Nonviolent direct action is a set of tactics that go outside conventional means of advocacy, like running for office, going to the courts, doing media campaigns, and the like. Community organizers sometimes call nonviolent direct action “street heat”—blocking entrances, boycotting, fasting, tree-sitting, planting gardens where a pipeline is supposed to go, and hundreds of other kinds of actions.
Today, teenagers for gun control, women for equality, African Americans for safety from unaccountable police, indigenous people for respect for their land and traditions, teachers and other workers for a living wage, grandparents for climate justice, and more—millions of people—are going beyond lobbying to insist on change.
Direct action flourished in the 1960s. Martin Oppenheimer and I were then graduate sociology students active in the civil rights movement, and Marty went on to a distinguished career as a teacher and writer led by concerns for justice. In 1963, he and I noticed that some activists were learning very rapidly from others’ experience. Others were not, sometimes making mistakes that were dangerous and even fatal.
With movements expanding rapidly, organizers were too busy to download their wisdom into a manual. Some groups were failing to achieve their goals not because they lacked numbers and heart but because they made needless mistakes.
To assist more people to get in on the movement learning curve, Oppenheimer and I wrote A Manual for Direct Action, just in time for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer.1 Veteran civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin wrote the foreword. A black organizer in the South told me with a smile it was like a “first-aid handbook—what to do until Dr. King comes.” The book was picked up by other 1960s movements, too.
In the past two years I’ve traveled to over 100 cities and towns in the United States, England, and Scotland with my latest book, Viking Economics.2 I was asked repeatedly for a new direct action book that addressed today’s situation. On both sides of the Atlantic most people are losing ground. That’s also happening literally, in coastal areas where the seas are rising. Governmental legitimacy is declining and trust is evaporating.
It’s a good time to take a fresh look at what has worked in times of trouble, and share what I and my fellow activists have learned about successful campaigning that gives hope for the future.
And so, what follows is a different guide from the one Marty and I wrote over 50 years ago. Then, movements operated inside a robust U.S. Empire that was used to winning its wars and a Britain that, however hesitatingly, was moving toward social democracy.
Now, the U.S. Empire is faltering, the economy is fragile, and even some populations’ average life expectancy is declining. On the other side of the Atlantic, a dis–United Kingdom struggles with major questions of where to go from here. Wealth inequality skyrockets on both sides of the pond, and major political parties are caught in their own versions of society-wide polarization.
The goal of the book is to offer movement-building approaches that win major changes rather than small reforms. At the same time, campaigns need to involve the many participants who hope that sufficient change can come through a series of limited reforms.
In building those movements, it helps to avoid competition between direct action campaigners and those who address problems in other ways, like doing direct service and building alternatives or being policy advocates. This book helps direct action campaigners establish productive relationships with those whose contributions to the movement utilize different skill sets.
I believe that building successful movements now requires fancier dancing than back in the day. This book suggests ways to accelerate movements’ learning—from their own experience and from each other. Because a movement’s learning curve depends on how healthy its organizational forms and processes are, this book is not only about strategy and tactics, but also about what goes on inside the groups that wage the struggle.
One thing is easier now: creating instant mass protests. Social media’s ability to increase our power to mobilize is so dramatic that it can cause us to forget that mobilizing is not the same as organizing. Also, that one-off protests, however large, are nowhere near as powerful as sustained campaigns.
This book also offers a process that supports you, with others, in setting goals that are meaningful for your group. Successful goal-setting takes into account the cultural moment and how the goal fits into the group’s larger vision.
It is possible to wage campaigns that move you closer to bringing about the transformational change you want. This book gives you examples, explains their innovations, and leads you to other resources that will help you start and conduct successful campaigns.
One major resource that contributes to the spirit and information in this book is the Global Nonviolent Action Database (GNAD). While teaching at Swarthmore College between 2006 and 2014, I worked with students to launch a new, searchable source of knowledge about campaigns: the GNAD. So far, the database has published over 1,100 campaigns addressing racism, sexism, and other systematic oppressions, environmental crises, violence, dictatorship and authoritarian abuses, and more. Each case includes the unfolding narrative of the opponent’s response, what happened if violence broke out, and how various allies acted in support of the campaigns.
Campaigns in the GNAD were waged by workers, students, farmers, women, middle-class professionals, and other groups. The campaigns are given scores on degree of success, so it’s possible to note what the more successful campaigns did as compared to less successful campaigns.3 Since we placed the GNAD on the Internet it has been visited by people from almost 200 countries.
A DIVERSITY LENSThis is a how-to book for people who want a diversity lens. In multiple chapters the reader will find ways of thinking and working that take into account human and cultural differences, including how injustice distorts our working together.
A successful social movement includes many different styles and preferences, because to make big change the movement needs to grow and be sustainable. This book supports inclusivity and open acknowledgment of difference.
Take strategizing, for example. Strategizing is the job of developing an overall plan and calling the “moves” as the campaign encounters opportunities—and challenges from the opponent. Different traditions assign this task to a trusted individual, a small group, or a much larger group that gives a wide representation of the entire campaign.
The 2016 North Dakota pipeline campaign’s decisions were made by the host group—the Sioux people who lived there. Others who gathered to participate were expected to carry out those decisions. Other campaigns seek to share decision-making with everyone. Occupy Wall Street expected to make strategic decisions through open assemblies with the cooperation of most participants.
In this guide we allow for such differences by offering a set of strategy tools that have proved useful, no matter who makes strategic decisions and how they make them.
In the writing I’m forthright about my own politics, but the value of the book doesn’t depend on your agreement with where I stand on various issues. It’s okay to take what’s useful and forget the rest.
MY POLITICAL INFLUENCESMy own politics were shaped by the civil rights movement—it was where I was first arrested, after all. I’m also struck by how often the brilliance shown in that movement has relevance for us now.
I went on to give leadership in the movement against the Vietnam war, at one point finding myself on a peace mission on a small sailing ship surrounded by hostile gunboats just off the Vietnamese coast. In the early 1970s I came out as a gay man and plunged into the LGBTQ movement while also co-founding Movement for a New Society, a network of autonomous collectives that gave training and strategy support to a variety of campaigns in that decade, including the successful struggle against nuclear power. As an ally to women and children, I co-founded Men Against Patriarchy, then drew on my working-class origins to help form a cross-class, cross-race coalition to fight President Reagan’s initiatives that stoked inequality in this country.
This book benefits from my learning from other movement activists in over 20 countries while facilitating workshops with Training for Change (TfC). Since I returned to academia in 2006 I saw TfC expand its facilitator team with more people of color and increase its outreach, continuing to act as a pollinator of good ideas while challenging participants to make learning breakthroughs.
Another source is the reporting from movement work in multiple countries coming from Waging Nonviolence. My writing the “Living Revolution” column for that publication and encountering responses by thoughtful readers has sharpened many of the ideas in this book.
I’ll often refer to lessons from today’s experience of the campaigning group I co-founded in 2009: Earth Quaker Action Team, or EQAT. It’s where I get to practice spirit-in-action. The EQAT campaigners deliberately seek to incorporate many best practices from other campaigns and also try creative experiments to meet challenges that movements face now.
The Nordic countries are the global high achievers for the goals of progressive activists in the United States and United Kingdom, but a century ago they were mired in poverty and oppression. How they made their turnaround inspires me. In the 1920s and ‘30s the trajectory of the Nordics’ movements ran parallel to those of the United States and the United Kingdom, then they were able to break through to a new level. It turned out that they had advantages that enabled them to gain breakthroughs that the rest of us couldn’t achieve at the time.
We can learn from the Nordics’ strategies; they took on the challenge of their divisions and the threat of their growing Nazi movements in highly creative ways. Their turnaround strategies were the focus of Viking Economics. Like all movements, they made their share of mistakes. They also got some things right, and those have influenced me in writing this book.
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE BOOKMovements benefit from fresh perceptions and creative initiatives. These ideas come from activists of all ages, but are especially likely to come from the young and from people with identities different from “the usual suspects.” And younger people deserve to find in movements a friendly place to grow to face tough challenges.
To walk the talk in this book, I’ve invited three activists from different generations and identities from me to contribute. They all have practical advice seasoned by in-depth experience. Daniel Hunter is an African American man who, at 37, has been campaigning for over 20 years and now mentors and trains climate change campaigners around the globe. Ryan Leitner started environmental justice campaigning during college and is now the field organizer for EQAT. Eileen Flanagan is a Quaker author from a working-class Irish background, a mother of two college students, and a teacher of online courses about nonviolent direct action.
One of the things we share is a view of campaigning as more than a technology. We present ways of working that don’t burn people out, ways that support campaigners to be the best human beings they can be.
Whether a particular campaign wins or loses, the people waging the campaign can win in their own sense of power and take their lessons forward to win the next time. Campaigns, because they take place over time, provide a container for healing and growth.
The truth is, no one deserves a society that systematically violates them or treats them unjustly. Campaigns can be designed to help people gain some experience of their own deservingness.
The occasional protest gives an individual the experience of taking a stand. A sustained campaign adds support and increased chance of effectiveness. By staying connected and acting together over time, each person can experience both the win for social justice and an expansion of their humanity.
Welcome to this guide.
Nonviolent direct action is a set of tactics that go outside conventional means of advocacy, like running for office, going to the courts, doing media campaigns, and the like. Community organizers sometimes call nonviolent direct action “street heat”—blocking entrances, boycotting, fasting, tree-sitting, planting gardens where a pipeline is supposed to go, and hundreds of other kinds of actions.
Today, teenagers for gun control, women for equality, African Americans for safety from unaccountable police, indigenous people for respect for their land and traditions, teachers and other workers for a living wage, grandparents for climate justice, and more—millions of people—are going beyond lobbying to insist on change.
Direct action flourished in the 1960s. Martin Oppenheimer and I were then graduate sociology students active in the civil rights movement, and Marty went on to a distinguished career as a teacher and writer led by concerns for justice. In 1963, he and I noticed that some activists were learning very rapidly from others’ experience. Others were not, sometimes making mistakes that were dangerous and even fatal.
With movements expanding rapidly, organizers were too busy to download their wisdom into a manual. Some groups were failing to achieve their goals not because they lacked numbers and heart but because they made needless mistakes.
To assist more people to get in on the movement learning curve, Oppenheimer and I wrote A Manual for Direct Action, just in time for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer.1 Veteran civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin wrote the foreword. A black organizer in the South told me with a smile it was like a “first-aid handbook—what to do until Dr. King comes.” The book was picked up by other 1960s movements, too.
In the past two years I’ve traveled to over 100 cities and towns in the United States, England, and Scotland with my latest book, Viking Economics.2 I was asked repeatedly for a new direct action book that addressed today’s situation. On both sides of the Atlantic most people are losing ground. That’s also happening literally, in coastal areas where the seas are rising. Governmental legitimacy is declining and trust is evaporating.
It’s a good time to take a fresh look at what has worked in times of trouble, and share what I and my fellow activists have learned about successful campaigning that gives hope for the future.
And so, what follows is a different guide from the one Marty and I wrote over 50 years ago. Then, movements operated inside a robust U.S. Empire that was used to winning its wars and a Britain that, however hesitatingly, was moving toward social democracy.
Now, the U.S. Empire is faltering, the economy is fragile, and even some populations’ average life expectancy is declining. On the other side of the Atlantic, a dis–United Kingdom struggles with major questions of where to go from here. Wealth inequality skyrockets on both sides of the pond, and major political parties are caught in their own versions of society-wide polarization.
The goal of the book is to offer movement-building approaches that win major changes rather than small reforms. At the same time, campaigns need to involve the many participants who hope that sufficient change can come through a series of limited reforms.
In building those movements, it helps to avoid competition between direct action campaigners and those who address problems in other ways, like doing direct service and building alternatives or being policy advocates. This book helps direct action campaigners establish productive relationships with those whose contributions to the movement utilize different skill sets.
I believe that building successful movements now requires fancier dancing than back in the day. This book suggests ways to accelerate movements’ learning—from their own experience and from each other. Because a movement’s learning curve depends on how healthy its organizational forms and processes are, this book is not only about strategy and tactics, but also about what goes on inside the groups that wage the struggle.
One thing is easier now: creating instant mass protests. Social media’s ability to increase our power to mobilize is so dramatic that it can cause us to forget that mobilizing is not the same as organizing. Also, that one-off protests, however large, are nowhere near as powerful as sustained campaigns.
This book also offers a process that supports you, with others, in setting goals that are meaningful for your group. Successful goal-setting takes into account the cultural moment and how the goal fits into the group’s larger vision.
It is possible to wage campaigns that move you closer to bringing about the transformational change you want. This book gives you examples, explains their innovations, and leads you to other resources that will help you start and conduct successful campaigns.
One major resource that contributes to the spirit and information in this book is the Global Nonviolent Action Database (GNAD). While teaching at Swarthmore College between 2006 and 2014, I worked with students to launch a new, searchable source of knowledge about campaigns: the GNAD. So far, the database has published over 1,100 campaigns addressing racism, sexism, and other systematic oppressions, environmental crises, violence, dictatorship and authoritarian abuses, and more. Each case includes the unfolding narrative of the opponent’s response, what happened if violence broke out, and how various allies acted in support of the campaigns.
Campaigns in the GNAD were waged by workers, students, farmers, women, middle-class professionals, and other groups. The campaigns are given scores on degree of success, so it’s possible to note what the more successful campaigns did as compared to less successful campaigns.3 Since we placed the GNAD on the Internet it has been visited by people from almost 200 countries.
A DIVERSITY LENSThis is a how-to book for people who want a diversity lens. In multiple chapters the reader will find ways of thinking and working that take into account human and cultural differences, including how injustice distorts our working together.
A successful social movement includes many different styles and preferences, because to make big change the movement needs to grow and be sustainable. This book supports inclusivity and open acknowledgment of difference.
Take strategizing, for example. Strategizing is the job of developing an overall plan and calling the “moves” as the campaign encounters opportunities—and challenges from the opponent. Different traditions assign this task to a trusted individual, a small group, or a much larger group that gives a wide representation of the entire campaign.
The 2016 North Dakota pipeline campaign’s decisions were made by the host group—the Sioux people who lived there. Others who gathered to participate were expected to carry out those decisions. Other campaigns seek to share decision-making with everyone. Occupy Wall Street expected to make strategic decisions through open assemblies with the cooperation of most participants.
In this guide we allow for such differences by offering a set of strategy tools that have proved useful, no matter who makes strategic decisions and how they make them.
In the writing I’m forthright about my own politics, but the value of the book doesn’t depend on your agreement with where I stand on various issues. It’s okay to take what’s useful and forget the rest.
MY POLITICAL INFLUENCESMy own politics were shaped by the civil rights movement—it was where I was first arrested, after all. I’m also struck by how often the brilliance shown in that movement has relevance for us now.
I went on to give leadership in the movement against the Vietnam war, at one point finding myself on a peace mission on a small sailing ship surrounded by hostile gunboats just off the Vietnamese coast. In the early 1970s I came out as a gay man and plunged into the LGBTQ movement while also co-founding Movement for a New Society, a network of autonomous collectives that gave training and strategy support to a variety of campaigns in that decade, including the successful struggle against nuclear power. As an ally to women and children, I co-founded Men Against Patriarchy, then drew on my working-class origins to help form a cross-class, cross-race coalition to fight President Reagan’s initiatives that stoked inequality in this country.
This book benefits from my learning from other movement activists in over 20 countries while facilitating workshops with Training for Change (TfC). Since I returned to academia in 2006 I saw TfC expand its facilitator team with more people of color and increase its outreach, continuing to act as a pollinator of good ideas while challenging participants to make learning breakthroughs.
Another source is the reporting from movement work in multiple countries coming from Waging Nonviolence. My writing the “Living Revolution” column for that publication and encountering responses by thoughtful readers has sharpened many of the ideas in this book.
I’ll often refer to lessons from today’s experience of the campaigning group I co-founded in 2009: Earth Quaker Action Team, or EQAT. It’s where I get to practice spirit-in-action. The EQAT campaigners deliberately seek to incorporate many best practices from other campaigns and also try creative experiments to meet challenges that movements face now.
The Nordic countries are the global high achievers for the goals of progressive activists in the United States and United Kingdom, but a century ago they were mired in poverty and oppression. How they made their turnaround inspires me. In the 1920s and ‘30s the trajectory of the Nordics’ movements ran parallel to those of the United States and the United Kingdom, then they were able to break through to a new level. It turned out that they had advantages that enabled them to gain breakthroughs that the rest of us couldn’t achieve at the time.
We can learn from the Nordics’ strategies; they took on the challenge of their divisions and the threat of their growing Nazi movements in highly creative ways. Their turnaround strategies were the focus of Viking Economics. Like all movements, they made their share of mistakes. They also got some things right, and those have influenced me in writing this book.
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE BOOKMovements benefit from fresh perceptions and creative initiatives. These ideas come from activists of all ages, but are especially likely to come from the young and from people with identities different from “the usual suspects.” And younger people deserve to find in movements a friendly place to grow to face tough challenges.
To walk the talk in this book, I’ve invited three activists from different generations and identities from me to contribute. They all have practical advice seasoned by in-depth experience. Daniel Hunter is an African American man who, at 37, has been campaigning for over 20 years and now mentors and trains climate change campaigners around the globe. Ryan Leitner started environmental justice campaigning during college and is now the field organizer for EQAT. Eileen Flanagan is a Quaker author from a working-class Irish background, a mother of two college students, and a teacher of online courses about nonviolent direct action.
One of the things we share is a view of campaigning as more than a technology. We present ways of working that don’t burn people out, ways that support campaigners to be the best human beings they can be.
Whether a particular campaign wins or loses, the people waging the campaign can win in their own sense of power and take their lessons forward to win the next time. Campaigns, because they take place over time, provide a container for healing and growth.
The truth is, no one deserves a society that systematically violates them or treats them unjustly. Campaigns can be designed to help people gain some experience of their own deservingness.
The occasional protest gives an individual the experience of taking a stand. A sustained campaign adds support and increased chance of effectiveness. By staying connected and acting together over time, each person can experience both the win for social justice and an expansion of their humanity.
Welcome to this guide.
