\Handout: More on the three applications of nonviolent action\

How the differences among applications of nonviolent action make better strategies possible

By George Lakey
ZNet, April & May 2002

Part One: What are the applications?

In reflecting on my public debate with Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado I've been realizing that a belief that prevents flexible thinking by pacifists and non-pacifists alike is a basic misconception about nonviolent action.

The misconception is that "nonviolent action" -- also called people power (Philippines), "positive action" (Nkrumah's Ghana), "pacifica militancia" (Puerto Rico), "soul force," (Southern U.S. freedom struggle) -- is a single, monolithic form of action. How this misconception hurts us politically and intellectually is that it short-cuts strategic discussion and invites us into diffuse ethical debates.

And if there's anything that's needed now, it's strategy thinking. No amount of analysis of the U.S. Empire can make up for today's strategy void.

Fortunately, strategizing gets way more possible when we deconstruct people power into three major applications -- applications which have very different modes of operation, points of leverage, and even constituency appeal in the body politic.

I've tested this notion of three applications with grassroots activists in various cultures (Indonesia, Canada, the Balkans, for example) and various issues (environment, pro-democracy, school reform) and gotten positive response. By "nonviolent action" I follow researcher Gene Sharp in his focus on technique of struggle, referring to dozens of specific methods of protest, noncooperation, and intervention, in all of which the actionists conduct the conflict by doing -- or refusing to do -- certain things without using physical violence.

Nonviolent action has three major applications:

• social change
• social defense
• third party nonviolent intervention.

Social change is the most popular application, and best known. Usually the campaigners have reform goals: they are seeking change in policies or conditions but not a change in the power structure. Every day's major metropolitan daily newspaper reports on action of this sort.

Sometimes, however, nonviolent action is used for revolution. In South Africa the ANC obviously wanted to replace the white monopoly of formal power with a new system, and after 1982 they mainly relied on people power to end apartheid. The Solidarity movement in Poland used nonviolent action to throw out the Communist dictatorship, and thousands of Serbian young people in Otpur led the nonviolent struggle that succeeded in overthrowing Milosevic in 2000.

As in using any technology of combat, the overthrow of one structure doesn't by itself solve the problem of what to replace it with. Just as thousands of armed struggles against oppression have been followed by something as bad or worse, victories using nonviolent struggle include no guarantees. The point here is simply that nonviolent struggle does sometimes force power shifts as well as (more often) force the powerholders to give up reforms.

Social defense is not as popular an application, but it is growing in recent years. In this application, nonviolent action is not used for change, but instead is used to defend the status quo. In Northeast Thailand, villagers and monks have been fighting to save the forest by using nonviolent action. This is environmental defense. I don't know anyone who is even trying to keep up with the thousands of environmental defense campaigns going on around the world currently that use nonviolent action.

There are also thousands of cases of community defense: Some urban black neighborhoods in the U.S. use nonviolent action to fight the invasion of drug dealers; they march, prevent drug dealers from using favorite street corners, and even use sledgehammers to beat down the doors of crack (cocaine) houses and chant their way inside while the dealers run out the back!

Another version of social defense is using it on a national level, either against invasion from outsiders or against a coup d'etat from insiders. In Russia in 1991, for example, much of the KGB, army, and Communist Party leadership decided to seize the state. They arrested top leader Gorbachev, took over the media and mobilized tanks. They also ran into such major noncooperation from the people that the waverers in the middle turned against them and they lost their coup. Similar events happened in Argentina in the mid '80s; a million people demonstrated in Buenos Aires, the fence-sitters turned against the military plotters, and civilian government remained.

Third Party Nonviolent Intervention is the attempted physical intervention of a third party into the arena of the conflict in such a way as to reduce the level of violence. Mediation and arbitration are also done by third parties, but they are not nonviolent third party intervention; here are some differences:

• nonviolent third party intervention is unilateral (does not require both parties to participate in structured interaction),
• expresses the value of process, rather than determination/judgment,
• enables the struggle to continue (rather than shutting down the struggle).

Since this is the application of nonviolent action least researched and written about, I am giving it extra attention in this essay. There are four forms of third party nonviolent intervention (TPNI) I have so far identified: accompaniment, interposition, observation/monitoring, and modelling.

1. Accompaniment: The threats from the drug pushers had worried her somewhat, but the Philadelphia neighborhood leader shrugged them aside until a bullet nearly hit her and her children. That was too much.

"What shall I do?" she demanded to know in the meeting the night after the gunshots. The response from her neighbborhood was heartfelt: we will protect you, they said, by holding a demonstration at your house and accompanying your children to the school bus. They did just that, and the threats stopped.

Accompaniment has recently become sufficiently developed as a technology so that a specialized agency offers this service globally. Called Peace Brigades International (PBI), the agency in the early '80s sent to El Salvador and Guatemala volunteers who accompanied human rights activists threatened with assassination. The international volunteers put the local activists in a glare of publicity which reduced the chance of assassination. In 1989, during a wave of killings of lawyers in Sri Lanka, the national bar association invited PBI to send a team there to do the same, and, while death threats continued against the lawyers, none of those accompanied by PBI was killed. The author was a member of the first team.

2. Interposition is used when two forces are moving into battle and a third force (often a crowd) intervenes physically -- and nonviolently -- to prevent or reduce the violence. In 1986 Philippines dictator Marcos was shaken by the pro-democracy campaign and General Ramos decided to rebel with the troops under his personal command. The Ramos troops took cover in an army base, and Marcos sent the main force of the army to Ramos to destroy the rebels. The Catholic radio station broadcast urgent messages to the people to go to Ramos' base as well. Tens of thousands converged between the two armies and stopped Marcos' forces in their tracks through nonviolently and forcefully confronting the soldiers.

3. Observation/monitoring is increasingly used in election situations where violence is expected. Rather than interpose themselves between violent individuals or groups, observers/monitors are expected to carry cameras, notebooks, and in other ways provide a physical reminder that "the whole world is watching," thereby restraining the violence. The author participated in the international observation/monitoring force in the Nicaraguan election of 1990.

4. Modelling consists of individuals and teams entering a situation of open conflict and, through body language, acts of service, and words, assisting people to choose other-than-violent behaviors. This form differs from interposition in that the third party teammates do not physically place themselves directly between the fighters, but use other behaviors, like active listening, to embody values of decency and respect. The Russian group Memorial reportedly has substantial experience in this form of intervention in inter-ethnic battles, entering the "conflict field" and, in largely subtle ways, refusing to cooperate with the prevailing atmosphere in the field of hostility and violence.

Some of the young people who this spring went to Palestine to be human shields are returning to their homes in Europe and the U.S. with powerful stories to tell of deterring violence. Some were veterans of protests in their own countries, challenging corporate and governmental policies, yet this time around they were not the center of the action; instead, they were a kind of third force intervening between the primary players: the Israeli army and the Palestinian people.

Far from being singled out for repression, as might have happened while protesting back home, these international volunteers were less likely to be hurt than the Palestinians and were lending some of their aura to the Palestinians to offer a measure of protection.

The way one returnee put it in a report recently at the A-Space in Philadelphia: When Palestinians staged a protest without us, they most likely would be fired on, but when we internationals were present, they instead would be tear-gassed and not killed.

This use of people power that I call Third Party Nonviolent Intervention, has different dynamics, suggests different strategies, and can be appropriate for very different situations from the other two applications that I wrote about in part one of this article, the applications called social change and social defense. Our ability to impact the world is greatly enhanced if we understand these three applications and their differences, and go beyond the often boring debates about ìnonviolence.

CONFUSING CHANGE AND DEFENSE

Two of the applications that frequently get mixed up in the heads of activists are social change and social defense. I had been working with activists in Russia for a year, in my role as a trainer/consultant, when elements of the KGB, army, and Communist Party attempted a coup in 1991. The cabal arrested President Gorbachev, seized broadcasting stations, and sent their tanks into Moscow. The plotters did not reckon on the fierce determination of the people to noncooperate with the coup, at many levels and in many ways. Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets to challenge the plotters, among other things surrounding the House of Parliament. Tank crews, often surrounded by defiant people, began to go over the peopleís side. The coup attempt failed.

Because I followed developments closely by email dispatches from friends on the scene in Moscow, I was especially eager to see them again on my next Russia training trip. The whole time I was there I repeatedly asked workshop participants and others to tell me their personal stories of what they saw and did in those fateful days. To my amazement, they universally changed the subject. Even my friends and colleagues in the Moscow collective Golubka refused to talk about it.

Finally, at the ritual vodka party the night before I left, I implored my friends at least to tell me why they would not tell me their stories! They got long faces, and said it was too depressing to tell their stories because it reminded me of their Great Failure. Failure! I exclaimed. It was a brilliant success. The whole world watched you bring down the coup! "You do not understand," they said; "With all those people in the streets, all those people standing up for themselves, all the risks we took -- it seemed like the revolution was at hand. In our euphoria we believed that now, at last, everything would change. And it did not. The privileged got richer and the poor got poorer, and we lost our big move for radical change."

For the next hour we had my most intense discussion in Russia, a land of intense discussions. We came to see the differences between social CHANGE, which my friends believed they were attempting, and social DEFENSE, which was in fact what they were attempting. They were a world-class success at doing the latter but were measuring achievement by the former, social change, which in fact was not what they were doing at all. Together we realized that a strategy for major change would need far more than an insurrectionary moment; it would need widespread radical education, and alternative institutions to build democratic skills, and smaller nonviolent confrontations to develop resilience and confidence over time, and a vision of what a democratic and non-imperialist Russia would look like, and many committed activists who would combine with popular movements for women and gays and human rights and ecology to bring together the needed elements of unity. A strategy for fundamental change is quite a different project from what the pro-democracy Russians in fact did, which was to defend Gorbachev and what he represented (the status quo ) against the attack of the reactionaries.

Here is another example, from environmental justice organizers in the U.S. South. During a strategy workshop which included organizers from various movements, I included the distinctions between social defense, social change, and third party nonviolent intervention. An almost-visible light bulb went off for some organizers from North Carolina. "At last our organizing puzzle makes sense!" one exclaimed. They had been sending organizers into low-income, often Black, towns which were targeted for toxic waste dumps. Their organizers, with a social change framework in their heads, contacted sympathetic but marginal people in the towns: old civil rights activists, a rabbi or Quaker or Unitarian, etc. Through living room meetings they would gradually develop education and action strategies that often won mainstream agreement to keep out the toxic waste.

The puzzle was that sometimes in early actions mainstream types would join them, far ahead of when mainstream leaders should according to organizers' timelines. Organizers would be nonplussed to see mainstream leaders acting with them so early, sometimes even demonstrating or blockading roads against waste trucks.

Now they could see that, in the eyes of these mainstream figures, this fight about toxic waste was not about social change, it was about defending their community. Who is motivated for defense? Leaders, most of all! It ís a primary function of leadership to defend a neighborhood, a family, a town, a nation. The leaders saw a battle shaping up to defend their town and often felt required to join it!

With this insight the environmental justice organizers could become much more efficient, framing their action as defense and working directly with leaders as well as the people they were used to mobilizing.

This story also illuminates a puzzle among traditional leftist and progressive intellectuals about how to make sense of environmentalists. Environmentalists do not nicely fit the old categories; environmentalists have a variety of political brands from anarchist to socialist to liberal to conservative. Greenpeace is by far the largest international nonviolent struggle organization yet pacifists largely ignore it. The old ideological lenses don't work very well when we try to see the new landscape.

My guess is that the modernist paradigm convinced us that social change is the only political game in town, and therefore kept us out of touch with many genuine popular movements that struggle for democratic and humane values when their struggle doesn't fit nicely into the nineteenth century's obsession with change.

By deconstructing the concept of nonviolent action into its three major applications, progressive intellectuals can reduce the gap between themselves and action on the street by noticing what oppressed people are actually doing when they struggle. Then we can be more useful to the biggest challenge facing all of us: strategy in the declining American Empire.

I am arguing, in short, that conscious framing of a struggle is itself a fundamental step in strategizing. Framing a struggle as social change makes certain allies available and makes others harder to reach, while framing the struggle as defense also has implications. Whether conscious or not, the Right sometimes uses this power of framing to its advantage, as when it responded to the highly effective movement for gay rights by calling on all good Americans to DEFEND the family.

A strategic debate waiting to happen among activists opposing corporate-led globalization is whether, in the various sub-movements, it is better to frame the struggle as change or defense. I do not as yet have a personal opinion to offer; the question ís complex and needs many voices speaking up. But many of the activists I meet assume that social change is the only way to frame anything, and we can surely do with some freedom to think more flexibly than that.

HUMAN SHIELDS AND THE THIRD APPLICATION

The newest of the three applications, in terms of conscious organizational effort, involves protective accompaniment, monitoring -- the whole world is watching -- various tactics that lumped together can be called third party nonviolent intervention. The unique power of this application is enhanced when its profile is nonpartisan.

There is, of course, a splendid history of partisan intervention by third parties -- some Northern readers of this may have gone to the U.S. South to march with Dr. King, joined the picket line of a union not their own, etc. Such partisan intervention can tip the balance, and if the struggle is defined as defensive I would call it outsiders joining the defense, and if the struggle is framed as social change I would call it outsiders joining the offensive.

The third application, third party nonviolent intervention (TPNI), works with a different (and more subtle) form of impact. The unique power of TPNI is to increase the political space available to the local contenders.

In a typical conflict involving human rights abuses, repression or terror, the political space has contracted, in other words there is less room for activists to act for their understanding of justice. Partisan outsiders joining one side in a struggle may even decrease the political space: I am thinking of moments in the civil rights struggle when white people joining the civil rights activists were themselves beaten more severely than black activists right next to them, and white people were killed by segregationists feeling even more threatened. As a white person I did some of that kind of partisan intervention for social change and I am glad I did.

TPNI, by contrast, is about increasing political space and protecting the local activists from violence to enable them to continue their struggle. In Sri Lanka, where I joined the Peace Brigades International team in 1989, we were nonviolent bodyguards for human rights lawyers who were threatened with assassination. The protective accompaniment worked so well that we were asked to extend our work to labor organizers, journalists, and others whose colleagues were being killed for standing up for democracy.

As a U.S. citizen I especially appreciate the modesty of TPNI work. It is so easy for us in the U.S. to be arrogant; it goes with the territory, like racism is socialized into white people. What could be easier than left versions of imperialism, therefore, in which U.S. progressives tell others what to do or how they should resolve their conflicts? TPNI, by contrast, is not about telling the locals how to behave. In Sri Lanka we in PBI took pains not to express opinions on how Sri Lanka should manage its affairs, except that we stood for human rights and protecting people from violence, thereby increasing Sri Lankans' own field of operation, increasing their own political space.

THREE APPLICATIONS AT ONCE?

At one point I did some work in Northern Ireland and was moved by the widespread despair and hopelessness about the future. At that point I started wondering: in such protracted and stuck conflicts, what would it be like to use all three applications of people power? What if Catholics returned to their use of nonviolent social change strategy, which was showing such promising results in their civil rights movement of the late sixties-early seventies? AND the Protestants developed a capacity for nonviolent defense of their community, so they need not feel so insecure? AND outsiders mobilized a force of third party nonviolent intervenors, making it more difficult for the British to send in their army under the cover of humanitarian intervention and increasing the political space for Catholics and Protestants to fight nonviolently with each other over their very real issues of difference?

At the time such an idea was about as relevant as claiming the earth is round to 13th century Europeans, but what I have noticed in the meantime is an increasing paradigm shift in conceptualizing power. The PBS documentary about cases of mass nonviolent struggles around the world was called A Force More Powerful, a significant title. The most recent PBS documentary about the overthrow of Milosevic, Bringing Down a Dictator, did not seem to bring much comment even from those who believe it was the NATO bombing instead of the peopleís nonviolent uprising that actually got the dictator out. Basic assumptions about coercive power are shifting, and that means more dictators are going to lose their jobs.

In the context of this paradigm shift, the picture of political conflicts where all three applications are at work may not be too far-fetched, even for a vision-averse political culture like ours.

In any case, knowing that the power of nonviolent action gets de-mystified when we are able to perceive three very different applications may set us free to strategize for more effective action.