Gene Sharp
Many of the most dramatic and politically significant conflicts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been waged by nonviolent struggle. Some of these struggles have filled our television screens and front pages. We remember the Solidarity struggles in Poland in the 1980s; the disintegration of the dictatorships in Czechoslovakia and East Germany in 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall; the successful defiance of the attempted hardline coup in the Soviet Union in 1991; and the undermining of the Milosovic regime in Serbia in 2000. We also remember the brave student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, as well as the earlier mass demonstrations and the killings in 1988 in Burma. Less often we remember that little Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania waged nonviolent struggles and won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Also, the African strikes, student boycotts, and defiance were major factors in the collapse of the apartheid system in South Africa.
It was nonviolent struggle that ended the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines in 1986. The civil rights campaigns with boycotts, sit-ins, bus rides, and marches shook legalized segregation in the US South in the 1950s and 1960s. Czech and Slovak noncooperation and defiance held off full Soviet control for eight months following the August 1968 invasion. General strikes and noncooperation were major weapons in two phases of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956–1957. Still earlier in the twentieth century were the successful nonviolent insurrections against military dictators in El Salvador and Guatemala in 1944 and the remarkable Norwegian nonviolent resistance by teachers and others during the Nazi occupation. In 1943 wives of arrested Jewish men with great courage massed in the streets of Berlin until their husbands were finally released.
More recently, the predominantly nonviolent revolutions against long-entrenched autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011 launched the Arab Spring. These struggles were stunning in their mass mobilization, nonviolent discipline, fearlessness, and speed.
Such struggles go further back, not only to the struggles Gandhi led in India for independence and social justice, not only to the women’s suffrage movements in several countries, but also to the labor union strikes for recognition and improved working conditions. These struggles have not required people to become believers in moral nonviolence, to be saints, to die, or to become or to follow a charismatic leader. Sometimes it is even impossible to identify the “leader,” because the action is conducted in a disciplined way by groups without prominent individual leaders.
Of course, there have been important nonviolent struggles that were ill reported or neglected by our media of public communication. These cases include the nine-year nonviolent movement of noncooperation in Kosovo, which under certain conditions could have been so successfully concluded as to make the later war and military intervention quite unnecessary.
Nonviolent action probably goes as far back as the first human beings. We have long possessed the human capacity to be stubborn, to refuse to do what we are told, and to persist in doing what has been forbidden to us. That capacity, when applied by groups of people, can become nonviolent struggle. There have also been prophets, saints, and others who have espoused rejection of violence for moral or religious reasons. Such injunctions have also been important in many situations, but they are a different phenomenon. The two phenomena should not be confused.
Nonviolent struggle has mostly been used by people who otherwise would have used violence. However, for various reasons, they have recognized that the technique of nonviolent action offered them significant advantages over violence, including greater chances of success. Usually their opponents have had vastly superior military capacity. Often the potential resisters understood that although there likely would be casualties during the nonviolent struggle, the numbers of wounded and dead during violent struggles and the extent of physical destruction are always vastly greater. They may also have recognized that although in a violent struggle the fighting forces are usually only able-bodied young men, potentially the whole population can participate in a nonviolent struggle.
With few exceptions, the people who have chosen to resist with these nonviolent weapons have seen them to be the most practical way to conduct their struggle. In these cases, the nonviolent character of the resistance has been simply a requirement for the effectiveness of this type of conflict. These situations undoubtedly constitute the vast majority of the applications of nonviolent struggle.
This phenomenon of nonviolent struggle has been demonstrated to be very powerful. Yet the understanding of it has been very limited. Far too frequently, the reporting has lacked perceptiveness, and the commentaries have been superficial or erroneous. Both reporting and analyses can be improved for future nonviolent struggles. For that improvement to occur, it is essential that reporters and commentators understand this technique more accurately and also have some basic insight into its nature and modes of operation.
These struggles have not been unique. This type of action has spanned many cultures, traditions, circumstances, and religions. Throughout human history, a multitude of conflicts have been waged in which one side has fought by psychological, social, economic, or political methods, or a combination of these, against opponents able and willing to apply violent repression.
These types of action are identified by what people have done or are doing, not by what they believe. In many cases, the people who are using these methods believe violence to be perfectly justified in moral or religious terms. However, for the specific conflict they currently face, they have selected methods that do not include violence. Only rarely does a group or a leader have a personal belief in a philosophy or religion that espouses rejection of violence as a principle. Nevertheless, a struggle conducted with nonviolent methods because of pragmatic or even accidental reasons may become viewed as acting in a morally superior way.
Belief that violence violates a moral or religious principle does not constitute nonviolent action. Nor does the simple absence of physical violence, as in passivity or submission, mean that nonviolent action is occurring. The type of activity employed identifies the technique of nonviolent action, not the simple absence of violence. It is also widely taken for granted that nonviolent struggle by its nature usually takes much time to succeed, whereas violent conflict produces successes quickly. Both claims are factually false.
There are three main types of activity that constitute nonviolent action. At least 198 specific methods have been identified. The first large class is called nonviolent protest and persuasion. These are forms of activity in which the practitioners are expressing opinions by symbolic actions to show their support or disapproval of an action, a policy, a group, or a government, for example. Many specific methods or forms of action fall into this category. These include written declaration, petition, leafleting, picketing, wearing of symbols, symbolic sound, vigil, singing, march, mock funeral, protest meeting, silence, and turning one’s back. Such activities may be termed nonviolent protest. They do not constitute the full range of nonviolent action or nonviolent struggle. In many political situations, these methods are quite mild, but under a highly repressive regime, such actions may be dramatic challenges and require great courage.
The second class of methods is noncooperation—an extremely large class that may take social, economic, and political forms. In these methods, the people refuse to continue usual forms of cooperation or initiate new forms. The effect of such noncooperation by its nature is more disruptive of the established relationships and the operating system than are the methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion. The extent of that disruption depends on the system within which the action occurs, the importance of the activity in which people are refusing to engage, the specific type of noncooperation, which persons and groups are refusing cooperation, how many of them, and how long the noncooperation can continue. The methods of social noncooperation include social boycott, excommunication, student strike, stay-at-home, and collective disappearance.
The forms of economic noncooperation are grouped under (1) economic boycotts and (2) strikes. The methods of economic boycott include a consumers’ boycott, rent withholding, refusal to let or sell property, lockout, withdrawal of bank deposits, revenue refusal, and international trade embargo. Labor strikes include protest strike, prisoners’ strike, slowdown strike, general strike, and economic shutdown.
Political noncooperation is a much larger subclass. It includes withholding or withdrawal of allegiance, boycott of elections, boycott of government employment or positions, refusal to dissolve existing institutions, reluctant and slow compliance, disguised disobedience, civil disobedience, judicial noncooperation, deliberate inefficiency and selective noncooperation by enforcement agents, noncooperation by constituent government units, and severance of diplomatic relations.
The methods of nonviolent intervention all actively disrupt the normal operation of policies or the system by deliberate interference—psychological, physical, social, economic, or political. Among the large number of methods in this class are the fast, sit-in, nonviolent raid, nonviolent obstruction, nonviolent occupation, overloading facilities, alternative social institution, alternative communication system, reverse strike, stay-in strike, nonviolent land seizure, defiance of blockades, seizure of assets, selective patronage, alternative economic institution, overloading administrative system, seeking imprisonment, and dual sovereignty and parallel government.
These identified methods have developed in the past as a result of the imagination and ingenuity of participants in conflicts who were conducting their struggle without violence. The use of these or many other similar methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention constitutes applications of the technique of nonviolent action. Some of these methods can be employed as a substitute for violence against other groups in one’s society or against groups in another society, against one’s own government or against another government.
Many times, only the methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion are used in attempts to influence opinions. Such action may affect the moral authority or legitimacy of the opponents. However, those are the weaker methods. Many of the methods of noncooperation are much more powerful in that they reduce or sever the supply of opponents’ sources of power. These methods require significant numbers of participants and usually the participation of groups and institutions in the refusal of cooperation.
The methods of nonviolent intervention usually require fewer numbers of participants but are generally, in the short run at least, more disruptive of the status quo. These methods are, however, likely to be met with extreme repression, which the participants must be prepared to withstand while persisting in their nonviolent defiance. Unless the numbers of participants are extremely large, it may not be possible to maintain the application of these methods for long periods of time.
Those who plan to engage in a nonviolent struggle must choose the methods they will use with extreme care. To be most effective, the methods will need to be chosen and implemented in accordance with a grand strategy for the overall struggle. The methods should strike at the opponents’ vulnerabilities, make use of the resisters’ strengths, and be used in combination with other methods in ways that are mutually supportive.
The effects of the use of the diverse methods of nonviolent action vary widely. Such effects depend on the nature of the system within which they are applied, the type of the opponents’ regime, the extent and proficiency of their application, the normal roles of the persons and groups applying them in the operation of the system, the skill of the groups in using nonviolent action, the presence or absence of the use of wise strategies in the conflict, and, finally, the relative ability of the nonviolent opposition to withstand repression from the opponents and persist in their noncooperation and defiance.
The nature of the opponents’ regime is obviously important, including its means of administration and repression and its competency in responding to nonviolent struggle. However, these characteristics are not by themselves decisive in the face of skilled and powerful nonviolent struggle. Often the roles of third parties may also be significant.
The most important reason that even dictatorships are vulnerable to nonviolent struggle is that, contrary to common perceptions, all hierarchical systems and all governments, no matter how dictatorial, are dependent for their necessary sources of power on the populations and the constituent or subordinate groups and institutions over which they claim dominance. The power of any regime, including dictatorships and even totalitarian systems, will be determined by the extent and degree to which it has free access to its needed sources of power. These include acceptance of its authority or legitimacy, human resources, skills and knowledge, intangible factors, material resources, and sanctions or punishments.
Each of these sources of power is in turn closely related to or directly dependent on the degree of cooperation, submission, obedience, and assistance that the rulers are able to obtain from their subjects. These include the general population, the paid “helpers” and agents, and the relevant groups and institutions. The groups and institutions that supply the necessary sources of power are called pillars of support . That dependence makes it possible, under certain circumstances, for the population and the regime’s functionaries and agents to reduce the availability of these necessary sources of power or to withdraw them completely by reducing or withdrawing their necessary cooperation and obedience. If the withdrawal of acceptance, submission, and assistance can be maintained in face of the rulers’ punishments for disobedience, the end of the regime is in sight. When the pillars of support are withdrawn, the regime must collapse.
Since these methods of nonviolent action, especially those of noncooperation, often directly disturb or disrupt the supply of the needed sources of power and normal operations, the opponents are likely to respond strongly, usually with repression. That repression has often included beatings, arrests, imprisonments, executions, and mass slaughters. Despite repression, the resisters have at times persisted in fighting with only their chosen nonviolent weapons. Past struggles have only rarely been well planned and prepared and have usually lacked a strategic plan. Therefore, not surprisingly, in the face of such repression, nonviolent struggles have often produced limited positive results or even resulted in clear defeats and disasters. Yet, amazingly, many nonviolent struggles have triumphed.
When nonviolent struggles succeed in achieving their declared objectives, the result is produced by the operation of one of four mechanisms—conversion, accommodation, nonviolent coercion, or disintegration—or a combination of two or three of them. Rarely, the opponents have a change of view or conversion takes place. In that case, as a result of the nonviolent persistence and the willingness of the people to continue despite suffering, harsh conditions, and brutalities perpetrated on them, the opponents decide that it is right to accept the claims of the nonviolent group. Although religious pacifists frequently stress the possibility, it does not occur often. One example is the 1924–1925 sixteen-month, twenty-four-hour-a-day campaign of Untouchables and their allies in Vykom, Travancore, in south India. Despite arrests, a flood, and the hot sun, the Untouchables campaigned for the right to walk on a road that passed a Hindu temple.
A much more common mechanism is accommodation. This essentially means that both sides compromise on the issue and receive and give up some of their original objectives. This can operate only in respect to issues on which each side can compromise without believing themselves to be abandoning a principle or condition that they believe would be in violation of their fundamental beliefs or political principles. Accommodation occurs in almost all labor strike settlements. The final agreed working condition and wages are usually somewhere between the originally stated objectives of the two sides.
In other conflicts, the numbers of resisters have become so large, and the parts of the social and political order they influence or control are so essential, that the noncooperation and defiance have taken control of the conflict situation. The opponents are still in their former positions, but they are unable to control the system any longer without the resumption of cooperation and submission by the resisters. In this case, not even repression is effective, either because of the massiveness of the noncooperation or because the opponents’ troops and police no longer reliably obey orders. The change is made against the opponents’ will because the supply of their needed sources of power has been seriously weakened or severed. The opponents can no longer wield power contrary to the wishes of the nonviolent group. This is nonviolent coercion. This is what occurred, for example, in the 1905 Russian Revolution. As a result of the Great October Strike, Czar Nicholas issued the constitutional manifesto of October 17, 1905, which granted a legislature, thereby abandoning his claim to be sole autocrat.
In more extreme situations, the noncooperation and defiance are so vast and strong that the previous regime simply falls apart, and no one is left with sufficient power even to surrender. In Russia in February 1917, the numbers of strikers were massive. All social classes had turned against the regime, huge peaceful street demonstrations were undermining the loyalty of the soldiers, and troop reinforcements dissolved into the protesting crowds. Finally, Czar Nicholas, facing this reality, quietly abdicated, and the czarist government was dissolved and swept away.
While noncooperation to undermine compliance and to weaken and sever the sources of opponents’ power are the main forces in nonviolent struggle, one other process sometimes operates. This is political jiu-jitsu . In this process, brutal repression against disciplined nonviolent resisters does not strengthen the opponents and weaken the resisters. Rather, widespread revulsion against the opponents for their brutality operates to shift power to the resisters. More people may join the resisters. Third parties may change their opinions and activities to favor the resisters and act against the opponents. Members of the opponents’ usual supporters, administrators, and troops and police may become unreliable and even mutiny. The use of the opponents’ supposedly coercive violence has then been turned to undermine their own power capacity. Political jiu-jitsu does not operate in all situations, however, and heavy reliance must be placed on the impact of large-scale, carefully focused noncooperation. Effective nonviolent struggle is not the product of simple application of the methods of this technique. A struggle conducted by nonviolent means will generally be more effective if the participants understand the factors that contribute to greater success or to likely failure and act accordingly.
Another important variable in nonviolent campaigns is whether they are conducted on the basis of a wisely prepared grand strategy. The presence or absence and, if present, the quality of strategic calculation and planning can have a major impact on the course of the struggle and in determining its final outcome.
Past nonviolent struggles have often played significant roles in determining social and political events. These means of conducting conflict are often used when groups believe, rightly or wrongly, that they cannot secure redress of perceived injustices or achieve certain objectives by milder means or by conventional political procedures or processes.
The many methods of nonviolent action have been applied for many different purposes, of which not everyone would approve. This technique has been used in campaigns to protect or extend civil liberties; in economic conflicts by both labor and management to lift economic or political oppression; in ethnic conflicts; in struggles to gain liberation from foreign occupations and achieve national liberation; to end racial and religious discrimination and domination; to resist and undermine dictatorships; to establish democratic systems; to resist possible social, economic, and political changes; to gain equal rights for women, as in suffrage, employment, and legal status; and diverse other objectives.
Nonviolent struggle has at times produced or contributed to producing major political and social change, such as ending the Communist system in Poland, breaking down racial segregation in the United States, undermining dictatorships in Latin America, and blocking military rule in Thailand. The technique has contributed to the empowerment of oppressed people by providing them with means of action that they can use even when they lack high status and the instruments of administration and repression that their opponents can wield. This technique was used to block fascist controls in Nazi-occupied Norway from 1940 to 1945 and to block coups d’état by military forces and dictatorial groups as in Germany in 1920 and the Soviet Union in 1991.
At times, violence and destruction of property have occurred alongside the methods of nonviolent action. Some of the violence in the midst of nonviolent campaigns, however, has been staged by the opponents’ agents provocateur to force a shift to resistance violence, which the opponents can more easily defeat. At other times, violence has also been instigated during nonviolent campaigns by political doctrinalists who are committed to violence and who will lose major political opportunities if the substantive objectives are instead gained by nonviolent struggle. Violence from both sources requires careful handling by the nonviolent resisters if negative effects are to be limited.
Over many centuries, nonviolent struggle has served as an instrument of wielding power in society and politics. It has served as a pragmatic substitute for the use of violence to gain objectives. Despite setbacks and frequent poor preparations, this choice of nonviolent means to wage conflicts has had major beneficial consequences that are rarely recognized. What would the United States and the world be like if African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s had, instead of the nonviolent civil rights movement, employed mass violence and terrorism? What would Poland, the Soviet Union, and the rest of world be like today if the Poles in 1980 had risen up by violence or Czechoslovakia in 1968 and 1989 had fought the Soviet Union and domestic Communist rule by violence?
We live in a world with many serious conflicts. By what means they are waged, whether they are conducted skillfully, and with what results are highly important. Therefore, accurate media coverage of ongoing and past nonviolent struggles and perceptive commentaries on them are both highly important. When references are made that either falsely credit positive accomplishments to the use of violence or otherwise discredit or trivialize the accomplishments of nonviolent struggles, the effect can be to encourage the use of violence in future conflicts. That can have highly negative consequences. Our view of the past heavily influences our perception of what is possible at present and in the future.
If the reports provided to the public and policymakers about nonviolent struggles are inaccurate or the interpretations and explanations of the events are false, the reporters and analysts will have violated their responsibilities to inform the general public accurately. They will also have done a disservice to the participants in the nonviolent struggles and to their own and other societies.
There have been instances when a clearly nonviolent struggle has been referred to as “rioting,” “violence,” “unrest,” “mob action,” and the like. Only slightly less inaccurate have been the terms “pacifist” or “passive resistance” to describe nonviolent struggles. Ill-informed commentators or analysts may neglect or denigrate the role of the masses of participants in the action. Some commentators are prone to give credit for major changes to presidents, prime ministers, and dictators, or to ineffective military policies, when masses of people have taken powerful nonviolent action and paid the price.
Even within the context of nonviolent struggle, such commentators have at times given excessive credit to a single individual whose role was actually highly limited. One prominent American television personality said that Boris Yeltsin “almost single-handedly” defeated the 1991 hardline coup d’état, when in fact noncooperation and protests by many thousands of defiant people and even disobedient Soviet troops had defeated the attempt to restore the Stalinist system. These and other distortions may even cloud the perspectives of future historians so that the full nonviolent characteristic of that conflict may receive insufficient future research and analytical attention.
Some groups facing acute conflicts reject nonviolent struggle and choose violence because they claim that only violence can attract worldwide attention for their cause. That claim may be untrue, but it is undeniable that media neglect or very limited coverage of important ongoing nonviolent struggles has occurred and can have important consequences. For example, the media failed to give major attention to the nine-year Kosovo campaign of nonviolent noncooperation with Serbian controls and the building of alternative institutions that had been remarkably effective, short of achieving independence. The neglect certainly contributed to the failure to provide major international support for the Kosovo nonviolent movement. Added to this was the internal Kosovar failure to develop a grand strategy of nonviolent struggle for gaining recognized independence. All of this led to the establishment and growth of the Kosovo Liberation Army, catastrophic Serbian repression, expulsions, slaughters, and finally military intervention by NATO and the United States.
Inaccurate reporting and faulty analyses, or even the absence of reporting, may mean that analysts and policymakers lack accurate information on the basis of which to recommend or support policies or actions. The consequences of poor reporting and analyses may be serious and widespread. Such unfortunate results can be partially or fully avoided with improved information and understanding about nonviolent struggle by reporters, editors, and commentators.
The twentieth century brought new intellectual efforts to understand this phenomenon, mostly from social scientists and, at times, from advocates of this technique. Among such studies, beginning in 1913 and going to 1994 are these (listed chronologically): Harry Laidler, Boycotts and the Labor Struggle (1913); Clarence Marsh Case, Non-Violent Coercion (1923); E. T. Hiller, The Strike (1928); Wilfred H. Crook, The General Strik e (1931); Karl Ehrlich, Niels Lindberg, and Gammelgaard Jacobsen, Kamp Uden Vaaben (1937); Bart de Ligt, The Conquest of Violence (1938); Krishnalal Shridharani, War without Violence (1939); Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence (1958); Theodor Ebert, Gewaltfrier Aufstand (1968); Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973); and Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict (1994). Of these, Laidler, Hiller, and Crook draw heavily on the labor movement in Europe and North America. Case, Ehrlich and colleagues, and de Ligt include examinations of diverse historical cases. Shridharani and Bondurant base their studies heavily on the movements led by Gandhi. Ebert, Sharp, and Ackerman and Kruegler also use historical cases and represent a significant advance in their analyses of the technique.
The combination of the growing practice of nonviolent struggle and such intellectual efforts to learn about this technique means that greater knowledge is now available than previously to groups that wish to use nonviolent action.
Efforts have also recently been made to enhance the effectiveness of future nonviolent action by study of strategic principles. The most important single contribution to this is Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler’s Strategic Nonviolent Conflict .
A new, highly unorthodox dictionary, Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle (2011), with nearly one thousand entries, challenges the pro-violence biases in our language about power and defense, among other topics.
Past uses of the technique of nonviolent action have mostly been improvised to meet a specific immediate need and were not the result of long-term planning and preparations. However, the planned and prepared substitution of nonviolent action for violent means has been recommended for consideration in certain types of acute conflicts. These include the following purposes:
There exist unplanned, improvised, cases of the application of nonviolent struggle for all these purposes. It has been claimed, and recent studies suggest, that advance analysis, planning, and preparations can increase the capacity of this technique to be effective even under extreme conditions. In the struggles against dictatorships, oppressive systems, genocide, coups d’état, and foreign occupations, the appropriate strategies all involve efforts to restrict and sever the sources of power of the hostile forces. Application of nonviolent struggle in all of these acute conflict situations involves resistance in face of extreme repression.
The planned and prepared application of this type of struggle against internal or external aggression is known as civilian-based defense.
In assessing the viability of nonviolent struggle in extreme circumstances, it is also important to examine critically the adequacy and problems of applying violent means rather than assuming axiomatically its superior effectiveness.
Expanded knowledge gained through scholarly studies and strategic analyses and its spread in popularized forms is likely to contribute to increased substitutions of nonviolent struggle for violent action. Some policy studies have already been initiated for dealing with coups d’état, defense, and other national security issues.
Concerns have been voiced that nonviolent action could be used by certain groups for “wrong” objectives, for purposes that many would not endorse. For example, in the nineteenth century, Scottish, English, and US factory owners combating trade union activities sometimes shut down operations in a lockout, Nazis organized economic boycotts of Jewish businesses in the 1930s, and southern segregationists in the United States used social and economic boycotts of civil rights activists in the 1960s. Comparable cases are likely to occur in the future.
The response to this situation of some specialists on nonviolent struggle is that the use of nonviolent action for those purposes is preferable to those groups continuing to apply violence for the same purposes. Suffering from the results of an economic boycott is preferable to being lynched, for example.
In acute conflicts, the contending groups are unlikely to abandon or even compromise their beliefs and objectives. However, there sometimes is a possibility that such a group might shift to other means of conducting the conflict. It is argued that the real issue is not therefore whether one would prefer them to change their beliefs and goals (since that is almost certainly not going to happen), but whether one prefers them to struggle for those same goals by violent or nonviolent means. The target group of those applications of nonviolent action would need to decide how to resist the “wrong” objectives, whether by violent repression, educational efforts, or counter-nonviolent action.
The technique of nonviolent action has been disproportionately neglected by academics, policymakers, and exponents of major social and political change. As the practice of this type of struggle grows and scholarly studies of it increase, it is becoming ever clearer that nonviolent action merits increased attention in several fields. Significant efforts are still required to correct the long-standing neglect of this phenomenon.
Studies of nonviolent action and the dynamics of this technique are likely to cross disciplinary boundaries, but certain disciplines have been identified as particularly relevant. Nonviolent action is of major significance for the social sciences, especially for the study of social conflict, social movements, historical sociology, and political sociology. Social psychologists can shed light on the shifts in attitudes, emotions, opinions, and group action during the course of a nonviolent conflict.
Some historians have identified the need to examine understudied developments of the past to correct the historical record that has usually given priority attention to violent action rather than nonviolent struggle. Recent studies that focus on nonviolent struggles are Walter H. Conser Jr., Ronald M. McCarthy, David J. Toscano, and Gene Sharp (Eds.), Resistance, Politics, and the American Struggle for Independence, 1765–1775 (1986); and Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (1996).
Recent studies of the practice of nonviolent action provide grounds for political and social theorists to reexamine basic concepts such as power, authority, sanctions, political obligation, and the presumed necessity of violence. In addition, it has been suggested that some important problems in political ethics and moral theology related to the use of violence require reexamination in light of the growing practice of nonviolent struggle and the scholarly studies of the phenomenon.
Nonviolent action is an important technique for conducting social, economic, and political conflicts without the use of physical violence. It is an old technique that appears to be coming into increasingly significant use in conflicts in various parts of the world. The phenomenon has been attracting scholarly attention and also efforts to refine its strategic application. Expanded knowledge of nonviolent action, and its operation and potential, is likely to have a significant impact on its future consideration in conflicts and the quality of its application. New efforts have been initiated to make the technique more effective in dealing with the hard cases, such as foreign occupations, coups d’état, and ruthless dictatorships. Steps are being taken to disseminate the increasing knowledge of the technique through popularization for the general public. Although knowledge of the technique has expanded, nonviolent struggle merits additional careful attention by scholars in various disciplines and policy analysts and also policymakers dealing with internal and international conflicts.
Ackerman, P., and Kruegler, C. (1994). Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century . Westport, CT: Praeger.
Bondurant, J. V. (1958). Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Case, C. M. (1923). Non-violent Coercion: A Study in Methods of Social Pressure . New York: Century.
Conser, W., McCarthy, R. Toscano, T., and Sharp, G. (Eds.). (1986). Resistance, Politics, and the American Struggle for Independence, 1765–1775 . Boulder: CO: Lynne Rienner.
Crook, W. H. (1931). The General Strike: A Study of Labor’s Tragic Weapon in Theory and Practice . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
de Ligt, B. (1938). The conquest of violence: An essay on war and revolution . New York: Dutton.
Ebert, T. (1968). Gewaltfrier Aufstand: Alternative Zum Burgerkrieg . Freiburg: Verlag Rombach.
Ehrlich, K., Lindberg, N., and Jacobsen, G. (1937). Kamp Uden Vaaben: Ikke-Vold Som Kampmiddel Mod Krig Og Undertrykkelse . Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, Ejnar Munksgaard.
Hiller, E. T. (1928). The Strike: A Study in Collective Action . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Laidler, H. (1913). Boycotts and the Labor Struggle: Economic and Legal Aspects . New York: John Lane.
Sharp, G. (1973). The Politics of Nonviolent Action . Boston: Porter Sargent Publisher, Boston.
Sharp, G. (2011). Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts . New York: Oxford University Press.
Shridharani, K. (1939). War without Violence: A Study of Gandhi’s Method and Its Accomplishments . New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Stoltzfus, N. (1996). Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and th e Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany . New York: Norton.