Civil Resistance, Power & Effectiveness - ICNC Module 1 & 2

Civil resistance is a strategically executed, nonviolent form of conflict led by ordinary people against general or specific injustice. 

Conflict can be defined as "a disagreement between one or more parties striving towards incompatible/ competitive means or ends.”

>> Intra-personal, inter-personal, intra-state, inter-state

• popular struggle (Palestine infitada), people power (Marcos regime)
• Nonviolence: strategy & blueprint for change. Gandhi rejective passive resistance. Power is the capacity to accomplish purpose (Aristotle). 
• non-institutional
• indeterminate, i.e., the procedures for determining the outcome of the conflict are not specified in advance (Bond 1994).
• specific actions that involve risk and that invoke non-physical pressure or nonviolent coercion in contentious interactions between opposing groups.
• does not require that activists hold any sort of ideological, religious, or metaphysical beliefs.
• Suffering not required: "get out of harms way, take the sting out of the agents of violence, disable the weapons, prepare people for the worst effects of violence, and reduce the strategic importance of what may be lost to violence” - Peter Ackerman,  Christopher Kruegler
  
  

What can people do when they face injustice and oppression, and when there is an asymmetric balance of power? 

1. DO NOTHING: Take no action, focus on survival. 
2. ARMED STRUGGLE: Join gangs or armed groups, and engage in violence. 
3. RESOLUTION: Use negotiation, mediation, dialogue, or institutional tools (legislation, electoral processes) with oppressors or powerholders. 
4. NONVIOLENT CIVIL ACTION: Join a nonviolent movement or campaign. 

Civil resistance may call for or lead to various forms of resolution and negotiation, but its primary objective is to address injustice through the use of nonviolent methods. Thus, civil resistance is about waging a conflict and, in some cases, escalating the conflict in order to draw attention to it, mobilize people around it, and eventually transform it.

4 mechanisms to promote change:

1. Conversion: oppressors change their view (moral authority)
2. Accommodation: change policies without changing views
3. Nonviolent coercion: withhold major resources, legitimacy, ability to control situation
4. Disintegration: ruling apparatus fall apart

Nonviolent Conflict: 

• Solidarity movement in Poland took office about a decade after its emergence
• People power movement in the Philippines took a mere 30 months (following the assassination of Benigno Aquino in August, 1983) to topple Ferdinand Marcos— something the Filipino Communists had been trying to do through armed methods since 1969.
• Nonviolent protest demonstrations by German wives against the imprisonment of their Jewish husbands in Berlin led to their release.
• Soviet Union itself disintegrated in the face of predominantly nonviolent secessionist movements from the Baltic states to Central Asia.

"Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue…" 

Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. (Lakey 1973, 57)." 

Most pacifists do not practice nonviolent resistance, and most people who do practice nonviolent resistance are not pacifists” 

(Lakey 1973, 57).

 “For even the most powerful cannot rule without the consent of the ruled.” - Mohandas Gandhi

Darren Cambridge

Kurt Schock, Rutgers University

6 Sources of power

1. Authority: right to command and be obeyed, legitimacy
2. Human resources: number of people who cooperate, their proportion, extent & form of organizations
3. Skills & knowledge: of supporters (special administrators, officials, technicians, advisors)
4. Intangible factors: habits, attitude, faith, sense of mission
5. Material resources: degree to which rulers control property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, communication and transportation
6. Sanctions: punishment, enforcement of obedience

Monolithic: People dependent on the goodwill of ruler. Power concentrated in hands of en elite. Self-perpetuating.

Pluralistic: Ruler dependent on the goodwill of people.

We cannot possess power like a static thing. Power grows with skills & capability.

Power is communal. Violence cannot create power.

Positive peace: people working together to create community.

Negative peace: No direct but still structural power. Structural violence is when someone's mental or physical potential is not being actualized as a result of the policies (discriminatory law, biased education, continued inquality of resource distribution)

• Power-within: I can effect change.
• Power-with: We're in this together.
• Power (in relation) to: Where do we go from here. What leverage do we have, working in groups and coalitions, against the entrenched corporate and political power?
• Power cannot be exercised except in situations where people are "acting in concert" (otherwise, it's strength, force, authorible, or violence).
• Although power and violence are frequently found together, they are in fact opposites. Where one rules absolutely, the other does not appear.
• Power is the glue that holds community together, while violence destroys community.
• Violence can defeat power, it can never create it.
• To reduce violence, we must empower people. - Hannah Arendt

"And, in the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities." - Arthur Rimbaud

Availability of power (as ability, competence, energy) is unlimited.

"Nonviolence and Power" by Andreas Speck. From Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns, 2nd edition. Authors and editors: Andrew Dey, Javier Garate, Subhash Kattel, Christine Schweitzer, and Joanne Sheehan. War Resisters’ International: June 2014. Pp. 34-37. 

Corporate Resistance (Gene Sharp, The Role of Power in Nonviolent Struggle )

3 groups:

1. Protest, persuasion: mainly symbolic actions (parades, vigils, picketing, posters, teach-ins, mourning, protest meetings)
2. Noncooperation: deliberate discontinuance of certain social, economic, political relationships (spontaneous/ planned, legal/ illegal)
3. Intervention: fasts, sit-ins, obstruction, establishment of new social patterns, stay-in strikes, alternative economic institution, seeking imprisionment, work-on without collaboration, parallel government.

nonviolent resistance is effective not necessarily because of its conversion potential but rather because of its creative, co-optive and coercive potential — a theory that Albert Einstein Institution founder Gene Sharp has articulated for decades. (washingtonpost.com)

Bonus Challenge

Challenge yourself to develop an elevator pitch (a one-minute verbal statement) on what civil resistance is and practice it on a friend or family member.