner and sympathetic honking at our signs, with the occasional gift of muffins and fresh water from front porches, it was confirmed we were walking the right path: ordinary people approved. Across the southern shore of the St. Lawrence valley, up the Richelieu river also under threat, down to Montreal, some 700 km (over 430 miles) were walked, in total for 33 days.

Upon entering a town, we’d put together our singing parade, complete with giant puppets, industry giants on stilts, and a roaring pipeline dragon flanked by papier mâché props such as a sick cow, a walking drilling rig, and a giant tap with poison signs.

Each night, local folks were invited to a special event with local singers, skits, presentations and short movies, one of which was a participatory video made by local citizens. Each step of the way, we talked about fracking, the need for a 20-year moratorium, long-term solutions (energy saving and green alternatives), and the need to prepare preventative nonviolent struggle, including civil disobedience as a last resort.

The press followed us closely, with national media at the start, middle and end points. The walk was the event of the day in rural towns. It would usually open the news, with the weather forecast sometimes closing with what the day would be like for the walkers. In cities like Trois-Rivieres and Quebec City, the march through downtown would bring out hundreds, marching with the fanfare and swaying with the samba band. When we finally reached Montreal, a crowd of some 10,000 to 15,000 people awaited  - the largest environmental demonstration in Quebec history at the time  - our allies having finally come together to celebrate. They held the banner in front of the march, with Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois at their side, with no representative from the walk invited to the photo op, however…

In the month it took to reach Montreal, two small victories were achieved. First, a bill was presented and adopted for a reduced 5-year moratorium on shale gas development under the St. Lawrence River proper and any of its islands west of Anticosti. Second, on the eve of the walk entering the world’s second largest French-speaking city, the Environment minister declared for the first time that no more drilling and no more fracking would be allowed in the province at all, until further notice.

More than two years later, the de facto moratorium is still standing. We call it a citizen moratorium, because it was clearly the result of grassroots organising and popular mobilisation.

Other huge benefits of the walk were:

• Trust and much closer relationships with rural groups all over the St. Lawrence Valley.

• Widespread support for the more "radical" position that shale gas should not be developed, or should remain in the ground for at least 20 years.

• Hundreds were now ready to attend Nonviolent Direct Action training sessions.

• Other leaders could not malign civil resistance as much  - rumours of Moratoire D’une Generation being "violent hotheads" subsided (or stopped working).

More than a village to raise a movement

Winning big usually requires a formidable synergy of efforts from wide and diverse civil society sectors. I would be remiss if I did not mention other key initiatives on which this success has rested.

Over a hundred citizen groups were formed over the last three years, that Moratoire D’une Generation (MDG) had little to no role in organising. Most were formed after a core group of infuriated citizens exchanged contact information, following an evening educational, at a local community hall. This built the powerful and well mediatized Regroupement Interegional Gaz de Schiste Vallee du St-Laurent (RIGSVSL), with a membership primarily composed of middle-aged, experienced home owners across the area under threat, many with ties to political parties, chiefly the Parti Quebecois.

Using traditional community organising methods, the Regroupement canvassed rural communities, asking residents to sign a letter refusing access to the industry, and selling the highly visible red and yellow “Non au gas de schiste” signs that now dot villages and rural roads across Quebec. Over 30,000 property owners have signed the letter. With signature rates sometimes reaching as high as 90%, the organizers brought to city hall maps showing the supportive properties painstakingly coloured one by one. Many municipal governments were swayed. Bylaws specifically designed to protect drinking water sources from the industry drilling were adopted in over 60 towns.

More symbolic than legally binding, these bylaws and letters have certainly made visible the blatant failure of the energy industry to gain any social acceptance of fracking in the province.

The AQLPA, a government-funded environmental group, has also been key in providing initial expertise and direction to the movement. As well, an independent committee of academic and scientific experts should be mentioned as a major source of critical knowledge, expertise and analyses to the grassroots and media.

Civil resistance and the language of powerJack DuVall [1] 

“If you want to build a ship, don’t gather your people and ask them to provide wood, prepare tools, assign tasks. Call them together and raise in their minds the longing for the endless sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Who has power?

One of the first people who understood how power could be produced by civil resistance was the great African-American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass [18]. In the years of his work before the American Civil War, which was an age of universal, brutalizing racism, even white abolitionists were dismissed as dreamers.  But Douglass was no dreamer. He operated with cold, furious logic. The power of oppressors “concedes nothing and it never will,” he said. You can find the “exact

measure” of injustice that will be imposed on people, he explained, by measuring how much they will submit to. And the injustice will go on until it is resisted. “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress,” he declared.

Douglass saw that if submission were replaced by civil resistance, the people could pierce the shroud of oppression, shifting power in a way that few in the world would have comprehended.  A half-century later, in the course of enjoining Russians to resist military conscription, Leo Tolstoy came to the conclusion that “public opinion” would, in the future, “change the whole structure of life” and make violence “superfluous.” In other words, what people believed and what they did to act on those beliefs could change the conditions they faced, and therefore violent intervention on behalf of change would be unnecessary.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Mohandas Gandhi read Tolstoy avidly, corresponded with him, and was galvanized by news reports of civil resistance against British rule in Ireland and against the Tsar’s rule in Russia. Experimenting, as he put it, with campaigns of nonviolent resistance against racist laws in South Africa and later against British rule in India, Gandhi expanded the repertoire of tactics that people could use to challenge oppression:  tactics of protest such as petitions, marches and walk-outs; tactics of noncooperation, such as boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience; and even tactics of disruption, such as blockades and seizures of property.

How are people roused?

To enlist and unify the people involved in these campaigns, Gandhi summoned a durable, passionate commitment from millions of Indians to the cause of swaraj, or self-rule. He did this by listening to them to ensure that their beliefs and grievances were reflected in what his movement stood for, and by talking with them about the importance of the cause and why their action was essential.  In other words, he gave them an argument, a proposition for them to consider.  The core of it, as reflected in many different themes and ideas, was this:  “The British are ruling this country for their own benefit, so why should we help them?”

Embedded in that simple proposition were three central ideas about the rationale for the movement for Indian independence, ideas that foreshadowed the same basic rationale for change used by leaders of later, successful movements that rallied mass participation elsewhere in the world.  First, Gandhi identified who was responsible for India’s problems: the British, who had long tried to mollify Indians with the phony excuse that British control was benign.  Second, Gandhi defined the reason for what was wrong with India: the people were being governed unfairly, and they had no say in how they were governed. Third, he suggested that the people themselves, by tolerating the British as rulers, and by not resisting their rule, were facilitating the injustice that all Indians felt. Just as Frederick Douglass had done 70 years before, he told his people that the power to liberate them was in their own hands.

If the terms of your life are dictated by others, but if you have the power to revoke those terms, then the question of the moment is for no else but you to answer:  Will you act?  This is the existential moment facing every person living with oppression. Thirty years after India gained its independence, Vaclav Havel [19], the Czech theorist and leader of civil resistance, said that everyone who lives under tyranny but doesn’t resist is living a lie, the lie that life is normal – and that everyone who resists instead lives “within the truth.” Everyone who tells the truth denies in principle a system based on lies, Havel argued, and therefore threatens that system “in its entirety.” And that is why totalitarian rulers have to arrest every dissident, as Havel himself was arrested, twelve years before he became president of his country.

Deciding to resist after those you trust have summoned you to act has changed the lives of millions, but it may be less momentous than continuing to resist.  Strategic thinking about civil resistance can identify ways to minimize the risks of repression, yet people in many nonviolent movements have known that they were exchanging political dissent for personal jeopardy if arrest was possible. A

few years ago, the American civil rights leader James Lawson [20] told me why he thought that so many of his colleagues were relentless despite the risk of arrests and beatings. He cited Fannie Lou Hamer [21], the leader of voter registration drives in Mississippi, who was pulled from her car by police one night, beaten almost to death, and after 30 days in the hospital, went immediately into another voter registration drive.  “Why did she do that?”, Lawson asked me, and he answered: “Because she believed that if she kept working, the movement would succeed, and that if she didn’t, the movement would fail.”  Her sense of what would happen to herself had become inextricably tied to her sense of what would happen to the movement. Certitude about the cause is the key to resilience.

Where do movements exist?

In the late 1970’s, the military junta that ruled Argentina fought leftists and dissidents with brutal tactics. Unmarked sedans would appear in the night in front of their houses, and they would be ‘disappeared’, never to be seen again.  On April 30, 1977, fourteen ‘mothers of the disappeared [22]’ [23] went to the central square of Buenos Aires, in front of the presidential palace, and began to protest.  They had one question:  Where are our sons and daughters?  The regime decided to let them march around the square, because arresting mothers might have angered others. But the mothers kept coming back, until they were a movement – which encouraged others opposed to the violence and incompetence of the regime to move into active resistance until eventually, under the stress of many events, Argentina’s dictatorship disintegrated.

Where did this movement start?  In a public square in Buenos Aires?  No, in the minds of the fourteen Argentine mothers who conceived a difficult question to pose to the generals who ran the country. Some who enjoin nonviolence as a response to injustice suggest that the behavior of people in conflicts must be converted, from belligerence to acceptance of others’ humanity, for nonviolent power to emerge. But behavior is first of all a function of volition: What I decide to do, in the precinct of my own thinking, is the impetus for my action. “Any response that places man in the center of our current worries,” Hannah Arendt [24] argued, “and suggests he must be changed before any relief is to be found is profoundly unpolitical. For at the center of politics lies concern for the world.”

To turn the people’s concern into action, Abraham Lincoln [25] said that we must begin with “reason – cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.” Lincoln knew that the content of his cause, saving the union of American states, had to be instilled in the motives and acts of the people. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail,” he said, “without it, nothing can succeed.” At a memorial service when Lincoln was assassinated, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Americans that Lincoln had “the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue.”

In our time, the philosopher John Rawls insisted that every citizen has “a duty of civility to appeal to public reason.” This is what Gandhi, Vaclev Havel, Corazon Aquino, Desmond Tutu and other champions of civil resistance did – and in the process, they made Indians, Czechs, Filipinos, South Africans and many other peoples into conscious, dedicated pursuers of rights and democracy. People move their bodies once they move their minds.

Power from ends

Today the leading democracies are home to political consultants who tell candidates running for public office that they should trigger voters’ emotions rather than wasting time on making arguments about policies much less ideas. Some of these consultants begin with biological explanations, insisting that language in politics should manipulate people’s reflexive feelings in order to push them into certain choices at the polls.  But the history of civil resistance offers little support to these explanations of how political convictions are shaped and translated into loyalty or support for a campaign.

If we fail to reflect the real substance of a cause in the language used to recruit people to join that cause, we reduce language to propaganda. Those who would instrumentalize language and convert it into semaphores about transitory feelings do not recognize that it will enlist political fervor not if it blurs but if it crystallizes ideas about purpose, identity, nationhood and other concepts that resonate with people’s most deeply held beliefs - and therefore act causally on their development of commitment and certitude, which are the fuel for the rise and resilience of movements.  Activate zeal for the ends of political action and you will draw power from those who are activated.

I came to this conclusion not only after noticing how the language of supposedly mature democracies has deteriorated into manipulating voters’ momentary likes and dislikes (so well represented by Facebook’s ever-present option to “like” every comment that appears on your “wall”), but also because I noticed that scholars and practitioners of nonviolent struggle have different views about how to teach or train those who are new to the subject. Is it possible to capture the essence of civil resistance in mechanical formulae about how to use tactics in particular circumstances? Should tactical action neglect to invoke a campaign’s core ideas and values or fail to telegraph the campaign’s purpose through that action? Can a campaign be effectively planned if its leaders assume that people are ready to be mobilized, without first ascertaining what the people think and how the content of the campaign’s goals can be expressed to represent that thinking?

The unconscious tendency to downgrade the language of a movement - from an expression of its primordial purpose in changing the existing political order, to a “message” that exploits listeners’ immediate discontent - is driven mainly by the assumption that a campaign or movement exists for the sole purpose of capturing political power as an end in itself, rather than as a means to the end of transforming society or the nation. If you capture power without first firing the minds and enlisting the work of those who will be stakeholders in the new order, you may have staged a coup de main (nonviolent or otherwise), but you will not have engaged the people in helping to exercise genuine democratic power.

Instrumentalizing language also tempts making a fatal strategic mistake in the effort to accomplish political change, either through movements of civil resistance or campaigns of conventional political action, and that mistake is breaking the linkage between means and ends. For civil resistance to work, it has to shred the legitimacy of power-holders whom it opposes and model a higher legitimacy based on representing the real aspirations of the people. But the fastest way to forsake that advantage is to resort to means that are not seen as legitimate.

No participant in a movement can “become the change you want to see” unless he or she takes action that is consistent with the political values and social vision held by the movement. That is not only an argument for nonviolent discipline (since violent resistance usually does not produce nonviolent order). It is also why the language of a campaign has to be based on rational propositions rather than deceptive or misleading allegations.  If you lie your way to power, popular consent to your power is unlikely to survive the discovery of your deceit, and to believe otherwise is to make cynicism a justification for expediency. No campaign can represent people it misleads, because then their participation is based on false beliefs instead of shared ideas.

One common variation of the inconsistency between means and ends is found in how campaigns use language to channel the rage of those who are deprived of rights or live with inequalities. The political psychologist Roy Eidelson [26]argues that shared outrage has lasting political force when “it insists on explanations for what’s wrong and it seeks accountability for the wrongdoing.” In other words, popular passion can be summoned, but only by using rational arguments to define the changes that are sought as well as the vices to be overturned. In doing that, a movement does what the writer Adam Gopnik [27] says that Lincoln did: it “turns reason into a new kind of passion.”

If it would be heeded, the call for civil resistance must propose that a society or nation can be changed only as people join and remain with a movement to make it change. The power of the language that a movement employs, to call forth power from people who want their freedom, will come only as it invokes the ideas and exhibits the values at the root of their existence as a people.

In his last letter to Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy said that he felt it was possible that the work that Gandhi was doing, abjuring violent force, could lead to similar action by all the peoples of the world. In the paintings and photographs of him near the end of his life, Tolstoy looked like a prophet.  In that letter to Gandhi, he became one. Tolstoy had no way to outline how he envisaged such power except through the language of his books and letters. Gandhi had no way to awaken the Indian people to the power they already possessed, and no way to teach them how to use it, except through the language he used to summon the people’s resolve to change their future.

The Syrian resistance: a tale of two strugglesMaciej Bartkowski [1] and Mohja Kahf [2] 

In Syria, mixing violent and nonviolent resistance jeopardized people power, particularly when violence became the main driver of resistance from early 2012 onward. See Part Two. [14]It is a tragedy of history when so many people regardless of sect, ethnicity, religion, and gender join in nonviolent resistance [15] to demand freedom for all, and achieve so much with so little during such a brief time, only to have their accomplishments go largely unrecognized, and their struggle devolve into a fight with oppression on its own violent terms - as if these could be complementary to nonviolent resistance, an effective method to protect people, or a proven instrument to defeat a brutal regime. This happened in Syria.

The recent book Recovering Nonviolent History [16] finds that a number of nonviolent campaigns in national liberation struggles were overtaken by violent resistance. One major reason for abandonment of civil resistance in favor of armed struggle is not understanding what civil resistance can achieve, and with what benefits for a people’s liberation. The narrative void about civil resistance during ongoing conflict is often filled by armed insurrectionists with their own ideologized discourse, which tries to discredit the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance and underestimates the costs of violence. How this happened in Syria is the story that follows.

Part I: Nonviolent and violent conflictCivil resistance

The impact of the nonviolent resistance in Syria - before it was largely overshadowed by an armed uprising in early 2012 - was tremendous. It mobilized hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of until-then apathetic citizens, produced hundreds of “leaders” from people who were mostly unknown except locally, united diverse cross-sections of the Syrian population, both rural and urban, as no other internal struggle since the anti-colonial period, and shook and weakened Baathist one-party rule.

Widespread, organized, yet non-hierarchical, nonviolent resistance succeeded in weakening the power of the regime to a degree that armed resistance (notably in Hama in 1982), a few valiant souls from an intellectual elite (such as the signatories of the Damascus Declaration in 2005), and one ethnic group isolated in their armed rebellion (the Kurds in 2004) had all failed to accomplish. All this was achieved while the ranks of civil resisters were being decimated by massacre and detention, and when they had to undergo a mounting humanitarian crisis.

Protesters hit the streets in mass numbers on March 18, 2011, in Daraa, Banyas, Homs, and Damascus. Banyas protesters reached out to the city’s large Alawite population, singing “Peaceful, peaceful-neither Sunni nor Alawite, we want national unity,” [17] In Damascus, protesters underscored multi-sectarian unity by holding up a  sign with a cross and crescent and the words “No

to repression, Yes to freedom,” [18] while an earlier protest on March 15 in Damascus had featured a voice with a coastal Alawite accent saying,  “We are Alawites, Sunnis, people of every Syrian sect, and we want to topple this regime.” [19] 

Killings of unarmed protesters backfired on the regime. In one video   [20]uploaded on March 23, 2011 in Dara, a man shouts, in a desperate voice, to armed troops,

Some of you have honor - don't shoot! You have brothers & sisters, you have brothers - your daughters - your mothers & fathers in

your town - they're just like us, don't shoot! …This earth is big enough for all of us! You don't have the right anymore to take all of it for yourselves!

Scenes like this in the months of nonviolent resistance countered the regime narrative that “armed gangs” were driving the resistance.

Protests spread to Salamiya, hub of Syria’s Ismailia Shia population. Misyaf, a town with large Christian and Alawite populations alongside Sunnis, was another early multi-sectarian protest locale. Chilling scenes of peaceful protesters suppressed by troops in Dara caused Muntaha Atrash, daughter of a national hero from the anti-colonial struggle, to reprimand the president by name on Orient Television (owned by a secular, non-Islamist Syrian in the Gulf) in her quavering elderly voice [21], declaring outright that the regime narrative was false and refuting its accusation of sectarianism. The civil resistance group Pulse (Nabd), begun by Alawite activists, emerged in Homs by summer; a Kurdish nonviolent groupAva, formed around June 2011; women were at the vanguard of a nonviolent protest series organized in Salamiya, called The Street Is Ours (al-Share Lana).

Non-sectarianism shone during Syria’s most massive rally, of an estimated 400,000 in Hama’s Clock Tower Square   [22]in July 2011, full of scenes of cross-religious embrace, women’s participation, and nonviolent conduct. This broad-based appeal would have hardly been possible, had not the uprising been unarmed.

With the regime insisting it was battling “armed gangs,” protesters clapped and raised both hands while marching to show that they were not hiding weapons. In Daraya, Yahya Shurbaji popularized the nonviolent concept of “fraternization,” whereby in order to make human contact with regime soldiers and soften their hostility or perhaps even motivate their defection, protesters distributed water and flowers to soldiers at protests.

By April, protesters in many towns had begun to self-organize, forming a non-hierarchical structure of local committees which sprang up all over Syria to coordinate nonviolent resistance. As regime detention swept and relentless violence took members, resistance groups dissolved and regrouped under new names. With similar adaptability, protesters innovated dodge-and-feint street tactics. Wael Kurdi, an Aleppo University student, developed a “flying protest:” protesters gathered on the agreed-upon street after announcing a fake location on government-monitored phone lines, marched and video-taped for eleven minutes, dispersed and hid or destroyed banners before security arrived, and went to safe-houses to upload the videos.

Dodge-and-feint tactics enabled protesters to protest another day, as did marching in narrow alleys rather than open squares on the Egyptian model, and holding protest signs backward over their heads, so faces in videos could not be identified. Street protests, whose number rose to 920 different locations in one week in the nonviolent phase and declined to fewer than 300 during the autumn 2011 when violent resistance began mounting, played an important role not only in publicizing the movement’s message but in giving people a personal sense of empowerment, long absent under the police state. One young activist, “Rose,” expressed why protesters did not stop demonstrating, even

Alawite symbol of double-pronged sword, cross, crescent, and star with national flag colors, carried by protesters in Tal, (mostly Sunni town in Damascus countryside), April

2011.

knowing they could be killed: “We do other activism, but we will not stop demonstrating: to taste freedom, if only for ten minutes!”

Narratives of defectors from the regime cite its targeting of lethal force on the unarmed and innocents as a key factor that broke the grip of loyalty to the regime. Massacres of unarmed protesters and the death in regime detention, under apparent torture, of Hamza Khatib (reportedly thirteen years old) were specifically recalled   [23]by the first defecting Alawite officer of record, Afaq Ahmad, who worked in the Dara branch of Air Force Security. Ahmad defected days before Hamza’s mutilated body was returned to his parents on May 24, 2011.

The regime responded to its defection problem by introducing snipers and tanks, among other tactics, to reduce contact between soldiers and protesters. This, however, did not stop defections, which occurred in this phase mostly among conscripts although a handful of officers defected. Some at the army defectors’ camp in Turkey would form the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Reports of field execution of attempted defectors proliferated. In response to defections, Assad began using only three of his army’s twelve divisions, the three manned by Alawites, to force the sect to retrench around the regime. A number of high-level military [24] defections occurred after violence spiked at the end of 2011 - though in some cases advanced preparation for defecting occurred during the nonviolent resistance phase - but these defections were increasingly by Sunnis. This set the stage for the violent polarization of Syrian society.

That the government kept responding to nonviolent protests with violent means was frequently asserted by observers as an indication of the failure of nonviolent resistance in Syria, with the concomitant assertion that nonviolent actions could succeed only when a regime behaved humanely. Yet evidence suggests that, while it lasted, nonviolent resistance was in fact a powerful weapon against the Assad regime, forcing it to be on the defensive, react to events, and commit mistakes that often backfired, leading to more resistance and solidarity across diverse groups.

Armed rebellion 

Besides formal regime forces, the government allowed armed loyalist militias to kidnap, loot, rape during home invasions, and traffic women to rape farms. The existence of these roving informal militias contributed to the belief that armed defense was necessary and could protect people against these violations. Reportedly the regime itself saturated certain areas with arms, to push protesters into becoming the “armed gangs” which it claimed to be fighting from the outset. Many brigades at this stage were native to local communities, making them accountable. 

Peaceful protests continued but with fewer participants: many former protest locales were becoming unsafe. In some instances, the protests occurred, according to participants, only because armed rebels helped barricade areas against regime troops. This “protection” was short-term, as the presence of a brigade drew increasingly indiscriminate and more powerful regime fire - including later airstrikes - to such areas. This triggered calls for arming the rebels with more powerful weapons, rather than returning to nonviolent resistance.

The trickle of foreign fighters beginning in late 2011, who entered Syria on their own or with support of foreign governments, further jeopardized unarmed resistance and reinforced the mutation of the overall conflict into civil war. Amazingly, it was during this period of increasing violence on both sides that those who remained committed to nonviolent resistance achieved new levels of creativity and organization. Some three dozen revolutionary newspapers, many of them distributed in hard copy on the ground (some highlighted here [25]), emerged. In September 2011, Freedom Days Syria emerged as a coalition of dozens of nonviolent resistance groups. Members of groups in this coalition implemented new, highly creative nonviolent resistance methods.

For example, several young underclasswomen at Damascus University released thousands of small papers from the highest dorm tower, containing messages of freedom and human rights, causing regime security agents to be assigned to using all their security training for the job of picking up the subversive litter from campus grounds for days, and pursuing the activists for three weeks. This led,

on November 3, 2011, to the 23-day detention and torture of then eighteen-year-old Yaman Qadri, young mastermind of the scheme, which caused a ripple effect as her diverse classmates demonstrated for her, and were themselves detained, spurring more protests not only in Damascus but in their respective hometowns across Syria. Nabd, a nonviolent group in Homs formed initially by Alawite activists in spring 2011, redoubled its behind-the-scenes efforts at conflict resolution among Alawite and Sunni villages and city neighborhoods.

The Syrian Revolutionary Youth group, active in Homs and Damascus, was launched in May 2012 and spearheaded both nonviolent direct actions and socio-economic organizing in direct rebuttal to the claims that “the revolution has become totally militarized and that there is no room for peaceful protest [26].” So, too, the Stop the Killing campaign [27] that lasted from April to July 2012 and held at least 26 demonstrations in diverse geographic locations, drawing in many minority members, was an attempt to refocus energies toward nonviolent resistance after militarization had become the dominant resistance.

Meanwhile, civilian structures on the ground in Syria were working toward unified self-governance. Unity did not come to fruition on a national level, but reached the next, community-centered, level: Regional Command Councils (in Damascus, Homs, and so on) integrated many aspects of resistance work: the underground clinic system, an alternate economy, schools, media, and transportation; in effect, they created alternative local governance.  Local Free Syrian Army units had liaison on each council, in an attempt to bring armed rebels under civilian leadership. Councils thus integrated both civilian and armed flanks.

Eventually, mixing violent and nonviolent resistance jeopardized people power, particularly when violence became the main driver of resistance from early 2012 onward. Assad redoubled his military efforts and could then show his supporters and neutral Syrians that he was their only protector against violent extremists. Armed struggle also helped Assad to foster skepticism about the revolution among Christians, Alawites, and other communities - something that he could not achieve during the first months of resistance. The populace now faced daunting conditions in many cities and towns. Nonviolent activists remained engaged in civic organizing [28] but, often, in the form of full-time relief work, operating field hospitals and distributing basic goods to displaced populations, and educating displaced children.

When armed resistance fully overtook civil resistance during 2012, it gained exaggerated influence over the outside world’s view of the Syrian conflict. Once the revolution embraced using violence, the only way it seemed possible to prevail over Assad was to acquire more arms. Because the fate of any armed resistance that is weaker than its adversary is necessarily determined by external assistance in the form of weapons, army training or air strikes, the door is opened to all the negative consequences that stem from outside military involvement. By contrast, nonviolent resistance does not historically need military intervention to prevail. It might welcome help from external civil society groups, but what it needs most of all is the force of its own mobilized citizens. Such struggle comes with fewer overall costs for the society and greater self-control over the internal trajectories of the resistance and its eventual outcomes.

Resisting corruption: recent progress in Indonesia and KenyaShaazka Beyerle [1] 

People power may be well-suited to a systemic approach to curbing corruption. Political will can be thwarted, because too many office-holders have a stake in the crooked status quo. Those benefiting from graft are much less likely to stand against it than those suffering from it.

The CICAK campaign. Jakarta Press [14] [14]Imagine you are an everyday citizen, living in a country with a history of over three decades of state violence and authoritarian rule, with widespread poverty still persistent. A nonviolent civic coalition played a significant role in displacing the old regime. The fledgling democracy inherited a thirty-year armed conflict that resulted in thousands of deaths, dysfunctional state institutions, security force impunity and gross malfeasance. Yet amidst these challenges, an anti-corruption commission has been created that has begun to expose illicit behavior and relationships among the local and national governments, parliament, administration, police and private sector. Not surprisingly, it has become a target of these corrupt forces, and commissioners have been jailed on trumped up charges.Alternately, imagine you live in destitution, in a slum, with little or no formal education. Ethnic violence has wracked your country, most recently after national elections. You feel frustration, hopelessness and anger at the lack of concern of local officials and your elected representative, who receive funds to improve your community while you see no beneficial results. Yet, you also have little confidence you can change things, and believe that in any case, it’s ultimately out of your hands and is the responsibility of others.What could you actually do, in either situation? One option is to remain acquiescent and suffer. A second option is to resort to violence, perhaps by joining a gang or extremist group, or venting through riots or mob aggression, though this is highly unlikely to result in positive change. But there is a third option. You could get together with others sharing the same grievances, and take up civil resistance to make your collective voice heard, articulate grievances and demands, put pressure on authorities to force action, and achieve results. This is exactly what happened in the above two stories.

Indonesia:

In the largest social mobilization since the Reformasi movement [15], which ended the brutal Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, the 2009 CICAK campaign [16] made history. CICAK has a dual meaning. It’s an acronym for ‘Love Indonesia, Love Anti-Corruption.’ It’s also a gecko lizard, referring to a derogatory wiretapped comment by the Chief of the Police’s Criminal Department, who likened the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) to a gecko fighting the crocodile (police). One hundred civic organizations soon joined CICAK; a graduate student independently created a Facebook group which rapidly grew to 1.7 million members; and local groups formed in 20 of the country’s 33 provinces, with well-known public figures coming on board.CICAK organized actions in Jakarta, while local chapters and high school and university students spontaneously initiated events throughout the country. A variety of creative nonviolent tactics were used, including banners reading “Say no to crocodiles,” anti-corruption ringtones, stunts, street murals, wearing of symbols, solidarity visits to the KPK, as well as demonstrations, concerts, sit-ins, leafleting and hunger strikes. CICAK demanded an immediate independent investigation and called on the President to save the KPK. As civil resistance escalated, he agreed to the investigation. The Commission recommended the

charges against the KPK officials be dropped.

Kenya:

The second case is ongoing in Kenya. Muslims for Human Rights (MUHURI [17]) is empowering the poor in Mombasa to fight poverty by gaining access to information about budgets, curbing misuse of constituency development funds, demanding projects actually wanted by communities, and gaining accountability of local officials and members of parliament. Since 2007, through a pioneering [18] collaboration with the International Budget Partnership [19] and veteran activists from the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS [20]) movement for the ‘Right to Know’ in India, it has developed a defining nonviolent method, the ‘five-step social audit’, designed to pressure legislators to confront corruption and mismanagement:

The first step consists of information gathering - records from the local Constituency Development Fund (CDF) office. The second step is training local men and women to become community activists who decipher documents and budgets, monitor expenditures and physically inspect public works. The third step involves educating and motivating fellow citizens about the CDF and their right to information and accountability. Community activists and MUHURI use nonviolent tactics to attract attention, directly engage people, and encourage them to attend a ‘public hearing’. This includes puppet plays, musical processions, street theatre, and leafleting. The fourth step is inspecting the CDF project site. Finally comes the public hearing with CDF officials, the media, and in some cases, the member of parliament. MUHURI first leads a procession through the community, replete with chanting, a youth band, theatrics and dancing children. During the forum the results of the investigations are presented, CDF officials are questioned and remedial measures are identified. Follow-up monitoring tracks progress.

In virtually every part of the world over the past 15 years, citizens have been proving they are not passive onlookers of elite-driven, anti-corruption initiatives, but rather, drivers of accountability, reform and change - all-the-while expanding the application of civil resistance tactics originally honed through more visible anti-dictatorship and anti-occupation struggles. People power may be well-suited to a systemic approach to curbing corruption. [21] Traditional, top-down strategies are based on the assumption that once anti-corruption structures are put in place, illicit practices will change. Institutions accused of corruption are often made responsible for enacting change. But those benefiting from graft are much less likely to stand against it than those suffering from it. It’s not surprising that even when political will exists, it can be thwarted, because too many people have a stake in the crooked status quo.In contrast, people power has a strategic advantage: it consists of extra-institutional pressure to push for change, when power-holders are corrupt or unaccountable, and institutional channels are blocked or ineffective. In ongoing research, this author has found that grass-roots campaigns and movements targeting corruption often complement and reinforce legal and administrative mechanisms, which constitute the anti-corruption infrastructure needed for

long-term transformation of systems of graft and abuse. They can disrupt vertical and horizontal systems of corruption. Citizen mobilization has also bolstered the efforts of honest individuals within the state and other institutions and sectors attempting reforms and change, even to the extent of defending them.Aruna Roy, one of the founders of the MKSS movement in India, characterizes corruption as “the external manifestation of the denial of a right, an entitlement, a wage, a medicine…” In bottom-up approaches, corruption isn’t considered in a vacuum; it is linked to oppression and other forms of injustice, from violence to poverty, human rights abuses, substandard social services, authoritarianism, unaccountability, and environmental destruction.Consequently, when people develop their own channels of power, the priorities of fighting corruption often shift from grand corruption, such as massive embezzlement, to those forms of graft and abuse that are most directly harmful to the public, particularly the poor. An active citizenry is at the heart of accountability and justice. In the words of Hussein Khalid of MUHURI, “If people are able to be encouraged to go out, today it’s CDF, tomorrow it’s something else, and another day it’s another thing. So CDF is an entry point to the realization of so many rights that people are not getting.”The achievements of the CICAK campaign, MUHURI and many others not only set an example, but provide hope that people can do more than sit in quiet suffering or resort to violence. Often institutionalized, corruption in democracies and non-democracies alike will remain globally pervasive to the extent that we, the people, have not yet become a nonviolent force for fighting the injustice that it causes. Civil resistance is a means by which citizens can become that source of change.  

 [24]

Civil resistance as deterrent to fracking: Part Two, Shale 911Philippe Duhamel [1] 

The on-the-ground citizen victory against those who represented one of the most powerful industries in the world is the result of a multi-pronged, multiyear combination of tactics that has combined into an innovative, compelling strategy. See Part One here [12].In Part One, Philippe Duhamel explains how La Campagne Moratoire d'une Generation (MDG), the One-Generation Moratorium Campaign, deployed an ultimatum to the Quebec government to impose a 20-year moratorium on fracking, a proactive nonviolent direct action training program, and a long-distance walk from Rimouski to Montreal, to build unity around a preventative struggle strategy to put on hold all current fracking operations and pre-testing wells in the province. What has happened since that success?

By mid-summer 2011, as we were debriefing and evaluating the walk and its success, the organizing challenges and the lessons, Marie-Ève Leduc, one of our creative members suggested that we set up an early warning system to watch and sound the alarm should fracking activity resume on Quebec territory. She suggested we call it “Shale 911”.

We got working on the design. First, there would be the creation and maintenance of a monitoring website and a 1-800 number to serve as hubs for active, citizen-based surveillance.

The web site that we built, SCHISTE911.org [13] in French, sports a big red button to signal suspicious fracking activity, and includes geo-mapping of all known potential sites, with a colour-coded level of alert with short descriptions.

We have secured the 1-888-SCHISTE emergency number, allowing for low-tech and more immediate contact with the campaign.

Eyes and ears in the community, watching remotes sites, important intersections and back roads, paying attention to rumours and talking with strangers, can provide important, timely information. It is the first and vital step in the system.

This kind of surveillance network doesn't always have to be built from scratch. In the Canadian province of New Brunswick, Canada , Neighbourhood Watch and Block Parent homes were enlisted to signal to protesters the presence of thumper trucks, used for seismic testing.

Any information received is first validated through a basic protocol. Journalism-style, we need at least two verified sources before an alert is made public. Point people in citizen groups stand ready to go out and verify allegations. Engineers and specialists are on call to validate.

One priority: train, train, train

If anything, the concept of preventative action rests on one paramount priority: to train communities in Nonviolent Direct Action (NVDA) and Civil Disobedience (CD). To reinforce their intended effect as a deterrent for the industry, the trainings themselves are publicized and mediatized.

Our trainings are full-day workshops, with advance registration, equal part theory, history of civil resistance strategy, and tactical training, all based on an experiential training design.

To anchor the training, and move the real work of organizing, we have started to facilitate tactical planning towards local emergency plans. What are the best locations to blockade? Where will civil resisters be sheltered? How will they be fed? Who will provide transportation?

As another innovation, we are using a Participatory Video process, adapted from UK-based Insightshare, teaching small groups in the use of video, the new literacy, to build a rapid deployment plan. With friendly faces from the community, this self-made video can show everyone - local folks, national authorities, and energy investors - the emergency mobilisation and direct action plans that are being prepared to resist shale gas development, should it ever dare come back in the area.

Direct action: costing the opponent

Although we knew intuitively, and politically, that preparing for mass participation in civil disobedience blockades would constitute a threat to the industry, the CEO of a major firm in the field of hydraulic fracturing provided a nice confirmation of the validity of one of our tactical assessments:

"A fracking operation costs about half a million dollars a day. That's why I won't pay this kind of money if the risk is too high that protesters will chain themselves to installations, or stop my teams from working."

— Michael Binnion, CEO of Questerre.

"Thank you Mr. Binnion, for sharing the recipe," we'd quip at every opportunity. "Now let's gather the ingredients!"

Although one would be well-advised to remember that one tactic alone is rarely enough, and that employing a vast repertoire of methods, with varying levels of risks, from none to mild to high, is key to mass participation, and thus victory, other stakeholders and analysts seem to share his assessment that direct action and nonviolent blockades represent a high risk and real costs for the industry.

In early 2013, London-based Control Risks, a global risk assessment consultancy for industries and governments, published an in-depth study of anti-fracking groups around the world entitled, The Global Anti-Fracking Movement: What it Wants, How it Operates and What’s Next. [14] On page 10 of the report, Control Risks consultants provide this piece of analysis on direct action, weighing more specifically the relative cost/benefit of blockades as a tactic to the anti-fracking movement, vs. unconventional hydrocarbon developers:

"Direct action serves both strategic and tactical purposes. Strategically, it attracts media attention, raising public awareness of hydraulic fracturing, and thereby increasing receptiveness to anti-fracking messaging and aiding activist recruitment. Demonstrations, days of action and non-violent civil disobedience provide impetus and focus to the anti-fracking movement, helping to mobilise grassroots support, and generating solidarity both locally and globally. Direct action can also confer political influence on the anti-fracking movement, as the imposition of moratoriums in France, Bulgaria, South Africa, Czech Republic and elsewhere has demonstrated..."  

 

"Blockades are a favoured non-violent direct action tactic across the environmental activist movement, particularly for rural gas drilling projects, which often depend on single, purpose-built access roads. Blockades generally do not require site security to be breached and can occur at a distance from the project. Furthermore, while the costs to activists of blockades are extremely low – both in terms of organisation and penalties – the potential for disruption to the target can be significant in terms of lost productivity and extra operating costs."

Providing further confirmation of our choice of tactics, Control Risks also had this to say about one element of the One-Generation Moratorium campaign, deemed a relatively sophisticated operation:

"In line with the generic evolution of social movements, online and social media are also instrumental in organising and mobilising the anti-fracking movement. Local and national anti-fracking demonstrations, for example, are promoted heavily via Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, with websites providing ready-made templates for posters, T-shirts and banners. At the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, for example, the anti-shale Quebecois (Canada) campaign Moratoire d’une generation maintains a dedicated initiative – Schiste 911 – to alert activists by email to drilling activity in the province."

Making the most of direct action

The second key element of the preventative campaign design deals with training very much upstream of industry activity.

We put a lot of emphasis on non-arrest, support roles. Our goal is to get as many people to attend the training as possible. We also want to recruit people who might not otherwise attend, because it is

a fact that support roles around nonviolent direct action often involve greater time commitments, and even courage, than the getting arrested part.

Civil Disobedience and Nonviolent Direct Action (NVDA) trainings can generate quite a bit of media buzz. Especially outside of urban areas, these workshops are not only a rare occurrence and a novelty, they generate enough controversy to provide prime newsworthiness. Especially when allowed to cover role-plays and other simulations, NVDA trainings provide this irresistible mix of anticipation and drama about the upcoming conflict.

Allowing media to cover civil disobedience workshops allows training to become an action in itself.

Since not only police and corporate surveillance outfits, but also journalists have been known to covertly attend these trainings, it is better that the movement allow access to the media, and hence exert some control over the message, and plan how to derive the most benefit from the coverage.

Pledging civil resistance

The training sessions in civil resistance always end with the offer to sign a "Pledge of Resistance" made out to each participant's name, followed by a graduation ceremony with diplomas also printed individually  - we register people in advance through an online form, and ask for their personal information, to be compiled in a database.

Because it is formal and dignified, it strengthens people's resolve. It is a serious commitment, that not everyone, but most participants do make. It prepares people for not just short-term, but a longer-term vision of how they should contemplate being involved in this struggle. It provides a reassurance that this movement is serious, well-organized and that it will see to it that nonviolent discipline doesn't break down, and that high-risk roles aren't open to untrained participants.

We then take a picture of each graduate holding their diploma, and add it to the database of trained participants. Later, we send each one their laminated personal card, complete with photo ID, QR code, and a newsletter with a fundraising appeal.

When we reach 500 trained participants (right now, our numbers hover just above 300), we hold a press conference to show how many people have committed to take part in civil resistance actions, as direct participants and support, should the industry come back.

Learning from the experiment

Under a threat as immense as fracking, no town could succeed alone. Just the same, no single organisation, much less a leader, can claim full credit for such a vast and successful movement.

With a mix of friction and collaboration, the combination of everyone’s diverse efforts and specific contributions generated the victory. Just as in nature, it takes many specialized roles to make an effective and resilient movement ecosystem.

Public framing

Choose a frame that allows you to talk to almost everybody, ordinary people who do not know about, share or even care about the premises of environmental activism, who know nothing about movement jargon such as “climate justice”, “CO2 PPM”, or even alternative energy sources. To become a mass movement, we need to develop language devoid of inside code words or policy-speak.  If your framing allows the other side to win over the fence sitters, you will lose.

We chose to put forward the idea of a momentary stop  - not a permanent ban outright  - so that there could be a way to bring over those who are not yet convinced, or educated enough about the issue, to even "hear" a hard position such "no shale gas, ever". The One-Generation Moratorium idea was able to capture the idea of reaching into the future, to talk about life through caring about our children. Granted, "Moratorium" sounds technical, and soulless. It is itself a term that sounds

like jargon. It was so widely held in the movement, it was the main plank: we had to also cater to the activists.

Ultimatum: take back the timeline 

Citizen-based initiatives trying to oppose unwanted development tend to be very reactive. By definition, the building of new installations is a process controlled by the opponent. Therefore, the timing of events - when and how each of the steps will be carried out, cutting down trees, bulldozing the topsoil, bringing in the equipment - is controlled by the opponent.

Add to this that citizens often lack in-depth knowledge of the various steps involved in more complex development processes, and you have a very unequal power over the time and place for confrontation.

Where do you draw the line? When do you launch an action?

Extensive research, other groups with on-the-ground experience, and sympathetic experts are all ways citizen groups can acquire better knowledge of the upcoming process to define the important steps around which actions can be designed.

Another great device is the ultimatum - a set date by which a demand must be met, or else a sanction, or a series of consequences, will ensue for the opponent.

Mohandas K. Gandhi made good use of the ultimatum during his career, often in the form of a letter penned in concerned, amicable language.

Issuing an ultimatum provides a number of advantages, the most important being that it allows a campaign to regain the initiative, by setting a deadline around which to plan, for a better handle on preparatory steps for mobilizations and resource-intensive moments.

Because an ultimatum warns opponents ahead of time of the likely consequences if they opt for confrontation, it tends to make the issuer look more composed and reasonable. At least, an attempt is made at persuasion, before coercion.

The denouement

One could argue that recent market conditions - in the form of lower gas prices - helped temper North American enthusiasm and urgency towards the development of extreme hydrocarbon deposits. True enough. But shale gas continues to be developed elsewhere, while it has been stopped in a province where the resource was found to be abundant, close to the surface, and cheap.

Sometimes, all it takes is some extra cost, some new unwanted risk, or a small increase in political uncertainty. Certainly, civil resistance can play a role in all three, for a winning combination to the benefit of people’s short-term quality of life, long-term health, their environment, and the promise of a better life for their children’s children.

Victories against extractive industries and other destructive projects sometimes come in the form of repeated delays and postponements imposed on promoters… until the conditions or the general climate, political and otherwise, change permanently. Winning time, especially if the time is used for more organizing, can mean winning, period.

Initially, the opponent in Quebec was wise enough to use public forums to try and pull the public toward their point of view. It started in the spring of 2010, when the Petroleum and Gas association toured the province to talk about the benefits of the industry. It was a disaster, helped along with the arrogance and mistakes of its spokesmen.

Then, the provincial government set up multiple environmental review boards. It designed their mandates so they would be constrained to look only at the how, not the whether if, or when. So alongside civil resistance, the public authorities and the industry were also doing their advocacy and consultations, often winning government officials over. While activist groups were tempted to ignore the flawed process, they were nevertheless important as a potential means by which public

decision-makers would take stock of the deeper opposition that civil resistance had been stirring, as the included chronology shows.

Chronology

* Spring 2010, the issue comes to the fore.

* Fall 2010, Provincial government launches an environmental review process on how to mitigate hydraulic fracturing. Citizen groups and most environmental organizations want proceedings to focus on whether fracking should be allowed and demand a moratorium. Moratoire D’une Generation (MDG) stages a dignified act of defiance: one by one, everyone in the room stands up and asks the board for a one-generation moratorium.

* December 2010 to February 2011, the MDG strategy proposal is circulated.

* March 1, 2011, Launch of the One Generation Moratorium Campaign, with ultimatum to government set for May 1.

* March 8, 2011, Environment minister announces a new study, this time a Strategic Environmental Assesmment (SEA), but makes no commitment that test wells and experimental fracking will be excluded.

* May 2011, Walk from Rimouski to Montreal, with educational campaign on fracking and proposed long-range strategy of preventative nonviolent direct action. First moratorium law proposed, then adopted on fracking under the St. Lawrence or any of its islands west of Anticosti.

* June 2011, Environment minister announces full stop to drilling and fracking for shale gas. Walk culminates on Montreal.

* December 2011, the SEA committee holds proceedings across the St. Lawrence valley. Everywhere, it is met with hours of opposition testimonies and statements from citizens, others standing in silent protest, holding signs with a giant eyeball saying: “Keeping an eye on you. The next generations are watching.”

* April 2012, first of series of trainings for Schiste911 (Shale911) begins. About three hundred citizens have been trained so far.

* September 2012, Parti Québécois is elected as a minority government. In keeping with election promises, it soon announces it will impose a moratorium on fracking for shale gas, through a bill to be presented.

* May 2013, A bill toward a 5-year shale gas moratorium in the St. Lawrence Valley is presented, but has yet to be adopted. The Parti Québécois also changes and extends the modalities of the SEA. For the bill to be adopted, the minority government needs the votes of at least one of the largest opposition parties.

* September 2013, the situation is unchanged. Emergency action plans are being drafted by citizens trained in NVDA, using an innovative participatory video process.

* And next, exploration for shale oil is slated for 2014 on Anticosti Island and the Gaspé peninsula, areas unfortunately excluded from the proposed moratorium. Two pipelines carrying Alberta tar sands crude have also been announced to carry diluted bitumen across the province. Opposition to these initiatives is mounting. Victories bring new challenges, and extra layers of complexity. La lutte continue…

On a practical level, intentional civil resistance planning, relentless community organizing, and a powerful sequence of preventative nonviolent actions were able to prevent destructive development from being sold as a "done deal". Grassroots civil resistance organizing acted as a real deterrent against seemingly undefeatable extractive industries.

Activism and resistance

This kind of success does not come easily. And many threats in Quebec still loom. But the on-the-ground citizen victory against those who represented one of the most powerful industries in the world is the result of a multi-pronged, multiyear sequence of tactics that combined into an innovative, compelling strategy.

Civil resistance can change the politics of environmental threats, by mobilizing the very same people who, in democracies, elect the politicians. Activism and advocacy are with us all the time. But sustained pressure by organized groups of informed, determined people who will be affected by exploitative public or private action is still rare in open societies. When it is summoned by shrewd planning and the framing of a cause whose time has come, the result can be to pull the sword of the people’s power out of the rock of even the daunting combination of governmental torpor and relentless corporate action – and finally put public interests ahead of private gain.

The Syrian resistance: a tale of two struggles, Part 2Maciej Bartkowski [1] and Mohja Kahf [2] 

Probabilities are always shredded by violent conflict, except the probability that freedom and justice will be postponed. See Part One here. [13]

Rima Dali holding a banner that reads, “My brother the policeman: Where are our friends? and who has imprisoned them?”

As Dr. Erica Chenoweth and Dr. Maria Stephan reported in their groundbreaking quantitative research (reported in Why Civil Resistance Works, Columbia University Press, 2011), substituting armed struggle for civil resistance is likely to make the success of resistance half as likely, even against the most brutal of regimes. No doubt, nonviolent civil resistance can fail. But the same research showed that violent resistance failed in more than 60% of cases happening in a 106-year period, 2.5 times more than civil resistance.

Moreover, as this research showed, it takes violent resistance against brutal regimes an average of nine years to run its course, but only three years for nonviolent resistance to succeed or fail.

Part II: Aborting a revolutionNonviolent resistance dominated the Syrian conflict only for less than one year - under one-third of the average duration needed to produce results. Given the destructive force of violent conflict in Syria now, any additional year of violent struggle means tens of thousands more lives lost and more of the nation’s infrastructure in ruins. Even failed nonviolent resistance costs much less in lives and property destroyed, while the probability of democratization is still much greater through people power than with even a victorious violent resistance.

Finally, no major genocidal act is known to have happened during mass-based nonviolent struggles. The same cannot be said about violent conflicts, including civil wars. Had this information been known widely among revolutionary Syrians in 2011, would the turn to civil war have been as ineluctable as it appears in hindsight? Instead, different beliefs and calculations were in the driver’s seat.   

Four fatal beliefs

What can be learned from a clear-eyed evaluation of the Syrian nonviolent resistance? We think it is important to understand the movement-centered factors that victimized and degraded civil resistance amid rising armed struggle:

The belief that armed protection will help defend civil resistance

Osama Nassar, a nonviolent advocate who helped to create Daraya’s Local Coordination committee said in October, 2011, that those who became convinced of the need to bear arms “believe arming will protect people from getting killed in demonstrations and shelling of towns, but it will multiply civilian casualties by tens of thousands,” collapsing the false logic that “arms protect.”  Short-term and immediate protection against a home invasion or rape or neighborhood sniper could in fact be achieved by armed resistance but only for a limited time and with little overall protection extended over the whole community. Consequently, armed protection came at a collective price exacted by the regime, resulting in more civilian losses in the long run as whole neighborhoods were demolished in pitched battles between armed combatants.

In reality, civil resistance, while imposing significant costs on the regime and faced with brutal repression, saved many lives when it lasted, as the following figures illustrate. During the first five months of nonviolent civil resistance (mid-March to mid-August, 2011), the death toll was 2,019 [14] (figures exclude regime army casualties). In the next five months (mid-August 2011 to mid-January 2011) mixed violent and nonviolent resistance saw the death toll climbed to 3,144[15], a 56% increase. Finally, during the first five months of armed resistance (mid-January 2012 to mid-June 2012) the death toll was already 8,195 [16], a staggering 161% increase in comparison with the casualties during nonviolent struggle.

The regime also felt no longer constrained in the use of its deadly chemical weapons and frequent use of air strikes after the uprising became armed. There are no known cases of death by air strikes, for example, when the resistance on the ground was driven by the widespread protest chants of “Silmiye, silmiye” (“peaceful, peaceful”). The supremacy of nonviolent resistance over its armed counterpart in lowering the costs in human lives, and by extension in overall costs for the society when faced with a ruthless adversary, was ignored when, feeling immediate danger as well as high emotions and affinity with defecting soldiers, people turned to armed rebels to protect them.

The belief that the regime would fall in weeks, based on the Tunisian and Egyptian experiences.

Activists interviewed say that many of them held high hopes based on the successes of nonviolent protests in Tunisia and Egypt, which resulted in the ouster of the heads of those regimes within weeks of large street demonstrations, followed by the opting of soldiers not to use violence and ultimately the generals’ decision to desist from it. The absence of planning for a protracted, even years-long, nonviolent resistance may have led to directing full energy initially to the primary tactic of street demonstrations - the regime’s repression of which often justified the calls for armed protection of nonviolent protesters - to the detriment of less spectacular underground organizing of institutional networks of liberated communities, to which the civil resistance turned only after months of initial struggle.

In hindsight, one of the weaknesses of nonviolent resistance was a lack of anticipation, planning and preparation for gradual defections [17] that would not bring about the quick collapse of the regime. Had that been anticipated, it might not have paved the way for the emergence of the “protective” violent flank that eventually took over the resistance. A frequent argument during the transition to armed resistance was, “Where should defectors go, and where can they put down their arms? They will be killed, unless they form a rebel army.” This argument was flawed on its very premise: that a resort to violence protected people, as if the probability of being killed decreased with participation in violent resistance. This belief was proven wrong. It was the nonviolent community of organizers and activists that could have offered - both through their networks and nonviolent actions - much better chances of saving lives of the defecting soldiers.

The belief that the Syrian regime was uniquely brutal, and the related lack of knowledge of nonviolent struggles in other countries as well as in Syria decades before.

The Syrian regime was not atypical in its proclivity to violence, yet youthful revolutionaries isolated from the facts about other countries’ histories believed that Syrians faced an exceptional brutality from the Assad regime. Few if any knew that the Shah of Iran killed 600 nonviolent demonstrators in Tehran on one day alone, September 8, 1978 and that Mubarak’s police and other protectors hesitated little before gunning down 900 protesters during 17 days of demonstrations in 2011 - more than twice the casualties in Syria during the first two and a half week of nonviolent protests. The question is not the willingness to kill - which every dictator possesses - but his capacity to sustain the killing. The goal of civil resistance is to weaken a regime’s capacity to such a degree that, as in Iran or Egypt, the regime is no longer able to rely on its bureaucracy, business sector, armed forces or other pillars of support.

Syrians who favored armed resistance claimed that the American colonists had armed for their liberation, failing to notice that Americans engaged in 10 years of nonviolent resistance [18] against the British prior to armed struggle, and the Revolutionary War, triggered by the arrival of a massive British military force on American shores, created desertions away from the rebel side and undermined colonial unity while earlier nonviolent resistance had broadened its social base. Some Syrian nonviolent groups and activists, in stressing sectarian unity, didn’t see the double-edged sword of celebrating the multi-sectarian solidarity of an armed nationalist struggle. They touted the Syrian stand against the French in 1925 - a violent struggle that failed - while ignoring an astounding episode of nonviolent struggle: the General Strikes of 1936 (one of the longest in the human history) that united sectarian communities and achieved significant concessions from the French.

The belief that sectarian loyalties would inhibit unarmed resistance and necessitate violent conflict.

One argument for armed struggle was the perception that the sectarian complexion of the regime inhibited a high level of defections from the security apparatus - that Alawites would remain loyal due to strong internal ties. While the regime pursued pernicious sectarian tactics to make Alawite civilians into human shields, latent sectarian discourse surfaced on the revolutionary side, showing a failure to understand the pressures on the Alawite [19] community and to plan ways to make their defections more feasible.

In the history of revolutions, shooting at the other side has never increased chances for defections. Sectarian discourse by extremists such as exile Adnan Aroor was also allowed to develop in the name of unity against the regime, with the dangers it represented not adequately addressed early on. Many nonsectarian nonviolent activists believed that even mentioning religion was itself sectarian, and this hampered the effort to stem sectarianism. Whether or not the initial nonviolent resistance, despite its non-sectarianism, ultimately failed to win majorities of Christians, Alawites, and other components of Syrian society, what is sure is that armed rebellion aggravated these divisions and inhibited the breadth and strength of the resistance coalition.

ConclusionCivil resistance in Syria, while it dominated, was strategically effective against the Assad regime. When this method was used by hundreds of thousands of Syrians, the regime became uncertain of the loyalties of its supporters. In contrast, armed struggle neither offered effective protection to the population, nor placed the resistance in a strategically more advantageous position vis-a-vis Assad than the nonviolent resistance had. The degeneration of the conflict from nonviolent to violent force was not inevitable and might not have been eventual, had the established benefits of civil resistance been better known. Instead, the real gains of civil resistance were never assessed, before being overcome by the myth of the power of the gun, and later by hope that external military intervention

could resolve the conflict, even though such intervention has been frequently shown to be incapable of assuring human rights [20], safeguarding civilians [21] and ending civil wars [22].

Civil resistance still continues in Syria today despite the prevalence of insensate violence. The armed resistance that led to the disproportionate escalation of violence by the regime, led to multiple humanitarian catastrophes and the use of chemical weapons. But nonviolent activists are now focusing on building alternative services and institutions in communities. Their work may help restore social bonds and citizens’ networks even though the strategic effects of nonviolent resistance have been marginalized by civil war. 

As we write this, the Syrian regime has been constrained by US and Russian diplomacy to agree to surrender its chemical weapons to the United Nations. While this may stall any decisive outcome in the civil war, it may also illuminate any ongoing brutality by the regime, leading perhaps to more assertive criticism by international parties, and perhaps offer space and time for civil resistance to regenerate. But that is only a possibility. Probabilities are always shredded by violent conflict, except the probability that freedom and justice will be postponed.