New Tactics Meet New People

Tactics rely on methods of action. The more methods you know, the more vocabulary you will have to articulate the proper tactical moves and the most strategic campaigns. Find out about the three main classes of nonviolent action, and what they can do for you.

Also, guess from whom Gandhi gained most of his knowledge of nonviolent strategy. Find out from the late Barbara Deming, one of America's prominent nonviolent activists.

Power flows from a transaction between the ruler and the ruled. If power were a liquid, it would find its source in the consent of the governed. Civil resistance is consent removed, striking at the core dynamics of power. Is this how civil resisters channel power for change?

Just like riots, spontaneous acts of defiance and improvised strings of actions are mere brush fires: quickly ignited, quickly extinguished. When you’re always reacting, you end up disempowered.

Civil resistance is not magic. It may succeed, or it may fail. But don't leave it to chance.

Powerful opponents seem to have everything: money, guns, supplies, the army and police, institutions and prisons. How can simple citizens, with scarce resources and unarmed, succeed against opponents wielding deadly weapons? “Look at us,” you say, “we are no match.”

Find out about how nonviolent struggle can achieve victory, in large part by shifting alliegeances among three main groups of people.

We offered a practical definition of nonviolent struggle earlier in this series. We now turn to "civil resistance", a term often used as a synonym of nonviolent action. Is there a difference between the two? Why use one over the other? Drawing from a new release on the subject, find out what the rationale is for using "civil resistance" as a term that covers most of the ground associated with nonviolent action, without some of its unwanted aura of ascetic faith or doctrine.

From the 1960's to this day, the Sharpeville massacre under apartheid
South Africa has been regularly cited as a clear-cut example of why nonviolent action doesn't work. As part of our series on nonviolent struggle, we take a closer look at what happened on that fateful day when women, children and men were shot dead by police, and its aftermath. Was the only possible conclusion that armed struggle was going to be the only option? What might such levels of repression mean
for the relevance of unarmed methods of fundamental change?

In this fourth posting in our series on nonviolent struggle, we tackle a frequent argument that nonviolent methods were tried and found lacking. What arguments and facts can you use when people argue that riotous or armed actions are the only options left, that only violent force has been shown to be effective? Well, turns out there's a trap waiting for you to step in, a fundamental fault in logic that you all might want to be armed to fight off with sound argument and scientific facts.

“An apostle of nonviolence.” “Preaching nonviolence”. We hear these
expressions so often, we don’t question them. But there is a crucial
difference between soporific preachifying and nonviolent action. So
let's clear this up.

How can this thing called "nonviolent action" work? Over the last 100 years, against seemingly insurmountable odds and always to the surprise of official analysts and media pundits, unarmed civilians have prevailed over the power and weapons of some of the world's worst human rights abusers and most brutal dictatorships. There's a long list, but highlights include the Shah of Iran, Poland's Jaruzelski, Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, P.W. Botha and apartheid rule in South Africa, not to mention a few Soviet-style regimes behind the Berlin wall.