Gene Sharp
Social Power and Political Freedom
(Boston: Porter Sargent, 1980, 440pp.)

"The most urgent problem of our age is the problem of discovering a way of overcoming evil without oneself becoming a force of evil in the process."  Laurens van der Post

On the eve of President George W. Bush's meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Brateslava, Slovakia in February 2005, there was a meeting organized by the German Marshall Fund of the US and the Slovak Foreign Policy Association to analyse how civil society organizations using non-violent methods had helped to overthrow authoritarian regimes in Slovakia, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. 

The recent popular uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine have raised the morale of the small human rights and opposition groups in Moldova and Belarus who participated in the conference.  There has been increasing contact between people who had been involved in these non-violent movements, each influencing the other.  While each 'revolution' is different, there are common threads running through the civil society movements that helped in the non-violent overthrow of authoritarian rulers.  On the streets of Ukraine, draped in orange cloth, there were young people from Moldova, Belarus, Russia, Poland, and the former Yugoslavia making posters and learning how to shut down government buildings, to use alternative methods of communication and to keep warm during long nights.

In many ways Gene Sharp, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts is the intellectual guide to this use of non-violent techniques for 'regime change'.  Albert Einstein had been of moral support to Gene Sharp when he was sentenced to two years of prison in the 1950s for his anti-military activities in the US.  Thus it is Einstein the social activist rather than the scientist who is honoured by this institution which aims to study - and promote - non-violent forms of struggle to undermine the opponents' social, economic, political, and military power by withholding or withdrawing the opponents' sources of support.

Although much of Gene Sharp's early work was devoted to Mahatma Gandhi, and his interest in Gandhi's spiritual approach is evident in his Gandhi as a Political Strategist also reviewed in this section, a two-year period in the late 1950s as the editor of Peace News, the UK pacifist newspaper, gave him all the discussions on non-violence as a moral or religious choice that he needed for this incarnation.  The Einstein Institution's approach is "free from religious, ideological, and ethical imperatives."

Social Power and Political Freedom is the framework for Gene Sharp's approach, especially the core essay which gives its name to the book.  Examples of non-violent methods are contained in a longer book The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973, 928pp.)  The chief issue that Sharp addresses is overthrowing tyranny non-violently.   The traditional means of controlling rulers - constitutional limitations, elections, self-restraints in the rulers themselves, and the counter power in organized civil society - does not work in the face of tyranny.  While the tyrants of classical Greece were elected for a limited time in periods of crisis, today's tyrants plan to be 'President for Life' and some prepare to  pass on the posts to their sons.

Thus, we must look at tyranny and seek ways to overthrow it non-violently.  The use of violence against tyranny is most often counterproductive.  The tyrant usually has control over the organs of coercion - army, police, special forces, secret police etc.  The assassination of a tyrant usually produces a new tyrant rather than a liberal democrat.  Thus overthrowing tyrants cannot be a spare time activity.  It requires skilful means on the part of disciplined satyagrahas, Gandhi's term for those who hold fast to truth in non-violent action.  Yet a satyagraha must not place himself outside the circle of the bulk of the people whose true needs he strives to meet.  One of the problems with a revolutionary elite - the vanguard - as Lenin  thought, is that the elite believes himself to be out front -and usually above - the masses.  He is willing to sacrifice them in the present for their future benefit.  Unfortunately, the Leninist vanguard in practice led to a new tyranny.  Overthrowing a tyrant needs to be quickly linked to creating a broadly-based society with real limits on governmental power.

We see this need in three of the recent non-violent shifts in power in Georgia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.  Each of these countries is deeply divided on regional, religious, and ethnic lines.  In the past, governments and groups have played upon these divisions in order to build their power bases or to keep the opposition divided.  Therefore, it is up to the civil society, and in particular non-governmental organizations as the organized expression of civil society, to help to overcome the ethnic, regional and religious divisions.

Today, we see that the philosophy and practice of non-violence has grasped human imagination and exploded in amazing and unexpected ways, as individuals, groups and movements have developed creative, life-affirming ways to resolve conflict, overcome oppression, establish justice, protect the earth, and build democracy.

As Gene Sharp stresses "Our responsibility therefore, is not to dissent from dictatorship but to prevent and disintegrate them, not to denounce genocide but to make it impossible, not to renounce war individually but to remove war from society, not to repudiate particular social oppression but to construct a very different society with justice."

For those who would like to read more or more recent works by Gene Sharp, they may go to the website www.aeinstein.org

René Wadlow