Gene Sharp, Author of the Non-violent Revolution Rulebook

Source: Ruaridh Arrow, Director of “Gene Sharp – How to Start a Revolution,” to be released in the spring. BBC News, February 21.

Gene Sharp, the man now credited with the strategy behind the toppling of the Egyptian government, is the world’s foremost expert on non-violent revolution. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, his books slipped across borders and hidden from secret policemen all over the world.

These are the key steps:

• Develop a strategy for winning freedom and a vision of the society you want.
• Overcome fear by small acts of resistance.
• Use colours and symbols to demonstrate unity of resistance.
• Learn from historical examples of the successes of non-violent movements.
• Use non-violent “weapons”.
• Identify the dictatorship’s pillars of support and develop a strategy for undermining each.
• Use oppressive or brutal acts by the regime as a recruiting tool for your movement.
• Isolate or remove from the movement people who use, or advocate, violence.

As Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine fell to the colour revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe, each of the democratic movements paid tribute to Sharp’s contribution, yet he remained largely unknown to the public.

Despite these successes and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2009, he has faced almost constant financial hardship and wild accusations of being a CIA front organization. The Albert Einstein Institution based on the ground floor of his home is kept running by sheer force of personality and his fiercely loyal Executive Director, Jamila Raqib.

Gene Sharp is no Che Guevara but he may have had more influence than any other political theorist of his generation.

His central message is that the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern – and that if the people can develop techniques of withholding their consent, a regime will crumble.

After the Green uprising in Iran in 2009, many of the protesters were accused at their trials of using more than 100 of Sharp’s 198 methods.

His most translated and distributed work, From Dictatorship to Democracy, was written for the Burmese democratic movement in 1993. The book caught fire figuratively and literally.

From Burma word of mouth spread through Thailand to Indonesia where it was used against the military dictatorship there. Its success in helping to bring down Milosevic in Serbia in 2000 propelled it into use across Eastern Europe, South America and the Middle East.

When it reached Russia, the intelligence services raided the print shop and the shops selling it mysteriously burned to the ground.

The Iranians became so worried they broadcast an animated propaganda film on state TV of Gene Sharp plotting the overthrow of Iran from the White House.

President Hugo Chavez used his weekly television address to warn the country that Sharp was a threat to the national security of Venezuela.

After recent allegations of vote rigging in her home country of Gabon, supermodel and activist Gloria Mika travelled to Boston to meet Sharp.

The Serbs who had used his books as a theoretical base for their activities founded their own organization called the Centre for Applied Non-Violence (CANVAS), and alongside their own materials have carried out workshops using Sharp’s work in dozens of other countries.

When I met Srdja Popovic, the director of CANVAS in Belgrade in November, he confirmed that they had been working with Egyptians. “That’s the power of Sharp’s work and this non-violent struggle,” he says. “It doesn’t matter who you are – black, white, Muslim, Christian, gay, straight or oppressed minority – it’s useable. If they study it, anybody can do this.”

By the time I arrived in Tahrir square on February 2, many of those trained in Sharp’s work were in detention. Others were under close observation by the intelligence services and journalists who visited them were detained for hours by the secret police. My own camera equipment was seized as soon as I landed.

When I finally reached one of the organizers he refused to talk about Sharp on camera. He feared that wider knowledge of a U.S. influence would destabilize the movement but confirmed that the work had been widely distributed in Arabic.

“One of the main points that we used was Sharp’s idea of identifying a regime’s pillars of support,” he said. “If we could build a relationship with the army, Mubarak’s biggest pillar of support, to get them on our side, then we knew he would quickly be finished.”

That night as I settled down to sleep in a corner of Tahrir square, some of the protesters came to show me text messages they said were from the army telling them that they wouldn’t shoot. “We know them and we know they are on our side now,” they said.

One of the protesters, Mahmoud, had been given photocopies of a handout containing the list of 198 methods but he was unaware of their origins. He proudly described how many of them had been used in Egypt but he had never heard of Gene Sharp.

When I pointed out that these non-violent weapons were the writings of an American academic he protested strongly. “This is an Egyptian revolution,” he said. “We are not being told what to do by the Americans.”

And, of course, that is exactly what Sharp would want.