Why should nonviolent action work against governments that control armies and police? The most influential answer comes from the American political scientist Gene Sharp (1928 to 2018), whose The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), often published in three volumes, became the standard reference.
The consent theory of power
Sharp argued that political power is not a solid block that rulers simply own. It flows from many sources: the authority people grant a ruler, the number of people who obey, their skills and knowledge, habits and beliefs, material resources, and the ability to punish. Every one of these depends on the cooperation and obedience of large numbers of people: soldiers who follow orders, clerks who process paperwork, workers who keep the economy running, citizens who pay taxes.
From this Sharp drew his central claim: since power depends on cooperation, it can be weakened or dissolved when people withdraw their cooperation. Even a dictator cannot personally collect taxes, run trains or arrest thousands. The idea is old; the sixteenth-century French writer Étienne de La Boétie, in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, argued that tyrants fall if people simply stop serving them. Sharp's contribution was to work it out systematically and link it to practical methods.
The 198 methods
Sharp gathered historical examples into a list of 198 methods of nonviolent action in three broad classes:
- Protest and persuasion (54 methods): speeches, petitions, symbols, vigils, marches, mock funerals and more. Mostly symbolic, they show disagreement and build support.
- Noncooperation (103 methods), divided into social noncooperation (such as ostracism), economic noncooperation (boycotts and strikes), and political noncooperation (such as boycotting elections or civil disobedience).
- Nonviolent intervention (41 methods): sit-ins, fasts, occupations, blockades and parallel institutions.
The list showed how wide the options are. Most people can name only a handful of tactics; Sharp wanted movements to choose methods deliberately, matching them to their goals and their opponent.
Pillars of support
Building on Sharp, trainers such as Robert Helvey popularized the image of pillars of support. A regime's power rests on institutions that hold it up like pillars under a roof: police and military, civil service, business, religious bodies, media, schools and courts. A movement does not need to defeat these pillars by force; it aims to pull them away by persuading or pressuring the people inside them. When enough pillars waver, as when soldiers refuse to fire on crowds, the structure can collapse.
How change happens
Sharp described four ways nonviolent action can produce change:
- Conversion: the opponent comes to agree with the resisters.
- Accommodation: the opponent does not agree but decides concessions are better than continued conflict.
- Nonviolent coercion: the opponent is forced to give way because cooperation has been withdrawn on a large scale.
- Disintegration: the opponent's system of power falls apart entirely.
Sharp also described political jiu-jitsu: when a regime violently represses disciplined nonviolent resisters, the brutality can backfire, winning sympathy for the movement and dividing the regime's supporters. This works only if the movement stays nonviolent.
Criticisms
Critics argue that consent theory oversimplifies. Some regimes rely on a small, loyal security force and income from oil or foreign backers rather than the cooperation of the many, and obedience is often produced by fear rather than freely given. Sharp's defenders reply that even such regimes need some cooperation, and that the theory shows where to press rather than promising success.
Worked example: pillars of support in Serbia, 2000
Slobodan Milošević dominated Serbian and Yugoslav politics through the 1990s, a decade of wars, sanctions and economic collapse. In 1998 students founded a movement called Otpor (“Resistance”), which studied Sharp's writing and trained activists in nonviolent methods.
Otpor used humor and street theater (protest and persuasion) to make the regime look ridiculous and to lower people's fear. When police arrested activists, crowds gathered outside police stations, and the arrests made Otpor more popular, an example of political jiu-jitsu. Otpor also pushed a divided opposition to unite behind one candidate and urged young people to vote.
After the September 2000 Yugoslav presidential election, the regime refused to admit defeat. The opposition called a general strike. Miners at the Kolubara coal mine, which supplied much of Serbia's electricity, stopped work, and when police were sent in, local residents came to stand with them. On 5 October, huge crowds converged on Belgrade. Many police officers and soldiers did not act to stop them, and Milošević conceded defeat the next day.
Map this onto the pillars: state media lost credibility, workers withdrew economic cooperation, and the police and military wavered at the decisive moment. Critics note that foreign governments funded some opposition groups and that some protesters used force on 5 October, so the case is neither purely nonviolent nor purely homegrown. Still, it is widely studied as an example of a regime losing its pillars.