The track record of wins for campaigns that use nonviolent direct action continues to grow. More activists around the world at this very moment are planning and carrying out campaigns than anyone can count.
The Global Nonviolent Action Database includes accounts of over 800 campaigns; researchers rate each on a scale of 0 to 10 to estimate its degree of success in achieving its goals. Many of the campaigns score 10, some score 0 and most fall in between. Today’s activists are bound to wonder: when campaigns win, how do they do it?
Mechanisms of change
When I tackled this question in graduate school in the 1960s, I noticed that movements’ pathways to success are different. So I focused on these differences to identify mechanisms for achieving success.
Gandhi sometimes said that his aim was to convince the opponent that the campaigners were correct. I used Gandhi’s word and called that mechanism conversion. One success happened when lower caste Hindus rebelled because they weren’t allowed on a temple road used by upper caste Hindus. The dalits were said to make the road unclean simply by using it.
Gandhi encouraged them to take direct action, and they occupied the temple road even when the monsoon flooded the road and they had to stand in water up to their waists. After a year the police took down the barricade preventing the dalits from proceeding on the road. But the campaigners decided to go for conversion, and they continued their vigil for four more months until the upper caste Hindus were convinced that the dalits were right.
As I searched through other cases, however, conversion seemed very rare, and Gandhi himself eventually dropped the conversion pathway when facing the British Empire. “England will never make any real advance so as to satisfy India’s aspirations till she is forced to it,” he said. “British rule is no philanthropic job, it is a terribly earnest business proposition worked out from day to day with deadly precision. The coating of benevolence that is periodically given to it merely prolongs the agony.”
England must be “forced,” Gandhi said — the mechanism of coercion. When we coerce we force a change against the will of the opponent, who still disagrees with us about the issue but must give in anyway.
We find this mechanism in the dozens of cases in the database where dictatorships are overthrown nonviolently. The shah of Iran in 1979 remained as fascistic and bloody-minded as ever, but he got on the plane to the United States because his people had shown they would no longer be governed by him.
So far, so good — conversion and coercion, two mechanisms very different from each other. But additional campaigns I was running into didn’t use either of these mechanisms. The people weren’t willing to wait until the opponent finally converted to their point of view, nor could they always mount such massive noncooperation as to be able to coerce.
I then identified a third mechanism, persuasion. Gene Sharp, when he drew from my work for his foundational book The Politics of Nonviolent Action, expanded the description of that mechanism into accommodation: The opponent realizes that yielding to the demands of the campaigners is the best thing to do under the circumstances, even though not actually forced to do so. In his later work Gene added disintegration, to identify regimes or opponents that actually dissolve under the impact of the campaign. That brought us to four pathways to success: conversion, coercion, accommodation and disintegration.
The mechanism more available to most of us
I was especially curious about the aspect of accommodation that I called persuasion, because so many winning campaigns have achieved this, and yet it seemed to me fairly tricky. It’s available to the labor movement, although labor is presently growing weaker in many countries, and to activists of many kinds. This is the pathway by which the opponent still has the means to maintain the oppressive policy and still believes in it — austerity or fossil fuels would be current examples of that situation — only to later shift once there is no longer the willingness to keep the machinery of punishment going that’s needed to continue the injustice.
The courageous women who used direct action to demand suffrage in the United States show us one version of how this works. The women of the early 1900s were not going to coerce the men to give them the vote. Nor could they convert the men to feminism; a century later most men in this country still aren’t there. The women’s strategy illuminates the pathway that might be most available for high-stakes issues in so-called liberal democracies.
When the United States joined World War I, a number of advocacy organizations did the expected thing and dialed back their pressure until after the war. The militant women led by Alice Paul did the opposite. They escalated their tactics and picketed the White House, which had never before been picketed, to pressure President Woodrow Wilson.
The women branded him with the title of the hated German emperor by writing on their picket signs, “Kaiser Wilson.” Their boldness got them physically attacked by passersby and thrown into jail, where they escalated still further by prolonged hunger strikes. A number of the women, when released, went right back to the picket line; one woman was arrested dozens of times!
The larger and more cautious part of the women’s suffrage movement was appalled at the polarization caused by this nonviolent direct action, and it’s true that at first many doors closed to the cause of suffrage in a nation at war. I interviewed Alice Paul many years later and found in her the shrewd strategist who knows that polarization can close doors in the short run and open them for the longer run — it’s all in the timing.
What she did next was send women recovering from brutal prison treatment out on speaking tours to tell the story of their suffering. The public continued to dislike the picketing but became empathic with these women who were suffering for their beliefs. Power-holders started to feel the heat. U.S. Representative Volstead of Minnesota said, “While I do not approve of picketing, I disapprove more strongly of the hoodlum methods pursued in suppressing the practice.”
Finally, the fact of suffering became stronger than resistance to women voting, and one congressman is reported to have said, “While I have always been opposed to suffrage, I have been so aroused over the treatment of the women [in prison] that I have decided to vote for the federal amendment.”
A critical mass of the opponents, including President Wilson, was persuaded that, even though the women were wrong, they were not really so bad as to justify long and brutal prison sentences.
How does persuasion use the opponent’s violence to win?
To understand how this works we need to remember something about systematic violence. In social conflicts the people tasked with violent repression are given dehumanized images to help them do their work. Ancient Greek soldiers waged war against “the barbarians.” White people were taught that African slaves were “animals.” The Nazis called Jews “vermin” and U.S. soldiers called Vietnamese “gooks.” Detainees in Guantanamo are “terrorists” — “the worst of the worst.”
When I research some successful persuasion campaigns in detail, I find that the campaigners use tactics that brilliantly undermine the images that perpetrators use to support their violence. Movement tactics vary, depending on the specific context and set of images.
The Danny Glover film Freedom Song shows graphically how detailed and nuanced these tactics can be; the film is based on the 1961 entry of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee into Ku Klux Klan-dominated Mississippi. When activists’ lives are on the line, attention to detail can make the difference between a beating and killing. Here’s a sample of racist imagery: “Black men carry razors and knives” and “demonstrators are riff-raff with nothing better to do.” Before confrontations the black students dressed in shirts and ties, carried their schoolbooks, and left their knives at home. The early SNCC and others were systematically undermining the framing that racists needed fully to unleash their repression.
What the white, middle-class suffragists and the black students had in common was a knack for focusing their opponents’ attention on something the opponents could not have seen earlier. The previously infantilized women, by dramatizing their own strength and determination, pierced sexist paternalism. The previously dehumanized black students, by dramatizing their own intelligence, courage and dignity, weakened racist contempt.
SNCC organizer Charlie Jones once told me about the white woman entering a southern lunch counter who went hysterical when she saw black students sitting where she thought only white people should be. She launched a torrent of abuse at the biggest student, then violently pushed him off his lunch counter stool. He fell to the floor, paused a moment to gather himself, calmly rose to his full height while holding her with his gaze, and motioned with outstretched hand that she was free to go.
She broke into tears and was led from the store by a friend. A week later the woman had joined a white women’s auxiliary working in support of the sit-ins, a group of allies that made it difficult for the racist power structure to keep repressing the students.
Similar stories can be drawn from many struggles in many cultures. The key is that the campaigners’ suffering is voluntary. Involuntary suffering such as that experienced by victims of genocide rarely has this effect. The dehumanized image of a group that perpetrators need to continue their violence is contradicted, in all cultures I know of, by dramatized courage. The campaigners’ refusal to run and hide, but instead to step up to “take it,” is a universal signifier of courage and carries a contagious self-respect.
Gene Sharp’s metaphor of “political jiu-jitsu” is fitting, since martial artists, like nonviolent campaigners, are eager to use the opponent’s apparent strength against him. Sometimes this means changing his mind or heart, while other times it doesn’t. Either way, campaigners can win.
Thanks, George. Helpful as always. I’m especially thinking about the point that infantilized women and dehumanized black students acted in ways that intentionally challenged the dominant mindset and am wondering how that might translate to the climate justice movement. I know Bill McKibben specifically asks people to dress nicely for civil disobedience, which counters the stereotype of hippy tree-huggers. What can we do to challenge the paradigm at a deeper level? If we are seen as unrealistic, how might we demonstrate the opposite?
Ah, yes… the hippie thing. What struck me most looking at the film of the Catonsville 9 and the footage in Nadine’s article on the attempt to levitate the Pentagon, was just how NORMAL and middle class everyone looked…so much more than I remember. The three Plowshares activists now awaiting their sentences all very normal….no 82 year old hippie-nun-tree hugger there. So I’m guessing how we look is not the answer at all. clearly something else is at work here. How TPTB and their tame media want to have us portrayed, how they manage to label us is the issue. Radical Priest, Hippie Freak, Anarchists [ there was a lot of that thrown around by the media at the last G20 summit], Whiney Liberals, and my personal favorite these last few years, the Communistsocialistnazis
I can only change my own heart not somebody else’s, that’s their job and life work…but the right actions along with the right timing can alter the situation at times.
But why cater to classism by “dressing nice”? What’s “dressing nice”? Is it limited to white collar garb? Reminds me of early feminists who considered trying to get suffrage by excluding African American women.
Thanks for this. It’s a great provocation, and a tough question. People come to resistance with so many different images of who they’re trying to reach, and of what they think those people want. It seems to me that as much authenticity as possible is probably the best approach.
I appreciate your worry about laying a classist trip on ourselves, so let me reassure you that the point I’m making isn’t at all about one particular presentation or symbol or another.
When mine workers in Appalachia found themselves getting brutalized on the picket line they asked priests and nuns in the area to come join the picket line with their “uniforms” on (backward collars and, in those days, the nuns wore habits) and, sure enough, the violence went way down, and they even won some allies.
In another situation it might be young people catching violence and grandparents and others coming out to stand with them, because the attackers had more respect for older people than they did for youths. Don’t get sidetracked by any particular example (maybe you don’t like Catholics? Relax.) Unless you are someone who likes getting beaten up, you’ll want to give some thought to how to manifest your cause in a way that minimizes the violence and when some happens anyway, TO MAKE THE VIOLENCE COUNT FOR YOUR CAUSE — that is, to make the violence wake the bystanders up to what they are witnessing/supporting and to mobilize them to join you.
That’s my point — be aware and be strategic so you can win. Know your opponents and what goes on inside them, and know your potential allies and what what it takes to mobilize them into action.
If you think social action is just showing up full of righteousness, you’ll almost certainly lose; if losing is OK, let’s not hear any complaints about those whose injustice prevails.
George
Thank you, George! It’s super interesting to learn more about the history of these mechanisms I’ve read about so many times.
Hello George,
I agree with the overall shape of this essay, and I love the fact that you interviewed Alice Paul, for example, and learned about her brilliant tactical sense of how to make the violence used against the suffragists backfire against the opposition to suffrage (a la activist/peace researcher Brian Martin’s very important Backfire Model, see http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/backfire.html). I’m curious what your impression was of her as a person?
I do have a historical accuracy concern, though, concerning the events of the Vykom road satyagraha. The version you relate is the version I remember via Joan Bondurant’s Conquest of Violence. But reading Joseph Lelyveld’s episodic and oh-so-insightful (and much more skeptical) biography of Gandhi reveals a very different and much more complicated picture.
The GNAD entry, apparently based on Bondurant’s and Gregg’s versions, contains similar innacuracies. (By the way, the GNAD database is a wonderful resource. I believe it would be even more useful for scholars (and for all activists concerned about struggling for truth) if it started to use footnotes rather than general bibliographic citations at the end.)
The passage above reads:
“One success happened when lower caste Hindus rebelled because they weren’t allowed on a temple road used by upper caste Hindus. The dalits were said to make the road unclean simply by using it.
Gandhi encouraged them to take direct action, and they occupied the temple road even when the monsoon flooded the road and they had to stand in water up to their waists. After a year the police took down the barricade preventing the dalits from proceeding on the road. But the campaigners decided to go for conversion, and they continued their vigil for four more months until the upper caste Hindus were convinced that the dalits were right.”
It’s not true that “Gandhi encouraged them to take direct action.” Lower caste Hindus, with support from progressive members of other castes (and from Sikhs and European allies as well), asked for Gandhi’s assistance. As Lelyveld describes it, Gandhi dithered, and mostly got involved, for many months, only to dictatorially dictate tactics from afar, ordering followers not to engage in assertive nonviolent action, for example. Additionally, and more crucially for the point you’re making, the leadership of the Orthodox upper caste Hindus were not convinced that the dalits were right, and the settlement that Gandhi agreed to (not the local activists) did not even involve opening the crucial road, but only three other roads. Even when Lelyveld visited there a few years ago, while Dalits can now use the road and enter the temple, lower caste Hindus are still being forbidden by Orthodox leaders from leading religious ceremonies in the temple, though there is agitation to change this. It might be a good case for illustrating the importance of splits within elites and perhaps should be classified in your typology under the persuasion category. (Here, I’m violating my own request for footnotes. I read this book in audio book form borrowed from the library, and then purchased a Kindle version for reading on my handheld and desktop computers. Annoyingly, Kindle does not seem to provide page numbers! My information here is taken from Lelyveld’s chapter called, “Unapproachability”)
Thanks, Sam, for the feedback — both your applause for the article’s general approach and for your suggestions for change. As you guessed, I was relying on Joan Bondurant’s account and didn’t know about Lelyveld’s, which changes the picture. The campaigners still made an advance at Vykom but apparently not that kind we call “conversion.” Do you know of any campaigns that present a really clear example?
I also appreciate your cheers for the Global Nonviolent Action Database. We’re now approaching 900 cases, and counting. We welcome suggestions of cases to research that aren’t already in there. As you know, we only do campaigns that are already concluded, win, lose, or draw. We do debate the value of footnotes, and so far have concluded that they might slow down the reader, especially the many whose first language isn’t English. (The GNAD website now averages 1000 unique visits each day, from 190 countries!) But we’ll keep thinking about it.
I hope soon to write about the 18 cases in the GNAD of student campaigns to get their colleges to divest from companies involved in apartheid South Africa. Today’s student divestment movement regarding fossil fuels may find some lessons for itself.
I’d rather talk about Alice Paul off-line.
All the best,
George
Sam, in my June 12 response to your comment I asked for examples that can more clearly be identified as “conversion.” I just ran across one in the Global Nonviolent Action Database, and will keep my eye out for more there. It comes from the U.S. campus movement against sweatshops. In March, 1999, University of Michigan students launched a sit-in in the president’s office while 200 students rallied outside in support. University President Lee C. Bollinger was converted and ended the university’s practice of selling clothing and other goods with their logo on them which had been made by poorly-paid and protected workers. His conversion put pressure on the brand Nike to give up its resistance and disclose information about the location of its factories so they could be independently monitored.
Let’s keep looking for more, especially cases in which the opponent first tries repression before truly seeing the error of its ways.
George
Hi George,
The concept of conversion is tricky. In a way, almost every member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and similar groups are an example, as are all military conscientious objectors. I know you’re looking for examples of conversion in response to campaigns, but the military personnel and veterans are often responding to campaigns by peace groups and efforts by folks with the GI Rights Network and Hotline (including me) http://www.girightshotline.org.
Maybe, in US politics, the arch-segregationist George Wallace might be the most famous example (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace). One might say he didn’t really convert, but was moving with the tide of public opinion seeking continued power and reelection, but maybe this is part of the point regarding the “if the people lead, the leaders will follow” model.
In many examples of successful nonviolent insurrection, there comes a point where the military is ordered to fire on insurgents and they refuse. Perhaps these are examples of conversion? By the way, I’ve never soon footage of this. Is there footage of the troops refusing to fire on the nuns in the front of the crowd in the overthrow of Marcos? Of the Chinese tank commanders in the first wave of attacks ordered to remove the protesters at Tiananmen in 1989 refusing to fire? (I heard that the tanks ordered in for the second wave, on June 4, were from the west and primarily spoke a language different from that primarily spoken in Beijing). Does anyone know of footage of the Indonesian troops ordered to shoot up the campuses during the nonviolent overthrow of Suharto, as the students threw a party and greeted with garlands?
By the way, I wrote about a case of conversion during the Birmingham Civil Rights campaign of 1963 (the case of the fire department chief who refused to relay Bull Connor’s order to open up the hoses again against protesters on May 5 (see http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/05/1088680/-When-White-Firemen-Refused-to-Attack-Civil-Rights-Demonstrators-May-5-1963).
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