‘Nonviolent struggles were twice as likely to win.’
Peace by piece: George Lakey’s research into nonviolent resistance
‘What happens when people fight nonviolently to defend something they value?’
As a 1950s undergraduate, new to Friends’ worship, I dug into the history of the Quaker movement. I found extraordinary achievements in conflict situations – early Quakers waging ‘the Lamb’s war’ to change laws and practices in Britain, and crossing the Atlantic to challenge the theocracy of Puritan Massachusetts. I learned that Friends were deeply moved by Spirit to take on opponents much bigger than they were, and in that way they reminded me of stories from early Christianity.
When majoring in Sociology, I decided to tackle this apparent achievement of the impossible.
When an invention works repeatedly – even an invention in conflict – there might be a scientific way to describe it. A transformative way to wage conflict would be useful to others who aren’t particularly religious. But then again, perhaps not: are only the Godly able to use nonviolent struggle?
I was in that condition of curiosity at the University of Oslo when I looked up a fellow US citizen who was researching there. Gene Sharp, barely thirty and dressed in a sweater and blue jeans, held me spellbound as he described his effort to put the concept of nonviolent struggle on a sound empirical footing. He related case after case, from multiple countries, in which non-pacifists had engaged in nonviolent struggle.
In Norway during world war two, he told me, the country was occupied by one German soldier per ten Norwegians. Nevertheless, the teachers decided to resist a Nazi takeover of their schools. They chose their point of struggle and when told to disband their union in favour of a Nazi teachers’ organisation, they refused – together. Despite arrests and torture in a concentration camp, teachers resisted, with increasing support from parents and the larger society. The Nazi government backed down.
Gene told me his next step would be a doctoral dissertation at Oxford. Rigorous thinking and behavioral definitions that will work across cultural lines were essential, he said; nonviolent action was too valuable to be held as a monopoly by people who identified themselves by ideology or religion. Those tactics show up in multiple places because of their sheer practicality. Our job as social scientists is to free everyone to catch up with ‘what works’.
Accordingly, at the University of Pennsylvania I produced a thesis that identified three mechanisms through which nonviolent struggles win (when they do): persuasion, conversion, and coercion. Gene absorbed the mechanisms into his work. The Canadian Peace Research Institute published my thesis.
I noticed I was preoccupied with cases in which the campaigners were nonviolently seeking – or forcing – change, such as those Quakers who ‘invaded’ Puritan Massachusetts and struggled until they obtained freedom of religion. Even though I was personally fascinated by making change, I began to wonder: what happens when people fight nonviolently to defend something they value?
In 1964 Gene Sharp organised a conference at Oxford on what he called ‘civilian-based defense’. There I learned about the Ruhrkampf, 1923-25. Germany had fallen behind in the reparations payments it owed France and Belgium. The victors sent troops to force more shipments of steel and coal. Germany resisted nonviolently, declaring the Ruhr Valley on strike: ‘Let them pick coal with their bayonets.’ Germany won.
This distinction opened my mind. If change and defense are two different applications of nonviolent power, what other applications can we invent?
In the 1980s there were urgent calls from Central America to protect the lives of human rights advocates being assassinated. Quakers and others responded by being ‘nonviolent bodyguards’. To me it sounded incredible – and then I felt moved by the Spirit to try it myself, joining a team in 1989 in Sri Lanka to keep human rights activists alive.
On the plane I realised that we were innovating a third, distinct application of nonviolent action: ‘third-party nonviolent intervention’. Campaigners using nonviolent change or defense are struggling for substantive goals, whereas in the work in Central America and now Sri Lanka, we interveners refused to take a position on the goals the local people were fighting for. As third parties, we focused on the local people’s right to stay alive and unharmed as they engaged in their (nonviolent) struggle for justice.
I was as startled as anyone when, in 2009, the Pentagon called me at Swarthmore College, asking me to come to Washington to share what we were doing in a course I’d recently invented. This was after 9/11. A counter-terrorism policy planning unit in the Department of Defense wanted to know how I’d applied systematic thought to the need to defend against terror.
My Swarthmore students were each choosing a country challenged by terrorist threat, pretending to be a consultant to that country, and devising a nonmilitary strategy for its defense. They had a toolbox of eight nonmilitary techniques to work with that I’d found had actually been used by some country or other.
When I met the Pentagon team I acknowledged I wasn’t an expert in counter-terrorism, and asked for critical feedback. I described the tools we were using in the course and asked for challenges. No one volunteered. Their chief said he knew by the body language of his group that what I’d presented made sense.
However, he explained there was no way our government could take up such a radically-innovative alternative to the ‘war on terror’. Between the lines he was reminding me of Dwight D Eisenhower, who long ago warned against the power of what he called the ‘military-industrial complex’.
One of my research projects, at Swarthmore, proved immediately useful: the online, searchable Global Nonviolent Action Database. It has 1,400 cases from nearly 200 countries, a fraction of the cases of collective use of nonviolent action that could be harvested!
Happily, many researchers in recent decades have been joining the party. Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan created a database of all nation-size popular struggles between 1900 and 2006. They found that movements that relied on nonviolent struggle were twice as likely to win as movements that used violence to pursue their goals.
For people still wedded to the violence paradigm inherited from mainstream culture, the surprises unearthed by nonviolent research continue. Quakers who have lost confidence in their pacifism have ample reason to take another look.
George is from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
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