GLOBALIZATION IS AMERICANIZATION::

The Machiavelli of nonviolence (Bianca Brigitte Bonomi,  1st October 2011, Prospect)

[American academic Gene] Sharp is a kind of ultra-politicised Miss Marple. Mild mannered and softly spoken, the 83-year-old academic's routine involves tending to his orchid collection and walking in the park, usually with the support of a young colleague. Like Agatha Christie's spinster detective, Sharp's appearance conceals a startling intelligence.

A leading authority on nonviolent revolution, Sharp has proved a menace over the years to oppressive regimes worldwide. Working from the Albert Einstein Institution and a small pad in east Boston, Sharp has dedicated his life to undermining autocrats and helping to establish democracies. He is best known for his short pamphlet, From Dictatorship to Democracy (1993), which he describes as "a technique of combat, a substitute for war." His approach is pragmatic and highly successful, earning him the title the "Machiavelli of nonviolence" in some circles. Oppressive regimes, he argues, nearly always have greater military might than dissenters, so taking up arms against the regime tends to make matters worse.

Instead, the hallmarks of a Sharp revolution are the employment of colours and symbols, signs written in English to maximise western media coverage, women and children strategically positioned at the front of the protest--all now familiar to us now from uprisings in Bosnia, Burma, Zimbabwe, Estonia, Syria and Egypt. [...]

A notable acolyte is Srdja Popovic, one of the young revolutionaries who rose up against Slobodan Milosevic in the late 1990s. For Popovic and other members of the revolutionary group Otpor, Sharp's ideas of united resistance and withdrawal of collective obedience were instrumental in undermining the Serb dictator. Otpor adopted a new approach to dismantling the pillars of the regime, treating the police being as potential allies rather than aggressors. He later founded Serbia's Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) and features heavily in the film.

In late January of this year, a 26-page pamphlet entitled How to Protest Intelligently began circulating in Cairo. The strategies it outlined--carrying flowers, uniting with the police and army, chanting peacefully and taking over government buildings--embodied the nonviolent ethos at the heart of Sharp's blueprint.

Posted by oj at October 2, 2011 9:41 AM
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