Should we bother trying to change our opponents’ hearts?

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Jun 6, 2013

When activists’ lives are on the line, attention to detail can make the difference between a beating and killing. Here’s a sample of racist imagery: “Black men carry razors and knives” and “demonstrators are riff-raff with nothing better to do.” Before confrontations the black students dressed in shirts and ties, carried their schoolbooks, and left their knives at home.

George Lakey, Waging Non-Violence

The track record of wins for campaigns that use nonviolent direct action continues to grow. More activists around the world at this very moment are planning and carrying out campaigns than anyone can count.

The Global Nonviolent Action Database includes accounts of over 800 campaigns; researchers rate each on a scale of 0 to 10 to estimate its degree of success in achieving its goals. Many of the campaigns score 10, some score 0 and most fall in between. Today’s activists are bound to wonder: when campaigns win, how do they do it?

Mechanisms of change

When I tackled this question in graduate school in the 1960s, I noticed that movements’ pathways to success are different. So I focused on these differences to identify mechanisms for achieving success.

Gandhi sometimes said that his aim was to convince the opponent that the campaigners were correct. I used Gandhi’s word and called that mechanism conversion. One success happened when lower caste Hindus rebelled because they weren’t allowed on a temple road used by upper caste Hindus. The dalits were said to make the road unclean simply by using it.

Gandhi encouraged them to take direct action, and they occupied the temple road even when the monsoon flooded the road and they had to stand in water up to their waists. After a year the police took down the barricade preventing the dalits from proceeding on the road. But the campaigners decided to go for conversion, and they continued their vigil for four more months until the upper caste Hindus were convinced that the dalits were right.

As I searched through other cases, however, conversion seemed very rare, and Gandhi himself eventually dropped the conversion pathway when facing the British Empire. “England will never make any real advance so as to satisfy India’s aspirations till she is forced to it,” he said. “British rule is no philanthropic job, it is a terribly earnest business proposition worked out from day to day with deadly precision. The coating of benevolence that is periodically given to it merely prolongs the agony.”

England must be “forced,” Gandhi said — the mechanism of coercion. When we coerce we force a change against the will of the opponent, who still disagrees with us about the issue but must give in anyway.

We find this mechanism in the dozens of cases in the database where dictatorships are overthrown nonviolently. The shah of Iran in 1979 remained as fascistic and bloody-minded as ever, but he got on the plane to the United States because his people had shown they would no longer be governed by him.

So far, so good — conversion and coercion, two mechanisms very different from each other. But additional campaigns I was running into didn’t use either of these mechanisms. The people weren’t willing to wait until the opponent finally converted to their point of view, nor could they always mount such massive noncooperation as to be able to coerce.

I then identified a third mechanism, persuasion. Gene Sharp, when he drew from my work for his foundational book The Politics of Nonviolent Action, expanded the description of that mechanism into accommodation: The opponent realizes that yielding to the demands of the campaigners is the best thing to do under the circumstances, even though not actually forced to do so. In his later work Gene addeddisintegration, to identify regimes or opponents that actually dissolve under the impact of the campaign. That brought us to four pathways to success: conversion, coercion, accommodation and disintegration.

The mechanism more available to most of us

I was especially curious about the aspect of accommodation that I called persuasion, because so many winning campaigns have achieved this, and yet it seemed to me fairly tricky. It’s available to the labor movement, although labor is presently growing weaker in many countries, and to activists of many kinds. This is the pathway by which the opponent still has the means to maintain the oppressive policy and still believes in it — austerity or fossil fuels would be current examples of that situation — only to later shift once there is no longer the willingness to keep the machinery of punishment going that’s needed to continue the injustice.