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BY

The Dissident's ToolkitWant to topple an autocrat? Street demonstrations are just one tool among many.

ERICA CH EN OWET H

Over the past few years we've grown used to the iconography of protest. In the

wake of the Arab Spring, images of angry young street demonstrators

shouting slogans, wielding signs, and confronting security forces have become

almost commonplace. But just as often we've seen campaigns of public protest

flounder or go into reverse: just look at Egypt and Libya, to name the most

prominent cases. The recent surge of street demonstrations in Sudan once again

confronts us with a fundamental question: How does public protest undermine

authoritarian governments? Are demonstrations really the key to toppling

autocrats?

Research shows, in fact, that demonstrations are just one of many tools that civil

resistance movements can use to effect change. Successful movements are those

that use a wide array of methods to pressure their state opponents while keeping

their activists safe. The demonstration tactic we're used to seeing is just one of

many hundreds of tactics available to civilians seeking change -- and successful

campaigns for change must use more than just a single tactic.

Maria Stephan and I conducted research on a related but broader question: "When

does civil resistance work?" The results of our research show that opposition

campaigns are successful when they manage to do three key things: (1) attract

widespread and diverse participation; (2) develop a strategy that allows them to

maneuver around repression; and (3) provoke defections, loyalty shifts, or

disobedience among regime elites and/or security forces.

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Attracting participation is perhaps the most important of these tasks, since the

ability to provoke defections and outmaneuver opponents often depends on

whether the movement enjoys large and broad-based support. The most important

singular factor for a successful campaign is its participation rate. According to the

NAVCO data set, which identifies the outcomes of over 300 nonviolent and violent

campaigns worldwide from 1900-2006, none of the cases failed after achieving the

active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population -- and some

of them succeeded with far less than that. Of course, 3.5 percent is nothing to

sneeze at. In the United States today, this constitutes over 11 million people. But

how do movements get this large in the first place, especially in countries where

overt participation in a mass movement is highly risky?

One way organizers can grow their movement is by including tactics that are safer

and therefore more attractive to risk-averse participants. For example, instead of

relying solely on demonstrations or protests, many movements will allow people to

participate through "electricity strikes" where people shut off their electricity at a

coordinated time of day, or by banging on pots and pans in the middle of the night

to signal the power in numbers. Engaging in these types of actions may draw in

more ambivalent people while also allowing them the opportunity to develop a

sense of identity with the movement and its goals. In Chile under Pinochet, for

example, outright demonstrations against the dictator were far too dangerous. In

one instance, Pinochet was so threatened by the subtext of some popular songs

that he banned public singing; it didn't take much. But when people began to bang

on pots and pans, it let them demonstrate their defiance anonymously in the

safety of their own homes. As the people's metallic clamor for change became

louder and louder, anti-Pinochet organizers and their supporters became

emboldened to press for more disruptive and overt action.

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A similar movement is underway in Egypt today, where the "Masmou" movement

has led thousands of people to bang on pots and pans inside their homes at 9 p.m.

each night to signal that there are viable alternatives to both the al-Sisi government

and the Muslim Brotherhood. In highly repressive environments there is, indeed,

safety in numbers. And actions like this can signal that one is not alone, while

making it quite difficult for the government to crack down on participants.

Once people do begin to mobilize, the effects on the internal politics of a tyrannical

regime can be intense. As Gene Sharp rightly argued, no regime is monolithic.

Every leader is 100 percent dependent on the cooperation, obedience, and help of

the people that form the regime's pillars of support: security forces, the state

media, business or educational elites, religious authorities, and civilian

bureaucrats. And when such people begin to reevaluate the regime's role in their

long-term interests, they can actually be pulled away from supporting the leader.

This is much more likely to happen the more people are mobilized against the

opponent.

Why? Because no regime loyalists in any country live entirely isolated from the

population itself. They have friends, they have family, and they have existing

relationships that will bring with them in the long term, regardless of whether the

leader stays or goes. As the literary critic Robert Inchausti is credited as saying,

"Nonviolence is a wager -- not so much on the goodness of humanity as on its

infinite complexity." Take an example from the so-called "Bulldozer Revolution," a

Serbian people power revolution against Slobodan Milosevic that toppled him in

October 2000. In this case, once it became clear that hundreds of thousands of

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Serbs were descending on Belgrade to demand that Milosevic leave office,

policemen ignored the order to shoot on demonstrators. When asked why he did

so, one of them said: "I knew my kids were in the crowd."

This policeman wasn't alone in Serbia or elsewhere. We find that, in general,

security forces tend to defect much more often when they face nonviolent

campaigns (as compared to armed uprisings), particularly as the numbers rise.

Controlling for other factors, security forces are about 60 percent likely to defect

when confronted with the largest nonviolent campaigns and over 30 percent likely

with the average-sized nonviolent campaign. The defection of security forces

occurred within the ranks of the Iranian armed forces during the anti-Shah

resistance, within Filipino armed forces during the anti-Marcos uprising, and

within the Israeli military during the first Palestinian Intifada, to name but a few

examples. And these loyalty shifts can be crucial for the outcomes of these

campaigns: They increase their chances of success by over 60 percent.

Of course, demonstrations -- and people power movements in general -- tend to

fail as often as they succeed. But when we look at outright failures -- such as

Tiananmen Square, the 1956 Hungarian uprising, or the 2007 Saffron Revolution in

Burma -- a few patterns become evident. The failed campaigns never spread to

include vast proportions of the population, and failed to shift between highly risky

tactics and safer ones. But they also failed to establish a long-term strategy to

make the campaigns sustainable, which was especially important given the

brutality of state repression. The average duration of a nonviolent campaign was

between two-and-a-half and three years, but few of these campaigns had a long-

term strategy, besides the wishful hope that tactical victories might make the

regime comply with their demands.

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Campaigns of civil resistance are underway in many countries around the world,

from Bahrain to Maldives, from Turkey to Bulgaria. In all of these cases, movement

planners must carefully analyze the political effects that tactics like

demonstrations have. If these tactics fail to increase sympathy for the campaign at

home or abroad, diversify the base of participants, and encourage defections

among regime elites, then they are not helping the movement's chances of

succeeding. But rather than abandoning the struggle because demonstrations stop

working, movement leaders would do well to appreciate the many other

nonviolent methods of protest and noncooperation they can bring to bear against

their opponents. The campaigns that ultimately succeed will be the ones that fully

embrace Sun Tzu's warning that "tactics without strategy is the noise before

defeat."

MAHMOUD ZAYYAT/AFP/Getty Images

BY

Economic Experiments and theBattle for East AsiaWhy the race for dominance in East Asia is about economic strength, not military

power.

ELY RAT N ER

After a last minute budget deal on Wednesday, Oct. 16, the United States

government is back in business. Among the casualties of the 16-day

shutdown, which resulted in at least $24 billion in U.S. economic losses, was a

presidential trip to Southeast Asia.

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Stuck in Washington in early October, media coverage, and even President Barack

Obama himself, described how presidential absence from Asia benefited Beijing.

Adding insult to injury, a group photo from a regional forum that Obama was

supposed to have attended showed Chinese President Xi Jinping smiling front and

center, while protocol banished Secretary of State John Kerry -- filling in for

Obama -- to a back corner. "Obama cancels Asia trip. Is the US 'pivot' in jeopardy?"

ran a headline from The Christian Science Monitor.

While China emerged victorious from this latest round of diplo-drama, the

handwringing in Washington misses the point: The contest for influence in Asia

will not be settled in multilateral meetings. Instead, the region will be shaped by

whichever major powers have the best prospects for long-term sustainable growth.

Simply put, power costs money. As the economic heavyweight of the 20th century,

the United States has had the resources to build a system of military alliances in

Asia and to advance U.S. interests in democracy and free markets. But today, the

region is up for grabs. Over the next four months, the United States, China, and

Japan -- the world's three largest economies -- are all potentially instituting game-

changing economic reforms, whose outcomes could determine who leads Asia.

China's economy could become roughly the same size as the United States in

purchasing power parity (PPP) terms as early as 2016, according to the

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And the

National Intelligence Council, the U.S. intelligence community's center for long-

term analysis, has estimated that China's economy will be the world's largest in

aggregate terms before 2030. Already the second largest or largest trading partner

to every major country in Asia, China uses its economic leverage to garner support

on issues like Taiwan while muting international criticism over continued human

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rights abuses. And in March, China announced its military budget would expand

by 10.7 percent in 2013, continuing two decades of double-digit growth and buying

increasing capability to contest disputed territories in the South and East China

Seas.

But China is simultaneously in the midst of its longest economic slowdown since

the introduction of market reforms in the late 1970s. After enjoying double-digit

growth for much of the past three decades, its gross domestic product (GDP) is

expected to expand at roughly 7.5 percent in 2013. With China facing rising labor

costs, an aging population, endemic corruption, pollution, and the consequences

of transitioning from a low- to middle-income country, Peking University

professor Michael Pettis believes its annual GDP growth could drop as low as 3

percent over the next decade. The 2009 financial crisis further exacerbated these

vulnerabilities by decreasing overseas demand and spooking Beijing into enacting

a $570 billion stimulus. While that program temporarily propped up the economy,

it also contributed to a serious local debt problem, now estimated at $3.28 trillion,

nearly 39 percent of GDP.

Communist Party leaders, aware that China's current growth model is

unsustainable, have been unequivocal about their desire to replace overreliance

on debt and investment with greater household consumption. With that in mind,

China's official news agency Xinhua billed the Third Plenum, a major party

conference in November, as "a springboard for major national reform." But it

remains to be seen whether the Party has the will or the wherewithal to take on the

vested interests that profit so handsomely from the existing system. It is looking

increasingly likely, for example, that the Party will defer reform of state-owned

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enterprises, seen by many as the linchpin to revitalizing China's economy. If China

gets bogged down in domestic economic problems, it will be less able to project

power overseas.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, Japan has been plagued by two decades of abysmal

economic growth.

In January, a month after taking office, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

announced "three arrows" of monetary, fiscal, and structural reform. The first two

are already underway: In February, Abe launched an unprecedented program of

monetary easing by the central bank, which quickly resulted in a doubling of the

monetary base. This was accompanied by the second arrow, a massive $116 billion

fiscal stimulus program to drive demand.

Early results have been promising -- the economy grew at 3.8 percent in the second

quarter of 2013 -- but the long-term success of Abenomics lies with the third arrow,

structural reform. Japan's economy remains over-regulated, inflexible, and

unfriendly to foreign firms. (The tariff on imported rice, for example, is a whopping

778 percent.) And the reforms may not be able to overcome the extraordinary

weight of Japan's increasingly aged population and debilitating debt-- expected to

hit 230 percent by 2014 (the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world).

Abe has already visited Southeast Asia, where Japan is a leading donor and

investor, four times since December. But visits alone will not suffice. The more Abe

is able to put Japan on a solid economic footing, the more the country will be able

to play a decisive role in the region. If Abe's reforms succeed, he may accrue

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enough economic and political capital to beef up Japan's military and amend its

pacifist constitution. This could become increasingly important to supplement

reductions in U.S. defense budgets.

Obama faces the daunting task of jumpstarting the U.S. economy while addressing

the longer-term challenge of curbing the federal debt, which exploded from 32

percent of GDP in 2001 to 72 percent in 2012. Over the next decade, the United

States faces a total projected deficit of $6.3 trillion as the spending pressures

associated with an aging population, rising health care costs and growing interest

payments continue to outpace revenue.

A United States suffering prolonged economic woes will find it increasingly

difficult to maintain the diplomatic, economic and military power it has sustained

in Asia since the end of World War II. Smaller defense budgets will corrode the U.S.

military presence in the region. Despite sound fundamentals for growth, the

failure to break the gridlock in Washington and put the United States on a

sustainable fiscal footing could imperil its ability to patrol and pacify East Asia.

The isolationism that often accompanies tough economic times would further

reinforce the erosion of American influence.

Kicking off the U.S. pivot to Asia in November 2011, President Obama told the

Australian Parliament that, "let there be no doubt: In the Asia Pacific in the 21st

century, the United States of America is all in." Maybe so, but current reform

efforts in Beijing, Tokyo, and Washington will help to determine who's playing the

strongest hand.

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