Resistance Tactics

Ted Galen Carpenter from the January 1995 issue

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The need to alienate the regime from expected bases of support is an especially crucial principle of engagement. Hence, for example, Solidarity's inability to undermine the military's loyalty to the communist regime allowed the Polish government to declare martial law and rely on military units to arrest the union's leadership. Adjusting offensive and defensive operations according to the relative vulnerabilities of the protagonists represents an essential "principle of conception." Leaders of the El Salvador civic strike executed that tactic to perfection. As the authors note, "Each time the movement chose to escalate the conflict, they did so in relation to the opponent's newly exposed weaknesses."

All of those measures have the common denominator of sustaining a flexible, dynamic, and offense-oriented resistance campaign. Indeed, a common characteristic of the unsuccessful nonviolent movements highlighted in the historical case studies is the tendency to persist with one set of tactics rather than adjust to changing conditions to exploit the oppressor's weaknesses or to compensate for emerging vulnerabilities in the resistance movement. The principles outlined by Ackerman and Kruegler should help the leaders of future resistance campaigns to focus better on strategic and tactical fundamentals. Among other benefits, nonviolent movements may exhibit less of a disorganized and "spontaneous" quality.

While Strategic Nonviolent Conflict provides an important intellectual resource for those interested in the mechanics of unarmed defiance, some important questions, of course, remain. Although the authors effectively undermine the myth that nonviolent resistance can be effective only against misbehaving democratic governments, they are less successful at determining how such a strategy
might be sustained against a regime or invading force that is determined to prevail at all costs and is able to retain the loyalty of enough armed personnel to execute its policies.

In that regard, the Danish example is not entirely compelling. The Nazis were preoccupied elsewhere and regarded the occupation of Denmark as a relatively low-priority matter. One suspects that a campaign of nonviolent resistance undertaken by the Poles, Ukrainians, or other populations that stood in the way of Berlin's quest for Lebensraum in Eastern Europe would not have fared as well. Similarly, such a strategy does not appear to be feasible in the maelstrom of the former Yugoslavia, where the feuding factions seem willing to slaughter each other without a pang of guilt. It is a thorny problem that advocates of nonviolent resistance must examine more thoroughly.

Additional analysis is also needed in connection with the authors' sobering observation that while resisters can raise the costs to an oppressive government or occupation force, the authorities can also raise the costs to the resisters in a variety of ways. Several of the principles outlined by Ackerman and Kruegler may need to be refined--and perhaps others developed--to help shift the odds more decisively against the forces of oppression.

Such issues await the next spate of books and articles on the subject. Strategic Nonviolent Conflict makes an invaluable contribution to the study of nonviolent resistance and offers several useful guidelines to those who are dedicated to defending or recovering their freedom in the post-Cold War world. Ackerman and Kruegler have taken our understanding of nonviolent conflict to a new and impressive level.