 what you said, you know, you said it hadn't arrived, so. Good afternoon. My name's George Lopez, and I have the great privilege of serving as the vice president here for the Academy of International Conflict Management and Peace Building here at the US Institute of Peace. It's wonderful to see not only the size of the crowd, but many of you who were with us about 10 days ago for the last panel on civil resistance. We are delighted in the Academy and at USIP that this has become such a wonderful theme for us, in a world of intense violence and in a world where we need thought, action, re-evaluation, and then that feeding into more action of a peaceful nature. This is what we do here, and the fact that this panel is one that also contains three USIP grantees is really exciting for us. I'm delighted to welcome you. I'm even more delighted to introduce Nancy Lindbergh, new president, or I guess she told us this morning her presidency is now seven weeks in. So that magnificent seven that we feel we've experienced here at USIP, you'll hear a little bit about from Nancy as she gives us her own welcome. I will then journey to the stage and become a commentator of this great group after the fact. And again, welcome to all of you. Let me introduce Nancy Lindbergh, please. Thanks, George. Thank you, George. And it's really a pleasure to be here with everyone today and especially to have a chance to discuss this really important topic with four experts. And I won't go into introductions because I understand that Maria has distributed that, but we have Maria Steffen, who's here at the Institute, joined by three distinguished scholars, Mary King, Sharon Nebstead, and Chaska Byerly. And couldn't be more delighted to have them all here. I have just returned from Afghanistan and Pakistan where I was very interested to meet an Afghan man named Akhmadullah, do I say that right? Yeah. Do people know him in the audience? So he has done really remarkable work. He's actually translated two of Maria's books into civilian nonviolent resistance, into push to, and used it as the basis for training both men and women on methods of civil resistance, particularly against corruption, which is absolutely endemic. In Afghanistan, one of the critical issues that they will have to overcome along and helps drive some of the other cleavages that run through that society. And what he said was that a lot of people used to think that this was some sort of imported concept and therefore dismissible. And what he's done is put it very much into the Afghan context and, in fact, identified an Afghan man who was very involved with Gandhi in that movement. And it's becoming a very powerful driver with the people that he's trained. I was so excited when I had a first meeting with Maria. And the fact that there's now this evidence basis that we're able to cite that shows, in fact, it's not just in alignment with our values, but there's actually evidence that nonviolent resistance leads to more durable and more effective outcomes. I think is extremely powerful. It's something I'm delighted that we're able to help support. I want to recognize Peter Ackerman, who's here with us, who is, what do we call you, one of the godfathers of his eminence, his eminence, Peter Ackerman, for all that you've contributed to the thinking and the learning on this. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to you. Well, Maria's laughing. She's like, I'm glad. I'm glad. We're getting her in the right frame of mind, because I understand humor is one of the ways in which civilian nonviolent resistance can be most effective. So welcome, everybody, and I look forward to the conversation. Thank you, Nancy. Great. Thank you very much, Nancy. And thanks to George for those nice opening remarks and nice framing comments. Really, for me, it's an honor to be on the stage with these three women. And I think it's going to be a lot of fun as well. So you all have their bios, so we won't go into those in any great detail. And what we wanted to do with this event is to make it more of a conversation style. So rather than a conversation after conversation or book talk, book talk, we'll try to keep this as lively and interactive as possible. One shout out before we start the conversation, Mary. For those who arrived early enough, you would have heard the nice music that was playing. So I want to give a shout out to Darren Cambridge, if he's in the room, who put theirs, Darren. So Darren put together some tracks of very powerful music that was used as part of nonviolent struggles around the world. And there's actually information about those songs and their origins and why they're important for this conversation in your brochures. So thank you very much to Darren for that. So Mary. This is fun. So Mary is someone, when you're a scholar in the field of civil resistance, you have tremendous respect for Mary King, both for the work that she's done with her research and the plethora of books that she's written, but also she's been in the front lines of the US Civil Rights Movement. So she's walked the talk. She's served in government. She's served a different part. So Mary, it's really a tremendous honor to have you here at the Institute. So Mary, we're here to talk about your book, which was just published. So I'll show it, since we're on live webcast, Gandhi and Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India. So Mary, a lot of people in this room won't be familiar with this struggle that you focused on, which happened in 1924 and 25. So explain to us why you spent literally years of your life in the bowels of libraries, in media archive hell, doing research about this campaign, and why should the audience care about this campaign? Well, it's true. I mean, this is a photograph taken in the newspaper morgue of a newspaper that was covering this struggle in Vikam, the village of Vikam, in what is now Kerala, India. And they sent a reporter out every three days during the 604-day struggle, which means that we have a precious account that was published during that time. But it wasn't fun. I would go in in the morning with a gallon of water, and by 4 o'clock it was empty. So I spent hundreds of hours in dusty archives. The true story had never been told before. And this nonviolent struggle in the 1920s had had some very detrimental effects on the perception and understanding of nonviolent struggle, which I will explain in a second. In the village of Vikam, there was a Brahman temple and roads surrounding it could be walked upon by anyone, dog, cat, pig, Christian, Muslim, Jew, anyone, except an outcast. Anyone except a non-caste Hindu could walk those roads. This was very detrimental for the outcasts or the untouchables because it made their way home much longer. And the struggle began by the untouchables themselves who approached Gandhi, sought Gandhi out for help, and brought to a head a campaign led mostly by high-caste Brahmans. Now, the reason for that is because Gandhi said that that was what they had to do. This will turn out to be a strategic error, as you will soon see. The next slide is a map showing the princely state of Travancore, which is the one that runs along the length. And that's Kerala in the bottom. It's a very leafy green part of India, unlike most of India, which is dry and arid. Here is the start, the opening start of the Vikam struggle. You'll notice that each of the costumes of the three men are different. That's because your garb revealed your status. The two who were half naked are various degrees of untouchability. In this part of India, there were not only untouchables, there were unapproachables. One had to be 95 meters away from an unapproachable if you were high-caste. There were also unseeables. Unseeables were so low that they could only come out at night so that they would not accidentally pollute a high-caste Indian. Next slide. Once the struggle actually started, there was a great flood in 1924. And you can see that the Satyagrahis, that is the volunteers in the nonviolent struggle, are trying to maintain a vigil despite shoulder height water. The water would rise to shoulder height by the afternoon. So what Gandhi insisted was that they try to convert the upper-caste Brahmins. And this meant that he thought that hearts and minds could be changed by sufficient nonviolent discipline. In fact, this has turned out to be a very major misperception. And there's no substantiation that it worked. So this is a radical notion in Mary's book, which is to suggest that Mahatma Gandhi made strategic and tactical mistakes. He did. So Mary, what mistakes did Gandhi make? He made too many to count, actually. But one of the things is this, I have to tell you right at the beginning that the struggle failed. There was a so-called settlement that Gandhi hatched with the British Police Commissioner. But it did not succeed. And the untouchables were left at the end of 604 days with no material gains whatsoever. Along the way, Gandhi did make some stellar suggestions. This was a grand procession of high-caste Indians, Brahmins from Vaikon, who walked for more than 100 miles to the capital of the princely state of Travancore to present petitions of more than 25,000 high-caste Indians. One of the real problems with the study of nonviolent struggle is that within a decade of the end of the 604-day struggle, writers writing for the Western world began reporting complete mythology, complete falsehood about what had happened there. They reported that it was a successful struggle, that the Brahmins' hearts had been touched, and they had embraced the untouchables. This is, as we say, baloney, or balonia for those of us. I see two people who are in the audience who've been in balonia. So this is balonia completely. But this was something that has been totally lost to history by the bad write-up that the struggle has had. If you could see it in color, they are dressed in various shades of yellow, and they walk through rains. And when they got to the capital of the princely state, they did present the petitions. The false reports that reached the West had a very severe effect, however. They skewed the entire understanding of how to fight with nonviolent action. Conversion really is an ideal at best. And the idea that you can actually accomplish anything by touching the hearts and minds of the opponent is something that is marginal to how nonviolent struggle actually works. This also didn't do Gandhi credit. Gandhi deserved constructive, creative criticism, which he did not get. And it's only now that scholars are actually beginning to reveal and recover some of what had happened. He deserved much better write-ups than he did. Researchers went into Mahatma studies instead of interrogating the technique of nonviolent struggle. This was a very major blow. We ended up with a lot of biography idealization of a leader who was highly complex, did extraordinary things. Along the way, George Leakey, one of the theoreticians, developed a tool called the mechanisms of change. And this are four categories of anticipatable or planable for. You can aim for four categories of action, or you can look at a struggle after it's occurred and say what happened. The first category is conversion. Conversion, as I said, can only be an ideal. So Gandhi's idea that you had to have only the high castes involved came from his concern for the Hindu faith. This is a map of the distance in which those processions walked. They started from two points, and they walked to me. It's been totally lost because of the bad studies that were published in the West and also in India. One of the deepest flaws in Gandhi's thinking was the idea that if there was not success, it was because the volunteers were insufficiently disciplined. This is not true. There are many factors in what brings about the success of a nonviolent action. So next slide, and I'll soon be finished. This is the sketch. I commissioned these sketches of one of the newspaper artists, the presentation to the Maharani region. In this part of Kerala, the passage of property went through matrilineal succession. The highest person in the princely state of Travancore was the Maharani, a woman, not because of marriage. It was not the Maharaja who was the highest. Gandhi did appreciate that only the Maharaja and the Maharani, that family, the ruling family of the princely state, could outlaw untouchability and make it stick with the Hindus. So he understood that very well. He was also very deeply perturbed about untouchability. The major effect was a great penetration in India on the question of untouchability, although it was much slower than anybody thought. From afar, American black communities were watching reports in newspapers. And beginning in 1919, black leaders began to travel to India to find out for themselves. They were particularly touched by the struggles against untouchability as the historian Sudarshan Kapoor has shown us. So they traveled by steamership for four decades. Next slide. So this, and I must say, I learned a tremendous amount. I wasn't aware, until I read this part of your book, Mary, the extent of learning that took place between US civil rights activists and Indian activists and the level of both physical travel, the amount of literature, and training materials that was exchanged. And this is very well documented. It's actually quite remarkable. We talk about peer-to-peer learning. Well, it was pretty extensive even almost 100 years ago. It was both ways. There were Indians who traveled to the United States. Some of you know the name Highlander Center in Tennessee, which is where Rosa Parks went this summer before she refused to give up her seat in the bus, the Training Center for Labor Organizers. There were Indians who were traveling to Highlander in this whole period, and were particularly right before them on Gumrie Bus Boycott. Let me in closing say that one of the things that we need to pay more attention to is the fact that among Gandhi's stellar contributions to the world, and he was the first non-Western individual to capture worldwide attention, is an entirely new language for the English-speaking word. All of these terms were coined by Gandhi, non-cooperation, non-violence. He told, visiting black leaders in the 1930s, he had to coin this word because he so detested the term passive resistance, which was the term being used in English, nonviolent action, nonviolent methods, nonviolent revolution, nonviolent conflict. We have people here from the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict. It's a Gandhi term, civil resistance. One of his terms, civil disobedience. This one's a little bit ambiguous. People think it came from Thoreau. Thoreau did not use this term so far as anyone can prove. Sanctions, that was another Gandhi term. Technique method process of struggle is what Gandhi talked about. But what went into the literature was what a friend of mine calls a metaphysical chassis. Everything was put on spiritual terms, which is a misperception, and it's poor historiography, and the term transformation of conflict, which is one of my favorite, because it gives you the hint that so much more can proceed. In addition to what you said, Nancy, about effectiveness, it is possible to have a transformational effect on conflict that it has a more lasting, enduring value and could be more positive than anything that violence can ever do. Thank you very much, Mary. So this is actually a perfect segue with the terms that Gandhi coined to Sharon Nebstad. So Sharon and I only met a few months ago at the University of Denver at a workshop, and it was at that meeting when I really said to myself that it's unfortunate that sociologists and political scientists working on civil resistance don't meet more often, because Sharon's body of work on nonviolent revolutions and nonviolent struggles has been pivotal. She looks at it from a sociological frame, which is incredibly helpful. So Sharon's book that she'll be talking about now is forthcoming in a couple of months, but this is her previous book, Nonviolent Revolution, Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century, when she also addresses this question of why civil resistance works and often better than violence. She focuses a lot on this element of security force defections being a key variable in the success of nonviolent movements. So that reinforced a lot of the work that Erica Chenoweth and I had done. So it was a really wonderful meeting this book. The one we're talking about, though, is more of a survey of the field. So the title of this book that's coming out in a couple months that I don't have with me is Nonviolent Struggle, Theories, Strategies, and Dynamics. So we saw some of the terms that Gandhi has coined. How would you say about the field itself and how the field of civil resistance has evolved over time? This book actually came up because I published Nonviolent Revolutions in 2011, like, I think, a month before your book came out with Erica Chenoweth. And after that, I was asked by a whole bunch of presses to start reading book proposals. And I thought, wow, there's so much work coming out on this topic right now. And very exciting work, empirically diverse, a lot of theoretically driven questions. And I was talking to my editor at Oxford. I said, this field has just boomed. It's been around for many decades as people were first intrigued with Gandhi's work. But in the last decade, we just see this burgeoning of work happening. And I said to my editor, somebody needs to write a book that kind of surveys this field, talks about its genesis, how it began, how it's evolved over time, what the key debates are, the key terms, summarizing the empirical findings to date, we're seeing more and more academics from mainstream disciplines getting interested in this field that for too long had kind of been ghettoized in peace studies and other fields. So somebody needs to write a book and summarize all this and talk about the areas that have yet to be researched as setting forth another research agenda. And he said, get me a proposal. And within a month, he got me a book contract. And so in many ways, this is a very exciting time to be doing this research because there's so much happening. But you can't see that the field has evolved over time. And of course, it's appropriate that Mary began this conversation because it begins with Gandhi. He's the first one who demonstrates this tactic on an international level. And very bravely, he takes on an opponent who was far superior in terms of its military capacity and financial resources. And he's quite successful in many regards, at least in terms of winning independence. So you have a period of about 30 years in which the field is really almost exclusively focused on Gandhian studies, maybe with many misperceptions. But people are intrigued, how does this operate? It's a different conception of power. And you see that happening throughout the 1960s. It kind of dies out in the 40s after World War II where people weren't interested in nonviolence because World War II was the good war, so to speak. But when King comes along and the success of the Montgomery boycott gains so much attention, he starts talking about Gandhi as well. Then, of course, what I call the second generation of scholarship begins in the 1970s when Gene Sharp publishes his landmark trilogy, The Politics of Nonviolent Action. And he shifts it away from some of those conceptions about the metaphysical elements of nonviolence and says, these are methods that anybody can use, regardless of your political persuasion, regardless of your religious orientation or your notion of whether violence is ethical or not. And he really lays out the strategy behind it. And so for about 30 years, you have a number of people working off of Sharp's model. And this period is important, in my opinion, because you have lots of case studies coming out and documenting how it's been used. And it's important in the sense that most historians are most of our narratives of history chronicle violent events. And so the nonviolent history is really not given much attention. So it's a very important uncovering of this rich history and a lot of evidence that this has, in fact, worked historically. It's not just a nice idea. We have evidence of it. And then from about 2005, I see a whole other generation of work happening. And I've got pictures here of Maria's book, Why Civil Resistance Works with Erica Chenoweth, Kurt Shock's book that came out in 2005. There's a number of studies that come out and that are asking a variety of different analytical questions. It's not just does nonviolence work or not, although that's an important question. And of course, Maria's book with Erica asked this very important question, which is more effective, violent forms of struggle or nonviolent forms of struggle. But you see a whole array of theoretical questions being raised, under what conditions are movements successful? It's not just whether they're successful, but what are the circumstances that increase the likelihood that civil resistors can attain their goals? You see people asking questions about, when do violent groups give up those forms of struggle and shift to nonviolent methods? We're asking about the long-term consequences. Is democracy more durable if people have used nonviolent methods of struggle? We see people asking questions about, how can civil resistors respond constructively when they were oppressed, so that repression actually backfires against the state and strengthens the movements? So we're seeing much more mainstream academic research on this and a lot of interesting empirical methods, a lot more comparative work. And it's brought about a whole new generation of research that's quite active right now. And so one of the points that you make in the book is that a lot of the research has been about what we call the maximalist struggle. So the struggle is against either authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, against foreign occupations, and I would say too in terms of the inspiration and the framing of the work of many people in the second and third generations. This was the strategic nonviolent action approach too. So this is where the Peter Ackerman, Chris Krugler perspective, because we wouldn't have even attempted, I don't think, to use that frame of strategy, absent sort of that other generation of studies and research. But you make the point that certain things are missed, or there are certain aspects of nonviolent struggle that are not being captured perhaps because of an overemphasis on these maximalist campaigns. So what do you think we're missing or how could the field be broadened and further nuanced, I guess? That was one of my other goals in the book was to say, what have we missed? And because it's relatively young as an academic field, there are areas that we haven't paid sufficient attention to. And I agree completely that that whole second generation paved to the road for what we're doing now. But because the focus was pretty strongly on strategic nonviolence against authoritarian regimes, we've missed other areas. So I have a chapter in the book where I document nine different kinds of nonviolent struggle. What we think of are the Philippines people power struggle in 1986, or the recent uprising in Egypt in Arab Spring. Those are the types of things that come to mind. But of course, there's all forms of nonviolent struggle. And even with that strategic emphasis, I think what I'm seeing in terms of the current debates that are going on, people are asking, OK, have we missed something from that pragmatic tradition? We've been so strategically oriented, is there anything that we've overlooked? And I think one of the points that's being made in current debates is we haven't paid enough attention to Gandhi's emphasis on the constructive program. And even the language, do we call it nonviolent struggle? Do we call it civil resistance? Sometimes I'm reluctant to use the term civil resistance because I think it leaves out this element that Gandhi so strongly emphasized. You resist the oppressive institutions that you're trying to change, but you must simultaneously be constructively developing alternatives. And he emphasized both. The strategic approach is really focused on the resistance. How can we get out the system that we don't want anymore? But Gandhi said, while we're struggling, we need to start rebuilding the economy in an alternative way. We need to rebuild cultural institutions. We need to rethink a whole variety of elements in our society. I actually shared a thought. The constructive program was more important. More important, you're right. For the transformation of India then was resistance. You're right on. And I think some scholars today are saying, if we're just focused at getting an old bad regime out without putting in place the infrastructure that can then transition to a new, better society, maybe we're just opening the door for another bad regime to come in. And we open the door for potentially exploitive economic systems to come in. And then are we really transforming the society, or have we just replaced one bad system with a new system? So I think people are starting to go back and say, we missed some parts of Gandhi without focusing so heavily on Sharps model. Maybe that constructive program is really essential in terms of long-term transformation. And so, and then you mentioned, and this is an important topic for USIP, because some people could say, well, US Institute of Peace, you talk a lot. I mean, you tend to emphasize traditional conflict resolution approaches and dialogue and mediation, negotiation, problem-solving workshops, more of the dialectic approach. But yet, a strong element of nonviolent resistance is using direct action. It can involve confrontation. It can involve disruptive tactics. So how can we think of peace building that incorporates both of these perspectives? And so I think you talk about how the negotiation part in the nonviolent action may come together. And again, this links to some of our perhaps empirical blind spots. Maybe that's too strong of a term. But I think with these models like the Philippine people power movement, where the dictator flees, and all of a sudden we can just jump in, we've missed some of the other kinds of models. So as I mentioned, I lay out nine different forms of struggle. And it goes back to these four mechanisms of change. One of them, which is the state collapses. And then you can go in and rebuild it. But I think what's much more common, like in South Africa or in some of the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, is it's really using civil resistance, using nonviolent struggle as a way of pressuring leaders to say, we have to start negotiating a transition. So I think there's not been much attention to how the interface occurs between civil resistance and negotiation. We tend to have that model that let's just oust the dictator and start all over. But many, many situations, Chile in 1988 is another situation where it was a transition based on negotiations. So I see lots of room for more academic research understanding how those dynamics play out, which is a different mechanism of change than a complete state collapse. So just based on a survey of the room, there are a number of people who are in policy positions in international civil society, what I see in the audience. So what are some of the key questions or takeaways for this community from your research? It's an exciting time to be doing this research, because there's lots of debate happening. But it's also a time where we're struggling with the fact that we don't have sufficient research to draw a lot of these policy implications. And in the book, I lay out some areas that I think we really need to focus on in terms of future research projects. And one of them is the role of international involvement. And if you look at some of the existing literature, there's contradictory findings. So you have some people saying the role of international involvement can be very positive, that sanctions can weaken the state, or support from international community can put pressure on rulers so that they don't crack down, which creates more space for a civil resistance movement to flourish and potentially win its goals. Then in my own work in nonviolent revolutions, I found that there are some problems. Obviously, there can be problems when the international community gets involved. I looked at the case in Kenya in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And one of the things I saw is that when the international community got involved with the best of intentions, there was a shift that occurred. The power was no longer at the grassroots level with the civil resistance movement itself. It kind of shifted to the international level. And some of those actors didn't always have the same perspective as the local civil resistors. And it meant that they lost some of their decision-making capacity. You also have the potential problem that when international communities intervene, it can generate new resistance, can generate new allies for a ruler who wants to see this as northern imperialism, or northern interference. So you have some people saying it can potentially be detrimental to a civil resistance struggle. There's a recent book that came out, Daniel Ritter's book, on Arab Spring, where he says, know the role of Western communities and the rhetoric of human rights as essential in terms of constraining rulers from engaging in brutal crackdowns. And then in your own book, Maria's book with Erica Chenoweth, I believe your findings were statistically insignificant that the role of the international community or international aid did not have a statistically significant effect. But we weren't happy with the findings. We didn't think there was enough information, enough nuance. And so we decided to write a second book together about the role of external actors vis-a-vis nonviolent movements, which is being generously funded by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. And it's really needed. And I think the reason we have contradictory findings is because we don't have sufficient evidence. We haven't really teased out the different forms of assistance and pressure and what effects they have. But if you're going to talk about policy, that's what we need to know. If we want to know what should we as concerned international citizens be doing, we need more data before we can make those choices. So to me, this is a place where you see contradictory findings but basically not sufficient research. So I'm pleased that you've got the second project underway. Me too. And the other area is radical flank. So this is another, so for peace builders, do you need a violent element in a nonviolent movement to make the moderate seem palatable and to make them negotiating partners? Does a violent flank help the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance? And again, in the social science research, there's two opinions on this. I have a picture of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X because some people argue this was the so-called positive radical flank effect. And I don't even like the term radical flank because I think what people are implying is violent. But the idea was because Malcolm X was seen as more militant, as more of a threat, that meant that more people were supportive of King as seen as the alternative that was more appealing. That's the positive flank effect. We're having a militant, potentially violent group helps a civil resistance struggle. There's also the negative flank effect in which there's a tainting dynamic. So you can see this in the struggle in Northern Ireland, in which originally the civil rights movement modeled after the US civil rights movement had a nonviolent orientation, but very quickly was seen as just an extension of the Irish Republican army. And therefore, a lot of those civil resistors were brutally repressed because it was seen as a front for a terrorist group. So the question is, does it hurt a movement, does it help a movement? What should civil resistors do? From a practitioner perspective, if there is a potential violent flank, how do you interact with them? What should your strategy be? And we really don't have sufficient evidence on this. So part of my hope in the book is to point areas of research that we really need more data about these topics in order to make judicious decisions about action and policy. That's great. I can report that never doubt that Erica Chenoweth is collecting data on important things. So she actually is doing research on radical flank. And so I sent her an email last night, what are the findings about radical flank? So she reported, so the article will come out eventually. But what she and I think her chalk, they worked on this together. So what they found is that having a radical flank decreases the level of participation in the campaign by about 17%. And having a radical flank decreases the overall effectiveness of the nonviolent movement. So it's basic, but this isn't the end all be all, but at least there's starting to be some quantitative evidence behind because it's a super important question. And the more evidence they have, the better we can make these decisions. Great. So thank you very much, Sharon. And finally to Shazka. So Shazka's book, let's see, Shazka's book, Curtailing Corruption, People Power for Accountability and Justice, I would suggest is perhaps one of the most, if not the most important and policy relevant book on civil resistance that's come out in quite a while. And I can say through interactions with policymakers, stay aid and beyond, that this is a critical hook for them. So the idea of corruption and what ordinary citizens can do about it, obviously without weapons and without relying on traditional approaches, technocratic fixes, that sort of thing, but what citizens in an organized way can do about it is something that is generating a tremendous amount of interest in this town and beyond. So Shazka, with whom I was a colleague at ICNC many years ago, what was it that inspired you to tackle this issue of corruption and why corruption and civil resistance? First, just if you will allow me one moment, Maria, to thank USIP because it was thanks to a grant from USIP that I was able to embark on this Odyssey that ultimately led to the book and also thanks to the support of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. And it started out because I was speaking on a panel in Turkey in 2004. It was a human rights conference that was held by the New Tactics and Human Rights Program. And I was on this panel discussing mass actions, low-risk mass actions that citizens have taken around the world. And there was a gentleman beside me who was speaking through a translator, a Turkish gentleman who spoke of a campaign in 1997 in Turkey called The One Minute of Darkness for Constant Light Campaign, in which he said approximately 30 million citizens participated. It was to fight what they called the crime syndicate, which was consisted of the links between organized crime, paramilitary groups, narco traffickers, arms traffickers, parts of the private sector, parts of the media, and parts of the state and government, at which time, was semi-authoritarian. And I thought to myself, and he described one of their defining tactics. There was a campaign. There were many tactics. But he said what citizens did was stay at home. And they didn't demonstrate, because anybody who would demonstrate in Turkey at that time would get brutally crushed and arrested. And what they did was that every night at 9 o'clock, they turned off their lights for one minute. And out of that, many other actions emerged that citizens took once this fear was dispelled throughout the country. So that, in a nutshell, made me think, wow, I've never heard of this before. How come I haven't heard about this? Could this be happening in other places? Citizens are fighting corruption and organized crime and these international crime groups and everything. And I thought to myself, wow, maybe this is the tip of an iceberg. And why am I hearing about it at a human rights conference? So it was an education about what is human rights and what is corruption and the fact that people were actually fighting corruption in an astounding campaign that we never heard about. And that started the odyssey, because I thought to myself, I had this feeling there must be more of this happening around the world. So your book looks at 13 different cases. 12 cases in the book. I researched 16 cases and had the really tough situation where I was told by the publisher, you cannot write more than 300 pages. You could not include all 16 cases. So I had to leave four out. And I'm trying, and I'm finding other ways to write about them, publish about them so that the research isn't lost and the lessons learned are not lost. But 12 are in the book and I don't have a slide up because I'm hoping all of you are going to go out and buy the book. It's available through the publisher and through other online sites. Even internationally with free delivery. And if there are people who just cannot afford the book, please come and see me afterwards. But everybody else, I really encourage you to buy the book. And the tactics. So what this slide shows, which when you read through the different case studies, and it's like equal, many of the cases are global south. In fact, some of the most vibrant and innovative people power campaigns happening around the world are happening in the global south. They're happening around anti-corruption. And so Shaskin, can you tell us about some of the more innovative tactics and approaches that these groups have used? There's a lot that we can learn about engaging in nonviolent struggle from these campaigns. And there are so many creative, what we would call, nonviolent tactics that people are inventing and using. So for example, monitoring. Who ever thought that monitoring could be a nonviolent tactic? But it is. Because what does monitoring do? First of all, it can be monitoring of so many different things ranging from reconstruction and development projects. For example, in Afghanistan and Kenya. Monitoring officials. For example, the police in southwestern rural area of Uganda. It can be monitoring institutions like parliaments. So monitoring is a tactic. It's also a nonviolent defining method. And Kurt Schacht coined that term. He was mentioned earlier by Sharon. A defining method is where you have a central tactic. And around that, there are many other nonviolent tactics that are sequenced and together constitute a series of tactics that are centered around a core tactic. So monitoring becomes a core tactic. And what does it do when we think of the dynamics of nonviolent struggle? One thing that it does is that it disrupts. It disrupts a corrupt system. And that was a very valuable lesson for me is that when you're fighting corruption, one way, not the only way, but one way to fight it is that you have to disrupt the corrupt system. Whatever that system is that one is targeting. Another very valuable lesson of tactics came out of mass actions. So you heard about staying at home and just turning off the light. Well, others, if you just flip back for a moment, you see there's a glass. Well, that glass says, we're watching you during the elections. This took place in Egypt in 2005. It was the Shey Finkum We're Watching You campaign. And what happens if 100,000 of those glasses are distributed throughout Egypt before an election? And they're given out to all these little tiny tea shops all over the country. And people start drinking out of them. That is a mass action tactic. It's not the only tactic in a campaign. But that's a mass action tactic. It's low risk in that context. And what would the police do in that context? Were they going to go and arrest all these people who are just drinking tea? So that's an example. There were so many innovative kinds of tactics like that that were low risk and mass action. And finally, I'll just show this one because this is Maria's favorite. And she always loves to talk about this one. What's my favorite? I'm dying to see. Oh, yes. The zero rupee note. The zero rupee note from India. This is a tactic that's part of a defining method that empowers anyone to say, I will not pay a bribe. So to not cooperate, to use the Gandhian term, non-cooperation with corruption. And people are empowered when they face a bribe demand to say, here. With a picture of Mahatma Gandhi. With this is based on a rupee note. I think it's the 50 rupee note. And on the back is something very important. This has the information about the movement. So if I give this to you, not you. You're not a corrupt official. But if I give this to someone, it's not just me, one poor little citizen, handing the zero rupee note. It's me and the fifth pillar movement that is giving this note. And I am protected. And I am a part of this. Oh, I shouldn't bang this. I am a part of this movement. So it's me and the movement that is handing you. You want a rupee note? Here it is. Yeah, so I actually do like that tactic a lot. And I like that campaign, the fifth pillar, and write information. So Shaskad, the other thing that's super interesting about your book is you talk a lot about, there's a lot of emphasis on tactics of confrontation. And obviously, this is critical and disruption. But all of your campaigns that you write about in all these different countries involve some type of constructive engagement with governments. And so how can you describe that a little bit and maybe give an example or two of how that worked in the context of the anti-corruption campaign? Yeah, I think that this falls under the rubric of engagement with power holders. And that can entail many different things. So for example, in the Ficha Limpa Clean Record Campaign in Brazil to pass legislation to bar people convicted of certain crimes, including of corruption from holding public office, this meant finding allies within the parliament who could feed information to the campaign in real time, sometimes hour by hour. And then that information was then taken in real time. And that through digital tools, digital tactics were employed to put pressure on members of the Brazilian Congress hour by hour in some cases. So that was one example of engagement where you're finding allies. Those allies, you could say, are defecting from that corrupt system within the Brazilian Congress. But they're not identifying themselves. But they are providing information that's of use. So that's one form of engagement. Another form of engagement is sometimes, especially when fighting corruption, there can be a government institution or an entity that knows that citizens are very unhappy with corruption. So for example, a Department of Education or a hospital or a clinic or a member of parliament and his spending of anti-poverty funds in his constituency or her constituency. So in that respect then, the engagement is to secure some sort of cooperation even if that powerholder is not doing it out of the best of intentions. They may be doing it for political reasons or because there's public pressure, people power that's putting them in a position where they have to do something to look good. But that engagement becomes a way to secure information, for example, the release of information that can be used to monitor. Or it can be a way to ensure cooperation, for example, to work with a very corrupt police force in order to get them, for example, to appear on a radio program, and which callers can call in and say, we want to report on corruption and we want to ask you, Mr. Officer, Mr. Big Policeman, why did this happen and why is this going on? That is, by the way, a low-risk tactic in that context is for people to call into a radio show. So the engagement has very strategic reasons. And then it's very important because through this engagement and the top photo is from Afghanistan, from something called Provincial Monitoring Boards, which were developed by Integrity Watch Afghanistan, which empowers local communities to engage in what we would call nonviolent action. But what they're doing is monitoring and using and wielding people power for reconstruction and development projects in their communities. But that was created by this CSO with strong roots with local communities. And through this, it enabled people who are marginalized to have face-to-face contact with those who never paid attention to them before, which would be the contractors who are implementing projects, the subcontractors aid people, local officials, et cetera. So again, this was another way to put pressure on power holders. So through engagement, one can actually put pressure on power holders. The last question before we turn it over to George. So Shaskar, the last chapter in your book is about what you would recommend to policymakers and to the international community. So can you highlight maybe one or two of those recommendations? Yeah, okay. Well, this one I won't highlight because it would take a long time, but maybe you can just take a look at it. Yeah, so chapter 12, everyone, policymakers in the room, please read chapter 12. It took a long time to write. And it really is, it focuses on 10 policy implications for international actors, and there's a huge section on recommendations for international actors on what they can do to support these types of grassroots, nonviolent social movements campaigns and local community initiatives. So a general takeaway, this is not theory, it's not hypothetical. Around the world, citizens that are organized in these nonviolent campaigns and movements and local community initiatives are achieving real outcomes. I won't read through this, but it just gives you, if you glance at this for a moment, it gives you a sense of some of the real outcomes that are happening. When we fight corruption, it's a process. We can have short-term outcomes and we can have long-term outcomes and ultimately a vision of a society that is corruption free or has very little corruption. However, even in the short term, what was astounding to me, and I never expected I would find so many outcomes that were really tangible, is that citizens are actually able to achieve change that they can see, that others can see, that they don't have to wait for 20 years to see the results of their efforts. Second, as you alluded, well, I'll skip that because you talked about that, that this really, in my research I found was not happening in what we would call the global north, though there is corruption in the global north. It was happening in the toughest places you can imagine, not in the easy places, in the places where you can get arrested, beaten, disappeared, lose your job, harassed for fighting corruption. And an important lesson for policy makers too is that corruption, when people get involved in fighting corruption, it's not abstract, it's not like we're fighting corruption because it's bad. Corruption is real. It's real because it is linked to the denial of services, to the denial of things that people are entitled to, to the denial of real rule of law, not rule of law and the abstract, but rule of law, which means that a policeman cannot stop you and say, if you don't give me this money, I'm going to throw you in jail. That is about corruption, but that is about really what is the denial of rule of law and human rights. So it was about real things that mattered to people. And when we fight corruption, we focus sometimes, when we're looking at it from the outside in, we think we know what types of corruption need to be addressed. And sometimes it's very obvious that there are certain forms of corruption that really need to be addressed. But on the other hand, oftentimes people from the outside or elites within a society don't really think about what corruption really matters to citizens and how can we play a constructive role so that they can fight it? Or what can we do with our top-down mechanisms, et cetera to actually address those forms of corruption that matter most to them, that harm them in their everyday lives? Great. Well, Shasca, thank you very much and thank you to all three of our panelists for giving sort of thumbnail overviews of their research and why it matters for practitioners. So George is going to offer just a few initial sort of comments, commentary on the discussions, and then we're going to open it up to Q&A with you all. And my bias will be towards Q&A with you all. I know we all have a sense of how marvelous the intersection and reinforcing nature of our three panelists today and their work is, that the notion of having the historical combined with the sociological combined with the policy relevant, and I'd say some economics and finance in your book is really shows the multidisciplinary character of this research and its relevance at its best. Just a couple of takeaways that I would pose if I were sitting in the audience and having the microphone, which I now do. We've come far enough in the research that I'd wonder if we should also ask the question about the mythologies, the learnings, the constructive proposals, the negotiated solutions, the notion of the smaller actions that are seen not by the nonviolent resistance group, but by the authorities. That is, how can we pull some of this inside out? Because it would seem to me that whether we look at Egypt or we look at Ukraine or we look at now Venezuela, a number of the key variables for each of the authors are up for grabs, not only in terms of the nonviolent movements and the civil resistance, but also astutely aware regimes that learn from some of the same cases that we have previewed here. The ability of corrupt and repressive regimes to already before international assistance injects itself to suggest intentions on the part of internationals that they have no real attachment to. They may be trying to reinforce certain aspects of international law, the treatment of prisoners, any number of other things, but they're given the label of the outside devil who then permits the leader to label the entire resistance movement as a tool of external actors who've always been our enemies. The ability to look at a regime's development of its own mythologies, not just the mythologies that would come after the fact and the resistance movement, but the dynamic of an Assad suggesting that we have to respond to this now with force because the only way we preserve the state the last time when my father faced it is by using that action and be able to create a rewrite of the story in ways that build support among secondary elites to repress the nonviolent resistance. I admit my own bias and development here as a peace scholar is coming to recognize from Shaska and others that corruption and systematic crime have now become the great enemies of peace. When you look at the list of transparency internationals top 10 and what they mean for where we've seen not only nonviolent resistance take form but the way in which the leaders to preserve that structure have used, if you will, if corruption and crime is the economic perversion of the system, the perversion of the state and the use of force by the state to preserve their place in the face of nonviolent resistance now compounds this in dramatic ways. And I think what's particularly intriguing about the blend of our good authors here is they pose to us the challenges on Mary's side. How do we really learn the lessons of the most recent campaigns or in her case the campaigns of the past? How do we accumulate lessons, make sure we're not governed by myths? How do we see the learning of leaders and groups? Sharon's research talks a bit about the importance of leadership and leaders as organizers and the adaptions they make in the balance beside insiders and outsiders and Shaska's approach of moving from significant symbolic and smaller actions to larger ones but seeing the vulnerabilities that are multiple in a corrupt system and begging for the creativity in the actions that people take. If we, instead of moving to Q and A, said okay in groups of six let's develop strategies for the Venezuelans. Now at this moment, what would we come up with from the insights of the authors and from the interesting experience and energy and background of those in the room because that's where I think we need to be unless we can help the Venezuelans and outside actors understand the dynamics of what we learn from this body of material and the good study of actions that it makes we're not making more progress. What we're doing is giving Shaska and her colleagues more cases. And we would like less cases, more immediate victories and more triumph of the nonviolent action. Palestine is now in a new critical place given the events of this week. Venezuela as we see it and others that people here know well. So I think we've got a body of material from which to spring from and a huge amount of experience in the room I'm going to turn into a mic passer rather than a mic speaker. So I have a hand in the audience already from Peter Ackerman. So I guess I better transfer the mic. And there's another mic in the back. The two of us will handle this. Go ahead. Thank you. This is great. Really great. But there's a missing element. And the element I live through and I want to just sort of explain a little bit of what that is. So I studied under Gene as you all know and it was a great experience but to take this in steps. Gene wrote a book called The Politics of Nonviolent Action. He had a, it was based on his doctoral dissertation over 1600 pages long from Oxford. Then he basically said, well why don't you write one just as long and I went to a process of negotiation and got it down to 1,100 pages. And if any graduate student asked me about that I'd say never do that again. But I wrote something very distinct from what he wrote. He basically in a very important way, seminal way, made the point that if you don't cooperate ultimately a government will fall. But there was also a compendium of work that was done, a compendium of essays in which Tom Schelling in that compendium, this was done in 1954. I still have a copy of it and by the way on the back of it has a little sticker says $1.62 cents. So to give you a sense of how old this is. And he said, look, it's not that easy. You may not cooperate but there's a cost to your not cooperating. You deny the opponent in a strike their ability to control you but you deny the economic benefits of having normal economic activity. You deny their legitimacy but you create pain in your own constituencies. At the end of the day he said, the one who is the most disciplined and organized will win. And so at the start of any conflict what he said was, and whoever is the most disciplined and we will determine whoever is the most disciplined and organized and they will determine who wins. So the purpose of the work I did under Gene was to say, well if he's, if this is right we should be able to demonstrate that specific performance of the decision makers in a nonviolent conflict, lead in nonviolent conflict is or is not more important than the conditions of the conflict that they find themselves in and that they emerge from. And the work I did was to basically conclude that specific performance of nonviolent actors is more important than the conditions that they live under. Then two things occurred. Number one is I did a book that had four other case studies and what that created was the first book I wrote was called Strategic Nonviolent Conflict. And I like to tell people that we sold out and I had to, we printed 5,000 copies with Prager, I had to sell out 2000, gave 2,000 of my friends to basically sell the printing out. But then a fellow named Steve York came to me and he said, I could turn this into a movie. And this is where the US Institute of Peace comes in is that, and I said, leave me alone. And after six months he basically prodded me and I said, look, if you can take the cases we had and show that even though they happen in different times in different places, through your art, that they're essentially the same story about specific performance of the civil resistors, nonviolent resistors, however we define it, we're critical because of the commonality of those incidents, then we've created something that's important. So we created, I wrote a second book with Jack Duvall and we created a movie called The Force More Powerful. Now what that movie did is it was seen by three million people, now it's been seen by tens of millions around the world. But what it did is it ignited a storm of people around the world who were in the middle of these conflicts saying to myself, my God, I could do that. And it made them become aware of the possibility that conditions are less critical that they're living in versus the possibility that they can have similar quality of performance that would allow them to prevail. Now what was the key element there too is that they had an adversary. You can't get rid of an adversary because it's the adversary basically who is the obstructor to more democratic values. And I think we have to be careful in our work here and we've talked about this a lot, is to ignore that there is an adversary. The reason we're having 10 years of blowback on democracy in this world is not because we failed to figure out how to create great democratic institutions, but those institutions and so many are being perverted and retaken by bad people in this world. We can all name who they are. Venezuela is in a new conflict. Venezuela began with a referendum, with a strike by opponents of Chavez. And when we talked to them, we said, look, they saw our second movie bringing down. The dictator said, look, we're just gonna have a general strike and he's not gonna be able to withstand the pressure and he'll go. And we had a general strike and the people who couldn't withstand the pressure were the people who did the general strike. It just cost them too much economically. So this whole second field that I hope you'll, I really didn't hear about, which is the distribution of costs in a conflict based on decision making is critical to determining these outcomes. So when we did the first movie, the reason I mentioned you us Institute of Peace is that I had to go to somebody to get the credibility to go to one of the major PBS stations. And so I went to her predecessor, Dick Solomon, and said, would you support us? And he basically said, I'm gonna give you $40,000 so you could have the credibility to go to a PBS station to get your movie on national TV. But if you can't get your movie on national TV, you're gonna have to give me the money back. So good luck at it. We got on national TV and that worked out well. But we have to be very careful here as we think through the various ways we look at civil resistance, nonviolent conflict, whatever we want to talk about it, to recognize we're dealing in a conflict where there's a distribution of costs. Everything a nonviolent resistance does costs them something, everything they do to the opponent costs them something, it's the distribution of costs. And so when we talk about tactics per se, the sequencing of tactics, there isn't a perfect sequence, there isn't the, what did I call it? The- Defining method? The defining method shifts all the time because every single act has its follow on and has its psychological impact. And unless you understand that, if you're in, if you're on, if you're leading a civil resistance, you're gonna lose. And so one of the things that we spend a lot of time on is the issue of planning, the capacity of the plan. And if you wanna talk about why civil resistance fails, more than anything else, it's not the conditions imposed by the adversary, it's the incapacity to plan. So just to make one last comment, so when we went, when Maria went to Erica first, the first question we wanted to ask was, what was more important? Skills versus conditions. And you brilliantly in your book, one of the most important parts of it was skills were more important because conditions, there was no condition you could define that basically correlated perfectly with failure. We did a similar study at ICNC with Freedom House and came to exactly the same conclusions. So I think as we think through this field, and I don't wanna be one of these people to say, oh, you're stuck in the past and this isn't relevant, I just don't think we can drop the notion that it's the distribution of costs in these conflicts for whatever the conflict is, that is the most important consideration and how to make sure that the cost to your opponent is greater than the cost to yourself. Peter, thank you. When you take the mic, please identify yourself and pose the question. I have a woman back here. There you go. And then we'll get to you. Hello, oh, sorry. Jill Moss, USAID, fabulous presentation. I'm wondering if any of you have seen Lance Bennett's work on the logic of connected action and how in our digitized global environment today we're seeing more connected action as a consequence of people using their networks, their social networks, their shared communities. So connected action versus collective action which may be more organizationally based rather than organically, holistically grown through a community of individuals who simply have grievances. Have any of you seen that work are looking deeply into the use of digital technologies and how connected action is building movement? I mean, Schatzka's got at least a couple cases. I have one case on which I focus completely on a digital campaign, part of the Fischal Limpa movement in Brazil. But I'm not familiar with this work so I can't comment on it, but I think that collective and connected, to me, would be two sides of the same coin if I understood what the definition is. George, excuse me, could I just say? There's a lot of talk about how important the technologies of communications are, the social media and so on and so forth. But in fact, historically, nonviolent movements always appropriate the most advanced technologies that are available because persuading people to be recruited to, as Peter talks about, the cost of risks, lose their jobs, et cetera, et cetera. But the human word is extremely important in the articulation of the grievance, the agreement on messaging and so on and so forth. So I'm taking the opportunity of your question to make a general point. Thank you. Thank you. I'm John Coonrod with The Hunger Project and by way of full disclosure, a semi-life, long-marry king fan. But I, given... It's so unique, I've got a lot to say in here. Yes, but for, given the wealth of research present here, which I really inspire to have heard from everyone, I have a specific case that I've never been able to fit into any understanding to date and that's the case of Bangladesh currently. Bangladesh is a multi-party autocracy where the space for opposition is dominated by a party that's exactly identical to the party in power, no matter which way it goes. And my colleagues have been very active in trying to build a nonpartisan movement for good governance there, but it's constantly frustrating. And I'm just wondering if in this sort of wealth of history of nonviolent struggles, if there are any other good examples of success in the case of a multi-party autocracy. Let's take a couple of questions at once. You can ponder on that one. We have a number of ones good in the back and then... Hello, everybody. Lawrence Jelou from Accountability Lab. I think the panel really enjoyed the wealth of knowledge, but I'm thinking more of nonviolent from a more modern standpoint from troubled regions like West Africa where leaders are sometimes being perceived as being backed by the West, where people try to take on a low-skilled citizen-driven approach, yet the government is not listening. Monitoring, yet the results are out, people are not listening. You take every actions possible, yet the government is still not listening. And the West also, through her embassies, will bring a report and make it more diplomatic, saying, listening to the people, and they're not listening. What kind of examples can we lean on that is more modern? Because I really appreciate the fact that during the period of Gandhi, some of those actions may not be relevant to our time, based on some of our situations for where we come from. Are we really looking at nonviolent civil resistance or we are looking at nonviolent methods and practices? Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Prasad. I am from India. I'm a visitor here. I am from the Gandhian movement. In fact, we have had a wonderful presentations here. And when we look at Gandhi or King, the nonviolent resistance that we have seen, to just call it a strategic, I think it is not really giving the real attribute because the constructive work that Gandhi had involved included in the whole process and he also included a spiritual process. These two happen to be extremely important. So nonviolence cannot be just a strategic matter, but it is beyond that. And whatever had been used in Gandhi's times, if we see the essential elements, I think that would be applicable anywhere else. And here it is not the opponent, not seen as an enemy. In fact, Gandhi withdrew his agitation in South Africa. When the government was in trouble, when the rail workers were on strike, he withdrew his agitation. In fact, it is not your weakness I would like to fight because when I am fighting for justice, when I am fighting for the truth, it is a truth force I use. It is a soul force that I use. It is a moral force I use. I think those elements are relevant even today. Therefore, the discussion around the conflict resolution, peace building should look into these aspects. Thank you. panel. So could I respond? With regard to Africa, one very important thing to remember is that it was African nonviolent struggles around him that Gandhi was studying during his 20 years of work in South Africa, during which he spent 249 days in jail. And he was trying to persuade the Indians to become more unified in order to be able to assert their rights against the legislation. He turned to newspaper accounts of African nonviolent struggles and South African nonviolent struggles in addition to other places such as Russia and China and Bengal. Africa has had vast amounts of nonviolent struggle over the decades. The problem is, often Africans don't know how to talk about it. And there's been very, very poor documentation by Africans. Also, we have now lost the permanently residing foreign correspondence who would be sent out to Africa for 40 years and write about what was happening for the newspapers of the world. They've all been withdrawn. So I've spent a lot of time working in West Africa and the rest of Africa. There's a vast amount of interest in this subject, but there needs to be more produced from African sources from within African history itself to be studied. It is thoroughly modern, thoroughly 100% totally modern and tested, but it's poorly communicated, poorly researched, badly reported, communications links are weak. I commend to you to start with the documentation of what successes have been achieved by Africans. Prasad, unquestionably, Gandhi was operating from a spiritual platform, and this gave him a great deal of strength. It also made the Indian people trust him, which was terribly important. He wrote about the spirituality much more than he did about other factors such as compulsion and pressure. But if you read Gandhi deeply, you see that he is thinking about the application of political pressure, and that is actually what determines much of his program after Vaikom. In Vaikom, he had returned to India in 1915, after 20 years in South Africa. He thought he had a technique that was going to bring about the transformation of India that he had developed, Satyagraha in South Africa. Of course, he didn't know that South Africa would become much worse after he departed, but he hadn't yet worked it out. It was unrefined. It hadn't been subjected to modern methods. One of his mistakes is that he paid no attention to the organizing being done by untouchables themselves, which is actually probably what brought about the change in Africa ultimately, based on the model from Vaikom. So yes, this was an important factor, but you don't ever want to have any form of spirituality be a bar to participation. People should not be asked to have a faith, or to believe in a certain set of principles. Gandhi knew this well because the members of the Congress party didn't believe in it on that basis. They agreed to sign on only because they thought it might be effective and would work. And all the Gandhi asked of the Congress party and Nehru was to subscribe to the rules of action. He did not ask them to share his beliefs. He knew they couldn't. Yeah, I would just one quote from a very well-known pacifist who was mentioned, George Lakey, I can't remember who mentioned. So I remember citing him in my dissertation saying something like the vast majority of people who participate in nonviolent struggles are not pacifists. And the vast majority of pacifists will never participate in nonviolent struggle. That's good, Maria. I'm glad you shared that. I probably didn't get the quote exact, but that's the point. And I think it's important because a number of us have worked with people out in the field who are living under oppression and repression. And there are people who are motivated by spiritual values, by ethical nonviolence to undertake action. But I think the vast majority of people living under oppression contemplate using violence. And they will use violence if they think it's effective. So I think the stronger argument will always be, here's how nonviolent resistance can be effective in achieving rights, dignity, democracy, and the like. But they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. And different people are motivated by different things. But I think what will help transform war from violent to nonviolent will be when people fundamentally believe that even in the most difficult environments, nonviolent resistance is more effective. What about Bangladesh? Bangladesh, yes. I'd like to respond to Dr. Ackerman's comments about the relative importance of strategy and skills versus conditions. Very important conversation. But I'd like to complicate it a little bit because I think that it's not as simple as either or. I agree completely that under any circumstances, people can experiment and engage in nonviolent resistance. But I think it benefits civil resistors to think about their structural conditions. And I think the more information they have about the relative weaknesses of various institutions, where there are potential pressure points, the better they can develop an effective strategy. So for instance, in your book and in my book, which came out simultaneously, I didn't know you were writing so much about security defections, but we both found that if the military sides with a civil resistance struggle, the chances of the movement winning go way up. I forget, is it like 46 times? Dramatically. So this is a very important point that I emphasize, you emphasize. And in any circumstance, people can work to undermine and erode the loyalty of the military. You can, but you're better off if you can think structurally, like how is this military designed? We know from a lot of political science research that rulers often try to co-proof by setting up their militaries in such a way that their key actors are going to be loyal, whether it's because of ethnic loyalties or because of religious loyalties. We know under other circumstances, conscripts might identify with the civil resistors because of some shared collective identity. So the more that civil resistors can think about the strategic conditions, I think the better their strategy is gonna be. Or talking about the relative costs of action, you can figure out, ah, this military is unlikely to be sympathetic or they're very likely, so where should we put our efforts? So I would prefer to think about it as both factors matter and the more we understand our structural conditions, the better our strategy is. Just a Bangladesh, maybe 30 seconds, so I'm not an expert in Bangladesh. In terms of multi-party, though, I would just say a lot of these struggles have been against regime where there have been sort of false parties. So it's not exactly the same thing as a multi-party country, but I know some like a strategic insight that may be worthwhile in when thinking about Bangladesh is that often nonviolent struggles spend at least 50% of their efforts in their nonviolent direct action unifying the political opposition. So unless you are able to unify the political opposition, it's very hard to change either the regime or the corrupt officials, anything like that. So a lot of the direct action has to be focused not just on the government in Bangladesh, but how to bring these disparate parties together. And I also know just very briefly that it seems in Bangladesh the labor unions and their ability to mobilize people across socio-economic ethno-sectarian divisions is very powerful. So it strikes me that's a key mobilizing actor there. But anyway. All right. Go ahead. Thanks. I'll respond one. I think the discussion about skills versus conditions is very interesting because it's approached, political scientists use the terms in one way and I'm learning that sociologists are using the term in a different way. So what you are calling conditions in reality is just the struggle context that- They're targets. They're targets. Okay. They're structures. The military is an institution. But they're structures, right. But it's part of the strategic assessment that a campaign or movement does when it's looking at its strengths and weaknesses and its adversaries' strengths and weaknesses. So that's what you're laying out what are the situations and the conditions meaning the entities, the structures, the different parts that define what is the struggle situation. Political scientists have a different meaning and when they talk about conditions they mean things in the society that you can hardly ever change. You're stuck with them. And so if you have those conditions then you can't do anything. So I think there's an interesting difference here between the two academic realms. If I could just- See why we, the political scientists need to be talking with the sociologists. Very interesting about all that. But I think getting political scientists to believe there are conditions that can't be changed should be dragooned. It's reification. These institutions don't exist without people. I mean there's a whole industry within political science that focuses on this. But if I could reply to the gentleman in the back from the Accountability Lab, which I love. But I mean I understand what I noted was frustration in what you were saying. Because you're saying people voice their grievances. People voice their demands and the governments are not listening. And then the other point was something that was addressed by Mary is that when we want examples, contemporary examples. Well my book actually has all contemporary examples so I'm not saying this to plug the book but really truly this is essential to see what people are doing literally right now around the world to impact corruption using nonviolent struggle. But even in West Africa, we can looking back within the past few years there was the amazing movement of women in Liberia to actually stop the Civil War. And to bring the warring parties together to make peace. So can you imagine the paradox in which nonviolent conflict was used to end a violent conflict? That is an astounding case and has not received enough recognition in the world for its significance and the bravery of these women. And then even in Sierra Leone, it was a nonviolent grassroots movement involving some very brave, uneducated ladies in the marketplace, in many marketplaces who basically again pushed during the Civil War that the, I don't remember his name so forgive me I'm really bad with names. But the head of state at the time and the insurgent groups to make peace again. And then after that for there to be democratic elections. So I think there's some very compelling examples but perhaps what is really critical about this is that we may not recognize nonviolent struggle and therefore nonviolent struggle victories because oftentimes we don't know what we're looking for. So for example when the women of Liberia this movement came together, nobody understood that as a nonviolent struggle and yet it was profoundly important. And when citizens get together to fight corruption and they can have either a small victory or even a large victory, they don't call themselves a nonviolent movement or they may not say, they may not even call themselves an anti-corruption movement or an anti-corruption campaign. What they're doing is basically wielding people power to address an injustice and to get some change but they are not using the labels that we are using here in a very scholarly and policy-oriented setting. But there is, they're really amazing examples and I think the third lesson that I would draw at least from my research is that, yes, citizens have to raise their voice but how we raise our voice is critical. And that's where this whole area that we're talking about in terms of organized nonviolent movements in which there is a strategic analysis and a strategy to achieve change in which the tactics are following the strategy in which there's a problem that's identified in which out of that problem then there are objectives and out of those objectives there can be demands. All of those like complicated elements that go into a campaign and movement are what's critical for citizens to actually raise their voice and then wield the pressure to make power holders listen to them to fulfill their demands, whether it's at the very local level or at the national level. But I'm really happy you raised the point because it is a really important point. And for- Thank you. Could I just go around? Let's go one more, let's go another round here. We've got a couple of hands up there. You work the back, I'll work the front here. Go ahead. Hi, my name's Nicole Paterno. I'm from King's College, London. First of all, thanks to everyone on the panel really fascinating research. I'm wondering if Sharon and Maria could speak about the conscientious objectors in the Israeli defense forces. Does this movement pose legitimate threat to the state and how could sympathetic members of Israeli society support them? Thank you. Hi, Mike Starcinich, I'm with IRG. And I would like to ask the panel to return to a set of provocative questions you asked us, which is what about international programs supporting how does it work? And I would say from 20 years of field experience we're using what you're writing, we're reading and it's working. So thank you. I think part of that is really on the move. Your part is on the move. But how do we get more experience from the field back to research? And the question I would ask is how do we make a community of reflective practitioners? I'm a part of a community on another topic. We're coming up with our second book. It's working quite well. But the fact is practitioners aren't very reflective. We're very action-oriented. Yeah, we don't write and we don't research. So we're really trying to build that. I know I'd love your ideas for how to go about it. Third there and fourth here. I would like to talk about the example of Egypt. My name is Fumam Rajab. I'm with the Iraq Foundation. And my question would be, I think the civil resistance in Egypt was dumped. So is there a way to reignite a civil resistance after it exists? I think it has most of the element you were talking about during this presentation. So I wonder, do these elements like stayed in those people and could be reignited through the same actors or through different actors? Thank you. That one's yours, Maria. Yes, Malcolm O'Dell with Encompass. We use appreciative inquiry and evaluation and change. And I'm just very interested. I'm really excited, in fact, because as the program progressed, I kept saying to myself, where's Gene Sharp? Where's Gene Sharp? And lo and behold, he appeared. And that was pretty exciting. I was glad to hear about West Africa. And I was gonna say, the next thing I was gonna say is where's the role of women? And waiting for that. And you brought that one up. I'm so glad you brought Liberia up. I think there's other places where amazing things have happened from grassroot movements that women have been a big part of. Nepal is one where not just women, but people with a lot of women active and influence, I think, of appreciative inquiry in the national culture and Buddhism, brought down the end of a dictatorship, brought the end of a Maoist rebellion, brought peace, and they've been negotiating a constitution ever since, but nobody's shooting anybody. The other thing was in one previous session here, Boko Haram was women in the communities of Northern Nigeria, apparently, are negotiating and bringing about some change there. So glad you brought up Liberia. And the question I'm gonna ask now is simply, does anybody know what the role of the women is in making Liberia go from the worst case of Ebola catastrophe to the winning case while other countries haven't caught up? Liberia has rolled ahead from being the worst. They've really wiped it out pretty much. And I swear the women are behind this. So I'd like to direct that last question to Kathleen Kunas, our gender and peace building expert. No, it's, so let me just a quick one on that last one. I've told graduate students that there are two award-winning books waiting to be written. One is on negotiation and nonviolent action, the other is on the role of women in nonviolent struggle. So you find disparate case studies, and the ones you cited are all very good ones, but the reality is that women in many cases can create spaces where spaces don't exist in ways that men often cannot. They're able to, sometimes it's not, I don't like to paint a picture of women as able to do everything and bring peace and harmony, but they're able to bridge, build bridges between divided communities in a pretty effective way. When they act as mothers, they tend to be fierce and they want to bring award at the end because they're suffering and their families are suffering. And so women can do certain things. And often, whether it's the mothers of the, the mothers of the disappeared, just classic cases where women created space where it didn't exist using symbolic tactics and then certain other parts in the community followed suit. So, but I think, systematic study, I'm looking at Kathleen, because this would be a wonderful topic to... There is a question coming out of it. Is there a wonderful handling of... A young woman named Selena Gayo Cruz at the Holy Cross College is working on a book looking at the role of women in nonviolent movements in four different countries. Oh, well, that's great. Okay, so how do we want to do this? Is really Refuse Nicks? That's not controversial. Mary's written a definitive book on nonviolent resistance. That's true. Mary has written the definitive book on the first in Tifada. When I was writing my dissertation on three self-determination movements, as soon as I got Mary's book, I'm like, oh my God, why am I trying to write this case study, The Quiet Revolution, which is really the best book. But I remember Mary in that book, and it relates to this question. Is really Refuse Nicks played an important role in the first Palestinian in Tifada. And of course, their conscientious objection in a country that gives a lot of moral valor and importance to soldiers. They're part of every family. There is required conscription. So when people refuse to serve or when they speak out, it's actually incredibly powerful. And so Break the Silence is one group of movement that's, I don't know if their numbers are increasing, but I think when soldiers speak out in this context and they report back on certain things that they just find unacceptable in the occupied territories, it has profound impact. Is it the only answer? No, there has to be a movement. I mean, what was profound about the first Palestinian in Tifada was this was a time when every segment of Palestinian civil society with Israelis were engaged in nonviolent resistance. It's hard. The context has changed. Objectors are one element of the resistance. But at the end of the day, there needs to be a thinking about how do we rethink a national nonviolent resistance movement? And now may be the time given the political situation. So they're important, but not the whole answer. Jonathan, would you mind standing up? This is Jonathan Kutab, who is one of the main agents of the transmission of knowledge into the Palestinian occupied territories during the 1980s to teach people how to fight with these methods. And what happened was that Israeli refuseniks and other Israelis made common cause with Palestinians so that the start of the 1987 in Tifada came about as a result of Israeli and Palestinians working together with demonstrations, media and a whole set of things. The Israeli defense forces are today far too shrewd to allow to happen what happened then. Anyone in the IDF who shows any willingness or any inclination to contest being posted because of human rights abuses or because they don't wish to make a situation worse for Palestinians is very quietly reassigned and they'll be peeling potatoes. They never have a chance to emerge as they did in those days. However, what I hear inside this question is Palestinians should be seeking to split the ranks in Israel. Violence unifies always any violence consolidates. The only method that can split the ranks is nonviolent action. And the Palestinians, many of them, Jonathan still do not understand that that needs to be their goal to get Israelis to begin to defect from the government that has kept a military occupation for so many years, that those of us who are U.S. citizens are paying for. I think that demands your attention for a moment, yeah. I think what is not appreciated about Israeli soldiers refusing to serve in the occupied territories is the tremendous impact it has in the Palestinian community. Right now, beneath all the struggle that exists is a very deep-rooted resentment and hatred that is taking root, I think, in both communities. And something like Israeli soldiers refusing to serve in the occupied territories challenges that hatred and challenges that bitterness and opens the possibilities for coexistence which don't exist today at all, but opens that possibility for the future. I think that if it weren't for such people I would feel great despair as of the future. 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now, if it weren't for these soldiers, I would say there'd be no hope. So this is a very significant thing and it's not the number of people. It's not how many there are. That's not how effective they are within the Israeli community because in the Palestinian community they really have a very deep, radical, positive, constructive impact that is almost never mentioned. Great, thank you. I'm gonna ask the panel to make some comments on the prior questions because we're getting close to our time. Egypt. Egypt. Yes, nonviolent resistance is always possible. You can have a reemergence of nonviolent activism. Will it take the same forms? There's probably protest fatigue right now in Egypt so people are tired of the mass demonstrations probably and I think activists are a bit in a reflective period. I mean, you're Egyptian, you can tell me how wrong I am. But I think where there's hope is that it's a civil society and a youth population that's awake and they're not gonna, if there's a reemergence of dictatorship authoritarianism, I think they can only accept it for so long before they will agitate and want to organize again. What I've heard from other Egyptians though is that the more hopeful examples of nonviolent organizing is happening at a very local community level and it may involve more what we were talking about with the constructive program. So volunteer activities that bring Egyptians together across the very profound political divide in the country which is keeping people separate and keeping youth. Whether you're Muslim Brotherhood or you're anti-Muslim Brotherhood, huge chasm. And so what are the activities in the campaigns that can bring young people, especially together at the local community level that you can build local leadership again so our new generation of nonviolent leaders? It's not impossible. I think it's probably a reflection period right now and a rebuilding period. But what I know of Egyptians, it's just a matter of time before they reorganize and reemerge as a powerful civil society force. I would just add to that that one of the legacies of the anti-corruption movement that I documented in Egypt is that it joined into the stream of what became the January 25th revolution. After that time, a new youth movement was born out of it and taking the same name, Shefin Kom, which means we're watching you. And as of last year, when I spoke to, I had contact with some of the activists because I wanted photographs to use for to tell people about what they're doing. I was told that after the Muslim Brotherhood, the Shefin Kom Youth Watchdog, call it whatever you want to call it, movement, group, organization, the label isn't important, but was the biggest non-state grouping of people in the country. We are not hearing about it, but it exists. And what they're doing are things that, again, are not getting our international attention, but they are focusing on, they are connected to the grassroots and they're focusing and they're watching the government from the grassroots, from the needs and the perspectives of the grassroots and stitching together these connections, stitching together these relationships. So when a victory later hits a hitch, like has happened in Egypt now, the situation is not good now. I mean, nobody can pretend that it's good, but all of that energy, those relationships do not necessarily disappear. They do what Maria does. So I am very hopeful and corruption is and remains a key issue that unifies everybody in Egypt because everybody's affected by it, no matter who they are. And the one more thing I know that, to mention about who are the protagonists in these kinds of campaigns and movements, and I use the term protagonist, very deliberately that people who are fighting for their rights at the grassroots are protagonists. They are the actors, they are the sources of change. They have the agency to bring forth change. Women are often not only the protagonist, but the leaders, the people who have started these efforts at the grassroots and young people. And so young people also includes young women and not just young men, but I keep women as one category and young people as another category. And these two groups are really important at the grassroots for really fighting for rights, mobilizing citizens and wielding pressure, making their voices heard to power holders. Before we go to George, I just want to offer thank yous. So the two people who are responsible for your being here today are Aamon Nadine. Is she here? Aamon and Tina Hegedorn, who's hopefully here. So I want to thank both of them for all the work they did to make this possible. We know there's a lot of hands we didn't get to, so we're going to leave time for you to visit with the panelists. Thank you to the panelists, especially Maria and all of you for coming. Are there still some goodies outside awaiting us? There should be, yeah. There should be, so don't leave without a goodie. Thank you very much.