Invest in Strategy
Civil resistance is not magic.
It may succeed, or it may fail.
But don't leave it to chance. Strategy is a wise investment.
Just like riots, spontaneous acts of defiance and improvised strings of actions are mere brush fires: quickly ignited, quickly extinguished. When you’re always reacting, you end up disempowered.
What is strategy? Strategy tells you whether, why, when, and how to fight. Strategy is how you move upon the social terrain, rebalancing power along the way. The aim of a liberation strategy is to generate influence in favor of the oppressed, through a durable reshaping of forces in society.
Planning strategy is a doable, if complex, task. First, good knowledge of the methods of nonviolent action — your "weapons system" — and the core dynamics of civil resistance is required. You also need an in-depth understanding of yourself (as an aggrieved group), of your opponent, and of society.
Start by using what you got. Weigh in the risks, and play wisely. There are times to prepare carefully, others to act boldly. Choose each action because of its coherence — how much closer it takes you to the goal. Essential to strategy is knowing when to deploy and when to regroup.
Weighing the likely return of an action against the amount of risk to be taken, a good strategist is like a wise investor: making sure to build social assets, not squandering them.
Steps to Strategy
1. Learn all you can about strategic nonviolent conflict
2. Gain a profound understanding of the situation
3. Set concrete, unifying objectives
4. Pick clear, symbolic symbols of problem & solution
5. Outline phases and intermediate steps
6. Plan a campaign for each phase
7. Anticipate moves by the opponent
8. Vary tactics (sequence methods of protest, non-cooperation, intervention — concentration, dispersion)
9. Build successes along the way
Nonviolent discipline
After building unity and careful planning, a third challenge is to maintain nonviolent resistance in the face of provocation and brutal repression.
Civil resistance struggles can be effective even against heavy repression and police action precisely because they fight such forces indirectly. A struggle pursued by nonviolent means is more difficult to control for the opponents. That is why they will often try to introduce violence among the ranks of civil resisters, even if they have to pay people (called agents provocateurs) to do it. Violent resistance (or counter-violence) in the midst of the struggle boosts the opponent's ability to use repression against nonviolent resisters, which can have disastrous consequences.
The rationale for keeping nonviolent discipline despite provocation and repression needs to be widely understood and accepted.
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Philippe Duhamel
interTactica — a liberation blog.
This was the eighth instalment in our series devoted to popularizing the concepts of nonviolent struggle. A one-page handout of this text is available as a pdf. Your suggestions on how to improve this draft are welcome.
Previous post in this series. Next post in this series (upcoming).
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