Michael L. Westmoreland-White, Ph.D.
Research
Associate, Fuller Theological Seminary Extension
Adjunct Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Spalding University
Reviewing
Gene
Sharp's Waging
Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential
for www.ecapc.org,
6/4/05
Last week, we looked at a work on the
spirituality of nonviolence, especially Christian nonviolence. This week,
instead, we examine nonviolent action the way a sociologist or political
theorist would—a series of practices designed to wage a social struggle
without the use of violence. Some people, such as Mohandas Gandhi or Martin
Luther King, Jr., have contributed to both these dimensions of the literature on
nonviolence. But most people have concentrated, at least in their writing, on
one or the other. Since the early 1970s, former Harvard professor Gene Sharp has
been the most influential figure among those who study nonviolence as practices
of social struggle.
In some ways, Waging Nonviolent
Struggle simply condenses into one volume the major insights of Sharp's
3-volume, The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Like the first volume of
the earlier work, part one summarizes the view of political/social power implied
in nonviolent struggle and, like volume two of Politics, it finishes
that first section with an outline of the many methods of nonviolent direct
action that Sharp has categorized. Part two looks at many of the cases of
nonviolent struggle in the 20th Century—cases which Sharp is at pains to point
out were largely improvised campaigns. Part three of the book, like the 3rd
volume of Politics, is a fine-grained analysis of the dynamics of
nonviolent action—the forces which make such a campaign successful or
unsuccessful.
This section three contains some new
insights that Sharp has refined over the years since Politics (72-74)
in such works as The Anti-Coup; Civilian-Based Defense, Making
Europe Unconquerable, & From Dictatorship to Democracy. But it is
amazing how many insights were seen right from the beginning.
In the final section of the book,
Sharp works to make future nonviolent campaigns more effective. To do so would
mean greater planning in advance and greater study of the dynamics of
nonviolence. For instance, using nonviolent means to defend a nation against an
aggressor would be most effective if nations gradually "transarmed"
themselves from military defense to nonviolent civilian-based defense. Such
preparation of the populace also makes nonviolent prevention of coups
d'etat far more effective. The most undeveloped part of the
book is an analysis of the difficulties and possibilities of nonviolent
3rd-party intervention. Though they can find helpful materials here, those
pioneering in this most dangerous form of nonviolent action (e.g., Christian
Peacemaker Teams, Peace Brigades International, The International Solidarity
Movement, Witness for Peace, Voices in the Wilderness, and Nonviolent Peaceforce,
to name the most prominent groups) must still largely experiment on their
own.