Examples Of Nonviolent Resistance

Nonviolent resistance has been changing the world for at least a century since Gandhi began challenging British racism. Nonviolent resistance movements are increasingly exchanging ideas in transnational networks. Egyptian activists traveled to Serbia to consult with veterans of the "Otpor" movement that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. The Serbs shared their own hard-won experience, as well as fundamental lessons of popular nonviolent resistance. What are these lessons? First, successful nonviolent resistance is based on overcoming fear and obedience. Despotic regimes, rather than ruling through absolute violence, typically rely on a noxious mixture of propaganda, patronage, apathy, political legitimacy, and a calibrated use of public and covert violence to generate a blanket of fear. However, it turns out that fear and apathy can be brittle. Dissidents can hammer the first cracks in the edifice by creating low-risk ways for citizens to signal solidarity with one another and see through a regime's subterfuge. In 1983, for example,

In his book Waging Nonviolent Struggle he describes 198 methods of nonviolent action. In early Greece, Aristophanes' Lysistrata gives the fictional example of women withholding sexual favors from their husbands until war was abandoned. A modern work of fiction inspired by Gene Sharp and by Aristophanes is A Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, depicting an ocean world inhabited by women who use nonviolent means to repel armed space invaders. Other methods of nonviolent intervention include occupations (sit-ins), blockades, fasting (hunger strikes), truck cavalcades, and dual sovereignty/parallel government. Tactics must be carefully chosen, taking into account political and cultural circumstances, and form part of a larger plan or