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Loading... This is an uprising: how nonviolent revolt is shaping the twenty-first century. (edition 2016)by Mark and Paul EnglerPolitical analysts Mark and Paul Engler uncover the organization and well-planned strategies behind outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest. The author's trace the evolution of civil resistance, providing new insights into the contributions of early experimenters such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., groundbreaking theorists such as Gene Sharp and Frances Fox Piven, and contemporary practitioners who have toppled repressive regimes. This is a pretty interesting book that mostly tells a bunch of stories about what it calls "momentum-driven organizing" - basically large strategic nonviolent protests. This is laid out as separate from "structure-based" organizing, in the tradition of unions, community organizations, etc. The book argues that both of these traditions are necessary to create lasting and meaningful social change, and can complement or detract from each other depending on a variety of factors. It lays out a few tenets for successful campaigns and goes through several case studies, including Otpor, ACT UP, the SCLC, and others. I found this book informative and inspirational - it really helped focus my thinking about the limited amount of activism I have done, and will continue to shape my thinking going into the future. Both an intellectual history of strategic nonviolence and a tour through what makes it in/effective, this is a timely read. To win, activists don’t need to convert their direct opponents, and it can be counterproductive to try to love your enemy; instead, you convince others to support you by provoking conflicts that make onlookers sympathize and join. The authors contrast the organization ideology, as theorized by Saul Alinsky, that looks to build political strength within existing structures and sustain itself through small victories on concrete policy issues, with the movement ideology, which looks to create transformational change, as theorized by Frances Fox Piven. Piven argues that poor people especially have few resources for regular political activism; their power instead largely comes from the ability to withdraw consent and disrupt the regular operations of the system—rent strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, parades through streets. More modern theorists include Erica Chenoweth, who has calculated that active engagement of 3.5 percent of the population is enough to make big social changes. Building that committed minority has to be a priority; it’s through them that movements change public opinion. Active engagement means (1) showing up for marches, phone banks, etc.; (2) voting and prioritizing the movement’s issues in voting; and (3) persuading others through conversation/argument/action in whatever way is available to them. The goal isn’t to persuade everyone, especially not with kindness—ACT UP, for example, was offensive to many (they interrupted meetings and threw blood on people) but still put AIDS on the public agenda, and a majority of whites thought that the Birmingham protests were a bad idea. ACT UP’s outrageous tactics kept the movement in the public eye, exposing the fundamental injustices of official policy, which made the backlash ultimately less important than the cultural change. Indeed, backlash was part of a necessary polarization in which fence-sitters decided which way they were going to jump, activists became more commmitted, and opponents also became more extreme and isolated from the mainstream. Having a radical group also made the moderate groups seem more reasonable. (The scary thing is how much of this the right in the US has understood, I hope not too late for us; post-November 2016, it’s pretty distressing now to read how conservatives are in an “impossible bind” because anti-immigrant statements energize the base but turn off more mainstream voters.) It was particularly interesting to read about contemporary activists’ reactions to MLK in Birmingham and Gandhi’s Salt March—in both cases, they accepted tiny substantive concessions and activists thought these were defeats, but the effect on the public agenda vastly overwhelmed the minimal substance. The perception of success can be more important than success itself, which is why it can be useful for the movement to set and exceed its own goals (X marchers, a bigger march next year, etc.). Media coverage matters a lot, too. Successfully grabbing the spotlight often requires disruption of the usual, sacrifice of some sort by the protestors (such as going to jail; suffering makes onlookers pick a side and galvanizes previously lukewarm supporters), and escalation (bigger protests, bigger demands). This can produce serious injuries or even deaths, but as one advocate of strategic nonviolent protest pointed out, “Ché Guevara didn’t abandon guerilla warfare because people were getting killed.” Helpful to all of this is a “culture of mass training,” where new members are instructed on the relevant principles. Bill Moyers, believe it or not, also wrote about the importance of psychology: activists have to feel like they’re doing something, especially in the down times after big protests where the euphoria has dwindled. Movements that use violence are empirically substantially less likely to succeed in the long term, but there’s an important caveat: what matters is whether the wider society considers an action to be violent. And we know which groups get the benefit of the doubt about whether they’re violent and which are perceived as violent or incipiently violent just because they exist in public. The authors argue that because violence can taint an entire cause, it’s not a good idea to mix and match tactics. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be more radical subsets of activists—ACT UP wasn’t violent, it was just a lot more confrontational. How do you go from movement to lasting change? Not everyone can, as Egyptian protestors discovered to their sorrow. The authors suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood, though well established as opposition, didn’t lead the protests against Mubarak because they were doing ok under the existing system—they had something to lose by being more confrontational. But once Mubarak was gone, the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational strength allowed it to influence the new governing bodies that were put into place. This book is a comprehensive evaluation of the tools and strategies used in nonviolent movements, whether they be to overthrow dictators or to advance social change in representative democracies. Much of this book is based on the work of Gene Sharp (who actually passed away during the time I was reading this), who published his theories on nonviolence in 1973's The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Enger illustrates nonviolent movements in action through cases of the satyagraha movement that lead to India's independence from Great Britain, and the tactics and campaigns of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the American Civil Rights Movement. Two other figures are also examined for their contributions to the theory and strategy of nonviolent movements. The first is Saul Alinsky, whose book Rules for Radicals (1971), served as a guidebook for organizing community organizations along nonpartisan and ideologically diverse lines towards pragmatic results achieved over the long term. A countering theory comes from France Fox Piven, who along with Richard A. Cloward published Poor People's Movements (1977), which argues that the most vulnerable communities lack the resources to manage long-term campaigns or gain political influence without using disruptive tactics such as boycotts, sit-ins, traffic tie-ups, and strikes. From Piven's point of view, the organizations created by Alinsky's organizing can become too complacent or risk averse once they've established themselves and made ties with political leaders. From Alinsky's point of view, the disruptive movements championed by Piven often fail to make lasting social change and run out of steam. There are obvious beneficial ideas and strategies that can be drawn from each theory, and Engler argues that a hybrid approach was successful in India, the Civil Rights Movement, and more recently by Otpor!, the Serbian resistance to the tyranny of Slobodan Milošević. Otpor! was a decentralized movement which made it more difficult for the Milošević regime to target leaders for retribution, or for leaders to become too comfortably entangled in the government to the point that would not want to risk taking action. Despite the decentralized approach, Otpor! maintained strict guidelines on action known as frontloading that helped maintain consistency on message and strategy. Many Otpor! actions came in the form of satirical street theater performances which doubled as recruitment by inviting interested passersby to attend intensive training on nonviolence. Engler also relates cases of how nonviolent movements are working in the contemporary United States. Marriage equality became reality in the United States not because of a Supreme Court decision, but because an organized movement worked for decades to shift public opinion. Movements can be divisive by design with ACT UP presented an example of a group who used provocative and polarizing direct actions that brought attention to people suffering from AIDS that could not be achieved by more pragmatic organizations who feared losing the few gains already achieved by the LGBT community. This is an important book that summarizes the history of nonviolent movements, breaks down key tactics and strategy, and serves as a blueprint for future nonviolent revolutions. I think massive nonviolent movements will be vital to address the severe social and political issues we're facing in the 21st century and recommend that everyone read this book to get a sense of what needs to be done. Favorite Passages: This book is concerned with a specific phenomenon: momentum-driven mass mobilization. It contends that those who have most carefully studied these mobilizations—examining how to construct and sustain scenarios of widespread protest—come out of a tradition of strategic nonviolence. It argues that political observers watching the democratic upheavals of the twenty-first century should incorporate this tradition’s insights into their understanding of how social transformation happens. Those wishing to bring such upheavals into existence, meanwhile, do well to marry these insights with their existing approaches to leveraging change. - p. 3 |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)303.6Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Social Processes Conflict and conflict resolution ; ViolenceLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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