PhilPaine.com

It’s odd that I haven’t read Gene Sharp’s work until now. I’ve known about him for years, and I’ve been aware of his ideas at sec­ond hand. He has been pre­oc­cu­pied with the issue of how peo­ple can resist or over­throw dic­ta­tor­ships for longer than I have (and that’s say­ing quite a bit). His ideas are fair­ly close to my own, and come from sim­i­lar influ­ences. So I’m embar­rassed to say that I have neglect­ed read­ing his works, an error that I will hasti­ly correct.

Unlike most aca­d­e­mics, Sharp has a com­mon-sense grasp of what is pos­si­ble and what is not, what is rel­e­vant and what is not, and what works and what does not. This short work, which he keeps in the pub­lic domain and encour­ages to be trans­lat­ed, is an extreme­ly use­ful vade­me­cum for those who want to over­throw dic­ta­tor­ships. He urges the use of what he calls “Polit­i­cal Defi­ance”, a strate­gic form of planned non-vio­lent resis­tance. As he points out, over-reliance on vio­lence, rather than on more sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­niques of resis­tance, does not have a good record of suc­cess. This doc­u­ment has influ­enced democ­ra­cy advo­cates in a num­ber of quar­ters. I strong­ly rec­om­mend it.