Teaching People Power
Gene Sharp talks about nonviolent conflict, the Middle East, and why we need to rethink politics
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GoogleThe Daily Beast calls Gene Sharp "The 83 Year Old Who Toppled Egypt." The New York Times reports that "for the world's despots, his ideas can be fatal." In the last month he's been praised in venues ranging from Scientific American to the BBC. It's an unprecedented level of attention for a scholar whose work has always circulated on the edge of our political debates, gathering influence but never driving the discussion. "It's really been quite amazing," Sharp says of the sudden wave of media attention. "It's never happened before."
Sharp didn't topple Mubarak, of course. The Egyptian people did that. What he did do was write books that activists in Egypt—like activists in other countries, from Serbia to Burma and from the Baltic states to Iran—found useful in forging their own revolutions. In an earlier age, rebels seeking strategic and tactical knowhow might have sought the advice of Che Guevara or Vo Nguyen Giap. Today they're more likely to read Gene Sharp. The differences between Che and Sharp are many, but the most important distinction may be this: Where Guevara would attempt to instruct the insurrectionists in the art of armed struggle, Sharp draws on the Gandhian tradition of organized, nonviolent noncooperation.
Sharp's magnum opus, 1973's three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action, clocks in at over 800 densely packed pages, so I won't try to boil his insights down to a few sentences. But three strands of his work stand out. The first is his careful combing of the historical record for empirical examples of civic resistance, which he not only recounts but sorts into useful categories, from "rude gestures" and "letters of opposition or support" to strikes, mutinies, and the creation of parallel grassroots governments. The second is his theory of political power, which aims to explain how such tactics could work in a world where the state has far more arms than the citizens. Drawing on several sources—Gandhi, Arendt, the anarchists—Sharp takes the insight that the government relies on the cooperation of the public and then explores its ramifications, probing the ways those habits of loyalty and obedience can be strengthened or weakened.
The third strand is a style that stresses strategic effectiveness more than moral appeals. For many people, the word nonviolence connotes a shelf in a New Age bookstore. But Sharp writes for realists eager to end oppressive dictatorships, not for would-be mahatmas.
Sharp lives in Boston, where the tiny Albert Einstein Institution serves as his base of operations. I spoke with him via phone on Wednesday, as the revolutionary fire lit in Tunisia in December was burning across the Middle East and Africa.
Reason: Do you know of any historical parallels with what happened in Tunisia?
Gene Sharp: Jamila Raqib [executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution] has been working on an account of the development of the Tunisia case. It seems quite special. It was way off in a part of the country that was relatively backward economically and politically. It was on a very small scale—an individual was very much wronged by the local officials—and then it escalated up to what finally happened. I don't know of any other case that started that way.
Reason: Right after Tunisia, a lot of people pointed to Egypt and said the same thing couldn't be done there. What was your level of optimism or pessimism as the protests there began?
Sharp: Well, I hoped they'd do something right. But I didn't expect what happened. It was very remarkable in at least two major ways.
One, that they somehow cast off their fear. They kept saying this to person after person, reporter after reporter, that they're no longer afraid. That is very dangerous for a dictatorship. Dictators always want to install fear, to get compulsive compliance and obedience and cooperation. When people cast off their fear and are not afraid, the dictator has very little means to control anymore.
And then they maintained nonviolent discipline. Not perfectly, but relatively very well. Even when they had a million people in a massive day of struggle and protest, when there was tension that might have developed into violence, I heard they kept saying: "Peaceful, peaceful!" This is an amazing achievement with that many people in a short period of time.
Violence is a tool that the dictatorship has more of than you. They are equipped to wage violence and to put down riots and that kind of resistance. They are not well-equipped to control a nonviolent movement. You have a chance of winning there.
Reason: How optimistic are you about the interim, or allegedly interim, military government? Do you feel there's more likely to be a transition to self-rule or just to another flavor of dictatorship?
Sharp: I don't know enough about the situation in Egypt to be either pessimistic or optimistic. I have noticed that the Egyptians themselves are being very careful about that. After the fall of Milosevic, the Serbs put up big posters: "We're keeping our eyes on you." You have to do that.
We have this danger of a coup d'etat in the transition period. It could easily be a military coup, as the Egyptians have had their spate of before. It could be some outside group, like the Bolsheviks did in 1917 after a successful nonviolent struggle had brought down the old czarist system. We have a handbook called The Anti-Coup that's a detailed account of what you can do and must not do during that period.
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Nuthin' wrong with seeking advice from V.N. Giap -- he whupped the French, American and the South Vietnamese butts real good.
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First, find yourself a foreign power willing to support your armed struggle with large quantities of equipment and material. . .
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That Tunisian who started this whole thing by self-immolation is probably the closest person who I would consider to be a martyr -- it's absolutely thrilling watchin' those Arab government sonzabitches get taken down.
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indeed. It's a pretty big injustice that he doesn't get to see the the result of his actions
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Sharp's work seems to be morally neutral. It is a comprehensive theory of nonviolent means to effect societal change. What that change is, or should be, and from what to what seems to be missing.
The good in it is nonviolence. The not-so-good is such methods, without a moral compass, can be used to reduce freedom and liberty on a large scale.
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You seem to put down his work because it is "morally neutral", I applaud him for it.
It takes amazing humility and perspective to understand that politics, limits of freedom and liberty are all constantly swinging pendulums - each movement is finite in scope and reach.
But changing the rules of the game,by removing the use of violent force, that will have positive lasting effects long after each movement has run its course.
Rather focus on -
The essence of morality lies not in the "ought" or what is "right" as we are excessively taught in our culture, but in the reason why something ought to be or is right. In this light, the essence of morality is nonviolence. There is no path to peace; peace is the path. What you call something that is essentially neutral has already involved morality in it in every step. To be sure, it can be reduced in some ways to mere strategics and manipulation for the sake of power, and at some point your criticism is actually valid. However, due to the essential nonviolence component of morality as such, it makes what you're saying here a bit more, as I suggest, complicated.
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Typo - 4th page near the bottom, ahisma should be spelled ahimsa.
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Thanks.
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I have a friend who got out of Egypt just as everything was hitting the fan. He loves the Egyptian people and thinks Glen Beck has no clue what's going on there.
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Does anyone except Beck think Beck has a clue what's going on?
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"There's Iran in 1979. The Shah was quite brutal in his repression, yet the people maintained nonviolent discipline quite well, even putting flowers in the muzzles of the rifles of the soldiers and undermining their reliability.
Yeah, things are all better now!
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Yeah, things are all better now!
They're working on it. When it (again) succeeds, it will be because of the ideas found in Sharp's work, and might even be partially due to the fact that Sharp did put them together in a world where nobody else did.
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Great 32 years later and..."They're working on it." I'll bet all the dead Iranians and their famlies are happy about that.
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Hey, genius, would it have been better for the Iranian revolutionaries to use more violence in overthrowing the shah? That's the question. As Sharp said, "Even if they're there for a cause you detest, it's better they use nonviolent means than they use violence."
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They would have better off today if they hadn't overthrown the Shah.
That's the answer! -
You clearly have no clue about what's going on in Iranian society. It's apparent that you are not, in fact a realist, but rather you are a blindfolded Zionist.
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"The violence seems to be on the protesters' side"???
What news are you watching, Jesse?
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What news are you watching, Jesse?
What article are you reading, Ryan? The sentence "The violence seems to be on the protesters' side" appears nowhere in this interview.
I did say that "there's been much more violence on the protesters' side" in Libya, but that was in comparison to the protesters in other countries, not in comparison to the government. I suppose I can see how that could be misread, but (a) the meaning seems pretty clear in context, and (b) even if it isn't, please let me be unclear in my own words, not yours.
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Got it.
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Sorry if I sounded snippy. I was taken aback that anyone would think I was minimizing Qaddafi's crimes.
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I think this is hot topic of the day..the speed of political changes through peacful and now through deadly events in Libya has really changed the way how things had been in middle east. Rulers who have been arounds for decades have to face the people myth now.
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Bravo.
This was a seriously excellent interview with a giant of future history. Well done.
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Indeed. Twas a good interview.
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Back in 1982, I reviewed Sharp's book SOCIAL POWER & POLITCAL FREEDOM from a libertarian viewpoint.
Theorist Who Influenced Egypt's Revolution, A Look Back http://groundreport.com/articles.php?id=2934845
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This article is wrong because it doesn't give Obama credit for all the revolutions!
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I love how this, the single most important article on Reason in months, maybe even years, sees no comment from the site's usual glibertarian dorks.
The reason is obvious: it's because effective nonviolence is a collective action and the usual glibertarian dorks are monumentally self-absorbed douchebags whose indulge their gun-cuddling fuck-you-I've-got-mine ethos to the cost of any collective action.
They might pay lip service to "non-initiation of force" but when practical, empirical nonviolence changes the world - repeatedly and in the balance for the good - where are these alleged pals of liberty?
-crickets-
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"Sharp Reflection Warranted: Nonviolence in the Service of Imperialism"
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I think that when people have power, its great for them I would say.