Understanding Civil Resistance: Strategies, Power, and Nonviolent Action

[00:00:13]so now we get into it and what is it we're getting into the description of this module in your schedule talks about the dynamics of civil resistance and that will come out during the course of this discussion but let's first ask ourselves what we mean those of us that i cnc when we use the term civil resistance it's not synonymous with the term non-violent conflict nonviolent conflict is obviously a conflict which is not violent which is to say a conflict in the case of a movement or a campaign that wishes to use non-violent action that has launched that conflict or instigated that conflict for various political social or other purposes civil resistance would be what a campaign or movement does that wishes to use non-violent action and the term civil resistance we are increasingly using as an organization in our educational activity as well as in our interaction with action taking organizations in the field partly because it does not use the word non-violent because in many places in the world there is a misconception that non-violence is pacifism which is not taking the initiative and not being militant and not engaging in a struggle and not engaging in a fight and even though the term civil resistance predominantly used in europe but also elsewhere in the world references in fact all non-violent strategies and tactics that can be used it doesn't use the word non-violent in its title and therefore it doesn't trigger that automatic um questioning so we find ourselves increasingly using the term civil resistance and so that's why i decided to head this particular presentation with that title and from a historical point of view i think that the use of civil resistance in struggles for the kinds of things we were talking about earlier rights and justice and self-determination and autonomy and equality under the law and equal rights is an emerging force for rights and as such is an alternative to violence if violence is understandable as the default preference historically for waging a conflict but you may recall that at the end of the previous session i asked the first word that i asked you to raise your hands if you believed in was the word peace and a lot of people come to this interest with a strong affinity for the idea of having a peaceful world and peaceful societies within that peaceful world and we wouldn't suggest that there is anything wrong with that objective but there are questions about how one arrives at a state of peace within one society or in the world and so i have some questions about peace for you to consider do you think that peace is simply the absence of conflict get rid of all conflict resolve all conflicts and you'll have peace not if you live under oppression and you think that you want to get rid of oppression which might require a conflict if all conflicts are resolved or soluble but there is still oppression then the question is can you have peace under oppression some would believe that that would be a dead peace is it possible to have peace if individuals all individuals within the society don't have rights can't get justice is that your idea of peace again it would be a peace to the advantage of those few in the society who happen to have rights and to whom justice can be done is peace something that comes through top down action suddenly a series of the most perfectly worded united nations resolutions have been passed and miraculously all nations in the world and all parties to all conflicts have accepted these resolutions is peace really likely to come about that way or can we understand the process which incrementally produces peace as coming from the bottom up and finally and perhaps most um indicatively as far as understanding the phenomenon of civil resistance is concerned if one wants peace to be the holy grail at the end of the yellow brick road if i can mix my metaphors can you get there just by changing people's behavior we have an academic advisor we love academic advisors who argue with us by the way because it's the only way we can that keeps us on our toes and that's the only way we can get we can we can be attuned to new ideas but one of them who is a wonder a lovely man and a pacifist um constantly says you know i totally endorse what icnc is doing i'm delighted to be an academic advisor but fundamentally i don't believe that we will have a non-violent global society until everyone decides to be non-violent and by that he means as a matter of their preferred behavior personal behavior and so i say back to him barry you know good luck in going door to door with all of the six billion people and convincing them one by one to be non-violent but there are others in the history of the development of non-violent action who have understood that it is possible to go through a political process in order to be able to bring about conditions that are consistent with having a non-violent society and one of the first individuals who understood the necessity of political action in order to be able to bring about a society in which minorities people who had been oppressed were no longer under the heel of violence was this man frederick douglass who by the way was the first african-american ever invited to a meeting at the white house and this and i found in this particular text from douglas a remarkable understanding of one of the central pivotal ideas about using civil resistance and it starts with the word power he says power concedes nothing and it never will he has no confidence in whoever holds power you can see that find out what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure the exact measure this is a metric of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them by power holders and these practices these unjust practices will continue until they're resisted they're not suddenly going to disappear and so he says the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress it fundamentally comes back to those who are oppressed who's the agent then for liberation it turns out those who are oppressed at least in the view of frederick douglass were those who could become the agents of their own liberation this is the man who invited frederick douglass to the white house abraham lincoln most of you know who he is when he was a congressman before he was president he was strongly opposed to the american invasion of mexico and to the war with mexico and he gave a dissenting address which hardly anyone listened to on the floor of the u.s house of representatives in 1848 and within that address he had to he had to he had to renounce or refute the argument that somehow the texas republic which was trying to break away from mexico had the right to be free if most texans wanted self-determination texan the texas struggle for self-determination was the excuse for the united states to invade mexico take a lot more territory than just texas and so lincoln said during the course of that speech something that was extraordinarily sweeping for 1848 he said any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better i mean forget oppression if you just want a government that suits you better you have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government a half century after that now that we're looking at the ideas which began to provide intellectual energy to the development of civil resistance historically a half century after that leo tolstoy the great russian novelist who had taken up the cause of opposing conscription men being drafted by the russian czar to defend tsarist russia he predicted that at one point in history in the future public opinion which by the way he did not understand as answering questions from a public opinion pollster but understood as that mass of opinion and affinity and sentiment and desire that would give form and shape to the aspirations of people that at some point in the future public opinion would change the whole structure of human life and that would make violence superfluous forget about whether violence is odious or not or as horrible or as costly or as evil or whatever else you might want to call it tolstoy simply said it will become superfluous because people will have found other ways in order to throw off injustice and of course mohandas gandhi was greatly influenced by leo tolstoy they even had a correspondence for several years prior to tolstoy's death although they never met because at that time gandhi was not in europe although he was educated in britain in part as well as in india he was in south africa as a young lawyer and was leading a campaign of resistance to white afrikaner suppression of the rights of all coloreds indians as well as black south africans and gandhi was a great reader of newspapers as by the way was lincoln and as well as frederick douglass and was just consuming information about irish resistance to british rule as well as the use of non-violent action in the first russian revolution against the tsar in 1905 gleaning many examples from these which he successfully applied in south africa as well as in india when he returned there and his campaigns of civil disobedience and non-cooperation in the 1920s reached such a point that members of the british government in london began to be concerned about mr gandhi's activities and one of the central concepts in understanding how civil resistance works is framed inadvertently by one of those british officials who in reviewing what gandhi had done concluded england can hold india only by consent we can only really hold on to india the british raj can if indians accept this if they submit to us as douglas had said almost 80 90 years before we cannot rule it by the sword it's not possible he understood that the only way that british colonial exploitation of india which gandhi was very clear at framing and defining that that could only occur by the consent of the indians so this was a new way to rise up that gandhi was pioneering in the 20th century bringing to life on the other side of the world ideas that had been germinated in the united states and elsewhere and his weapons and he called these non-violent weapons in resisting british rule as we know consisted of mass marches and protests not paying taxes boycotts resignations active interference tactical diversity the absence of tactical diversity is one of the reasons why many non-violent campaigns aren't successful and gandhi was an innovator tactically as well as having the perception that if you had a strategy as we'll get into in a minute tactics could then be successful the american mid-20th century scholar of the strategic use of non-violent action gene sharp grouped hundreds of tactics of nonviolent resistance into these categories there are other categories there are some now who challenge the the sufficiency of these three categories but just for your consideration tactics of protest and persuasion petitions symbols vigils marches walkouts tactics of non-cooperation we're going to engage in a struggle by not doing something boycott strike sit-ins civil disobedience sometimes not doing something will get you arrested and tactics of physical intervention in which you are directly disrupting the operations of a state blockades and seizures so let me sum up what i see as the dynamic of resistance not difficult at all when people deprive an oppressor of their consent when they say we're not going to cooperate with this state of affairs any longer because we think it's wrong that reduces the perceived legitimacy of the system and engenders a contest for legitimacy very important to a campaigner movement as they have a message to the wider population to join our cause what this government is doing is not legitimate it wrongs you it's unjust it violates our nature it violates our own constitution it violates whatever it violates and it's not legitimate we represent a higher idea of what order should be in this country political order constitutional order moral order and then when enough people refuse to cooperate when they when enough people join this campaign in withdrawing consent the cost of holding control by the oppressive system goes up which and this isn't necessarily visible at first automatically renders the status quo unsustainable from the moment resistance begins the sustainability of the status quo is in question and there are even some people who defend the status quo who notice that immediately which is why in totalitarian systems the first dissident gets killed because they realize that this is a challenge to their legitimacy if that legitimacy is based on lies so when the system's legitimacy goes down and its cost goes up if you're paid to defend that regime you begin to wonder wait a minute is this this is not exactly what i signed up to do in nashville when jim lawson was developing the strategy and organizing the sit-ins in downtown nashville tennessee one of the consequences of their challenging the legitimacy of that system and driving up its costs was police overtime working long hours every policeman began to realize this wasn't exactly in my job description beating people up in department stores working 70 hours a week costs being imposed stress being placed on a system the record of this kind of civil resistance historically using this kind of dinette this simple dynamic has really been impressive these are just a few of the struggles with which a number of you i'm sure are familiar i'll just touch on a few that haven't been mentioned already there was a wonderful 30-day struggle against a bloodthirsty dictator in el salvador in 1944 and a nationwide general strike threw him out his fellow generals decided at the end of the 30 days that he had to go so they escorted him across the border and there was a democratic election in el salvador the struggle against the argentine hunter which began in the 1970s the people's movement against augusto pinochet and chile in the 1980s the solidarity movement in poland from mache we'll learn more of that during the course of fsi the movement in the philippines which gave us the term people power in 1986 the velvet revolution in czechoslovakia and also the transitions from communists to democratic systems in east germany and mongolia which is a very interesting struggle that most people are not familiar with although we do have a chapter about it in the book of force more powerful very interesting because at a pivotal moment in the course of that non-violent struggle the key tactic was a hunger strike which had cultural resonance within mongolia very interesting which i i recommend to you that struggle the democratic transition in mali in 1991 the uh largely if not entirely nonviolent resistance to the coup attempt against gorbachev and yeltsin in russia in 1991 the long struggle in south africa greatly nonviolent during the course of the 1980s through the work of the united democratic front which led to a pacted transition as political scientists call it actually in south africa and the three famous much maligned and much misunderstood color revolutions in serbia georgia and ukraine very interesting how recent events seem to be more likely to be misunderstood than events further in the pat in the past but that certainly is true of those revolutions which we can talk about looking at this another way in the 35 years between 1970 and 2005 according to a study done by freedom house there were 67 transitions from authoritarian to democratic governments these are not the only important kinds of nonviolent struggles in the world that have been going on but they're easy to assess and look at and very repressive opponents were involved in each of these in 50 of those 67 transitions the key factor in forcing a change was some non-violent coalitional movement or campaign which was pushing for change a remarkable record and yet the record has not been perfect obviously sometimes when we're asked well non-violence doesn't always work my answer to that is what's the it that's not working which tactic are you talking about what strategic approach are you talking about can you examine the decision making give me an analysis why is the most important question to ask if there is a non-violent struggle or campaign that hasn't been successful tnmn is the big poster for this everybody says well what about tiananmen in june of 1989 some of the most tactically ingenious organizers of mass demonstrations include the chinese students who managed to to create an event in which a half million chinese participated in tiananmen square they didn't however appear to possess a full range of skills that it's usually necessary to have in order to wage a full successful non-violent struggle and there was physical repression and i like this quote from the ancient military strategist sun tzu which partly explains that failure in tiananmen square when he said tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat we can talk about tiananmen if you'd like but it's a useful reminder that this is high risk it's also high gain potentially so then the question is how you balance costs and risks which we'll be talking about tomorrow the big triumphs of people power however that we're familiar with as in the fall of the berlin wall or the enormous movement that welcomed martin luther king jr in his speech in washington dc in 18 in 1963 which may have been the inflection point uh at least from a a national psychological perspective in the waging of the of the civil rights struggle those are important tableaus because they were advertisements to the world that a new methodology of using political and social power in order to accomplish a transition from some system of oppression to a freer system was on offer historically what i'd like to do now is to turn your attention to what i call certain emergent properties of civil resistance emergent properties which come forward political and social effects which are produced within the societies that are undergoing these political and social changes which are experiencing the use of civil resistance because the argument that i wish to make is that these properties become imbued to some extent within the changed society which is what lends makes that change sustainable so it's not just a change of regime so it's not just a change of who's in power but may in fact be a change in the society and the first of these properties is this idea of consent withdrawing it is part of the leverage which enables civil resistance to be applied successfully and the idea that i'm taking away my consent and that when i'm doing that i'm saying that this this state of affairs is not legitimate tends to be absorbed by people in the society so that then when a new president comes along and has a new raft of laws that he wants to pass and people say well wait a minute this resembles what we had before that's not right that's not legitimacy legitimacy can become an enduring test of whether or not the political order ought to be sustained normatively should be sustained or not this changes also the idea of how power is transacted within the society power is not necessarily a matter of giving an order it's a matter of making sure that people are willing to accept this order i need your consent before i'm going to get you to do something the idea of power begins to change within the society and also as you withdraw your consent you're changing space political space within the society space becomes something that you think about differently it's not something that you're granted something that you can take you can even take it by giving it up the second property which i think is absolutely critical is the property of reason no one can be coerced to join a non-violent movement they have to do so voluntarily which means leaders have to have a proposition that people are going to say i agree with that okay that makes sense to me you've told me what you want you've told you've sketched out a strategy to get it that makes sense to me these propositions have to embody a rational argument you have to address people you have to respect their mind this stimulates creative thinking people say well wait a minute i'm not so sure about this aspect of this particular strategy you know have you thought that through or not this starts a dialogue in a conversation this is persuasion it's not coercion think about what happens when there is a long-running movement in a society that moves a society from say colonialism to democracy or from oppression to some degree of political freedom and this is done in part by so many people within that movement in the society making rational arguments and people responding to rational arguments this can be a new social experience within the society to be able to be successful at presenting a rational argument you have to be honest with people you can't lie to them that's based on manipulation that means that you recognize that your credibility is your most important asset as someone presenting a rational argument honesty and credibility tremendously important social properties to be able to be absorbed by society if it's going to keep its freedom and this helps to instill also i think reasons to believe that the project of doing a change this way and of having a rational society is something that people can believe in they in other words reason can trigger emotional commitment to the cause that is being prosecuted another very important property is self rule a movement has to be able to run itself no organization is going to be successful unless it's well organized gandhi said how can we expect to rule our nation if we can't rule ourselves and when campaigns would begin to be violent on the edges he would call them off and say we have to go back to the village and dig latrines we have to do something that's going to focus ourselves on behaving in a way that is consistent with the image of the society we wish to produce do constructive work organize ourselves this requires planning this requires in the act of engaging in civil resistance non-violent discipline and i have a picture of lek valensa here because he and his colleagues after a series of violent eruptions against the communist state in the 60s in the early 1970s recognized that that wasn't going to work as a way of rebelling and one of the intellectuals in the movement said at one point that it was necessary in order to to uh get rid of communism we couldn't do it through insurrection we had to pretend that it didn't exist and then create space within the society in which to begin to rule ourselves to really govern ourselves to do things we find little pieces of the polish constitution that would authorize something we want to do and we'll go out and do it and then when they challenge us we'll say well wait a minute that's in the polish constitution self-organization self-rule very important to have if you're going to sustain your new order none of this works unless leaders of non-violent campaigns and movements can say honestly and truthfully and realistically that they represent the people who are following them this idea of representation of course which is mirrored and having a viable representative democracy after the fact means i have to figure out why you are discontent i have to represent your grievances if i don't represent your grievances if i only represent my pie in the sky vision of what the society is going to be like somebody may follow me for a period of time until they decide well i'm following him because of what he wants to do but what he wants to do doesn't really have much relationship with what i want that requires that you listen to people and listening requires humility i don't think there is such a thing as a successful non-violent leader who doesn't have humility and when you when you exhibit humility as a leader what you are not exhibiting is hierarchy you are not exhibiting a style of leadership which says implicitly i know best for you follow me you'll find that if you do what i say things will work out well you know personal personalistic rule how many personalistic dictators do we see still in the world the other thing that representation does when you're running a nonviolent campaign or movement it models solidarity everyone can become a stakeholder in this action if i know that the movement that i'm a part of is representing what i think if i freely feel that they're representing what i want then and everyone is being reasonably well represented and everyone together as a stakeholder this is effectively where this idea of social solidarity comes from this is not about heroism of the few gennaro aryagada one of the leaders of the coalition against pinochet and chile you those of you have seen the chile segment of the film of force more powerful in the interview with him at the very end of the of the film he says how many people once pinochet resigned how many people in chile could said they had done this seven million people could say they had done this not a bunch of gorillas in the hills not a single charismatic leader everyone had a stake in that resilience socially is necessary for these movements to succeed because they tend to unfold in time iteratively and cumulatively there are setbacks two steps forward one step backward if you're going to mobilize people tactically if you're going to sustain some sense of strategic force if you're going to arouse and drive popular momentum and participation you need resilience and you get resilience if people have such an identification with the cause that they feel an existential stake in its outcome if they have some sense of certitude about what's going to occur and this property of civil resistance became clear to me two years ago in a conversation with jim lawson right here at fsi when he was admiring the um the refinement and the detail in a presentation on tactical innovation and sequencing and said you know as good as all that is there's something else that's also necessary he said when my compatriots in the civil rights revolution would dedicate themselves be out on the front lines commit themselves physically as well as socially and economically when they were putting all the chips of their life on this bet that this movement would succeed what could explain doing that this is a picture by the way of fannie lou hamer i think the idea i think the force more powerful is in her finger frankly in that picture if that doesn't show resilience i don't know what picture might but um she did voter registration drives in mississippi as some of you probably know and once she was on a driving home uh at the end of one of those drives her car was waylaid uh by some white men and she was dragged out of her car and beaten to with an inch of her life and she was in the hospital for 30 days approximately about a month the 31st day she goes out and starts another voter registration drive and jim lawson told me that evening at fsi two years ago the reason is that she felt that if she did not go out and continue the struggle the struggle would not succeed and if she did go out and continue the struggle the struggle would succeed she was convinced that her participation was mandatory if the struggle was going to succeed this is the commitment and the devotion and the faith and the potential success of the struggle that is summoned from people who participate in these movements which change the fate of nations and are imparted i would argue to the society socially there will be people present in that society who understand that this kind of maximum effort may sometimes be necessary in order to get a society beyond another difficult passage in its experience of course these movements produce political force and that force is understandable strategically just a few of the ideas you go after your opponent's weaknesses in order to be able to quickly drive up costs you have to get people engaging in initiative on a widely dispersed basis one of the biggest mistakes as an example in the conduct of non-violent campaigns is to devote too many resources to very conspicuous actions which lend themselves to physical repression you have to press from all angles from all points of the compass and you have to do this in a way that prompts those who are defending the old order to question whether it's sustainable and it leads to transformation it does not typically occur the change doesn't typically occur with some cataclysm some great undoing some the human equivalent of an earthquake these aren't human earthquakes these are transformations because when members of the police and military in the old order defect and cross this street and join a movement or a campaign which ha can and can't happen and has happened what does that suggest it suggests that when you started your struggle those who you thought with were your enemies were in fact not monolithic they may have been deeply divided and this of course is a process of change that's not based on destruction but is really debased based on debate on reason as i said in which everyone is a stakeholder and in which the way we want to end up is reflected in how we do the struggle one of the reasons we do the struggle in a non-violent way is so that everybody can participate so that when we have a society that results from this political transition we have a society in which many many many more people are participating and a society which is less likely to be violent because something extraordinarily successful that happened in the history of this country was done without violence which is an enormous lesson to learn that it doesn't take violence it all comes back to the individual vaclav havel in his book of essays called disturbing the peace how are we successful in a non-violent movement we disturbed the peace he said by breaking the rules of the game the dissident the single individual disrupts the game he shatters the world of appearances he shows everyone that it's possible to live within the truth hubble's argument was that all systems of oppression are based on lying and you have to tell the truth as the first step to yourself first of all that this system is based on lies living in the law hovel said constitutes the system only if it's universal are no terms whatsoever on which that system can coexist with living in the truth and therefore every single person who steps out of line with the system denies the system in principle and therefore threatens it in its entirety that's why repression is often severe the worst oppressors engage in the worst repression because they understand that anyone who disagrees with them anyone who says you're not telling the truth is threatening their legitimacy and therefore sowing the necessary distrust of unjust power that does bring about a change except the page down here we go so the basis of resistance in my view is really a choice of identity it's a question for each of us who have may have the opportunity of joining a struggle and the question is who are you who are you are you the object of a ruling elite is that how you see yourself are you going to be submissive to threats of violence are you someone who ducks inside every single time or are you someone who's just willing to say hey i got mine man i don't need to really get you know take too many risks here just happily succumb to the social anesthesia of life in an advanced industrial but unjust society or are you a citizen oh what a concept you're actually a citizen even if you don't have any rights of citizenship yet and you realize that you're able to resist the lie that injustice can't be opposed every oppressor says don't try anything it won't be successful you know you'll just get yourself killed no that's not that's a terrible idea why would you're such a nice young woman why would you want to get involved in this campaign something bad is going to happen to you you better do nothing but in fact you are a citizen and you can develop based on the the record we've gone through you can develop the means to obtain power and today's movements are everywhere they're metastasizing into new zones of injustice if you could put it that way against endemic corruption against organized social violence for women's rights for land reform for indigenous peoples rights four kinds of rights that most people didn't even know existed one or two generations ago for self-rule and autonomy as in the western sahara and of course continuing for democracy but there still is an argument for political violence it is persistent among those who do want to resist injustice but somehow believe that injustice or oppression or brutal violence from a regime can't be resisted except by something that's proportionate to that violence and so they think that the only thing that is proportionate to violence is violence and they argue for violence and they develop an attachment to violence another the guys who really don't mind at all being violent and have to justify the desire to be violent the first component of the argument they make for the necessity of violence is that it's necessary it's the only effective means to the end and this statement sums it up oppression cannot be demolished except in a hail of bullets and that of course was said by one of the ultimate defenders of violence and the other half of the argument is that violence is really a good thing it's going to purify us it's going to make us men i once read a remark by jean-paul sartre praising the algerian revolution saying they became men that way manliness as a positive manifestation of struggling with violence would be virtuous a form of redemption even or apotheosis and so the ultimate statement about it death is truth even if you die you're doing something good and who said that same guy said that death is true well when i when i saw that comment in one of his screeds i thought what it reminded me of was something that sergey popovich a leader of the resistance to milosevic in serbia had said when he was asked why did basic so many serbs like a vast majority of serbs just dislike milosevic so much and he said their language smelled like death people sensed it they felt profoundly uncomfortable with the very language that the regime was continuing to use and so this is really the vulnerability the strategic vulnerability of those who insist on using violent struggle as a means of achieving power death isn't popular inviting people to join a struggle in which they might die is not going to be as likely a proposition to be followed as inviting people to join a campaign or struggle the strategy of which suggests there are serious risks but exposing you to death is not what we want to do an iranian protester last year understood this love of life that was in every non-violent movement i think when she said our people we're not terrorists that's what our government has become tell the world how much we love life we just want to be free this affirmation of life we are rejecting the discourse of death we're told by the government that we have to accept the consequences of the deaths of some people who are resisting because they are terrorists or their you know their social male factors or whatever the term of derision used is this is in this sense discourse begins to model a fundamental existential choice of life versus death there still is a demand for militant struggle i said some people respond better to the use of the term civil resistance than than non-violence or non-violent action because they want militants the many milit struggles in the world full of a sense of militants the question is how to what the choice what the telling them what the relative risks are of engaging in two different kinds of struggle and in this new research study that maria stefan who uh obtained her phd here at the fletcher school writing her dissertation on the nonviolent struggles in east timor and palestine and kosovo and erika chenoweth an academic advisor to icnc who's still working on a massive project on this data set they studied 323 violent and non-violent campaigns in a 106-year period of time and coded tens of thousands of tactical actions and found that violent campaigns could be said to have succeeded in some way achieving this goal or in this particular phase of the campaign in 26 percent of cases and that non-violent campaigns could be said to have succeeded in this 106 year period of time in 53 percent of cases more than half more than double the number of the success rate so that's a that's evidence of the degree of risk of failure that you incur if you resort to violent struggle so resistance therefore resistance is going to happen the question is how is it going to happen and i believe that the appeal of violence is a methodology of struggle will recede if people who have grievances begin to understand that there's another way of struggling to be able to replace grievances with social goods with political rights and with success in reaching the goals they have in their society this was all summed up i think by one sign held by one south african woman standing by herself on one street corner in front of a gas station in a petrol station in 1986 that sign simply said to end violence struggle for justice she got it she understood that if the society was violent or if the government was violent the struggle to command the participation of a majority or of a sufficient number to begin to propel change within the society the struggle for justice needed to rest on the people if the people engaged in a struggle for justice if it was strategic if it called on the best ideas and practices from this impressive legacy of successful movements and campaigns in the last hundred years it could prevail and that a just society a society made to be just because its system had been changed would not be predicated on violence by the few over the many but would instead be predicated on everything that had been learned by that society in producing a transition in which non-violent resistance had been the means for making that change thank you you