Alternatives to War from the Bottom Up

More than at any other time in history, a strong case can be made on pragmatic, utilitarian grounds that war is no longer necessary. Nonviolent statecraft need not be the dream of pacifists and dreamy idealists. It is within our reach.

Simply opposing war and documenting its tragic consequences is not enough. We need to be able to put forward credible alternatives, particularly in the case of efforts to rationalize war for just causes, such as ending dictatorships and occupations, engaging in self-defense, and protecting those subjected to genocide and massacres.

Some states have rationalized arming revolutionary movements that are fighting dictatorships. Some have even rationalized intervening militarily on these movements’ behalf in the name of advancing democracy. However, there are other, more effective means to bring down dictatorship.

It was not the leftist guerrillas of the New People’s Army who brought down the U.S.-backed Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. It was nuns praying the rosary in front of the regime’s tanks, and the millions of other nonviolent demonstrators who brought greater Manila to a standstill.

It was not the eleven weeks of bombing that brought down Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, the infamous “butcher of the Balkans.” It was a nonviolent resistance movement — led by young students whose generation had been sacrificed in a series of bloody military campaigns against neighboring Yugoslav republics — that was able to mobilize a large cross-section of the population to rise up against a stolen election.

It was not the armed wing of the African National Congress that brought majority rule to South Africa. It was workers, students, and township dwellers who — through the use of strikes, boycotts, the creation of alternative institutions, and other acts of defiance — made it impossible for the apartheid system to continue.

It was not NATO that brought down the communist regimes of Eastern Europe or freed the Baltic republics from Soviet control. It was Polish dockworkers, East German churchgoers, Estonian folksingers, Czech intellectuals, and millions of ordinary citizens who faced down the tanks with their bare hands and no longer recognized the legitimacy of Communist Party leaders.

Over 2 million Filipino citizens joined together to overthrow the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos through nonviolent resistance in 1986. Here, nuns form the first line of defense against Marcos’s troops.

Kim Komenich/UC Berkeley Bancroft Library

Similarly, such tyrants as Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, King Gyanendra in Nepal, General Suharto in Indonesia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, and dictators from Bolivia to Benin and from Madagascar to the Maldives were forced to step down when it became clear that they were powerless in the face of massive nonviolent resistance and noncooperation.

Nonviolent Action Has Proved Effective

History has shown that, in most cases, strategic nonviolent action can be more effective than armed struggle. A recent Freedom House study demonstrated that, of the nearly seventy countries that had made the transition from dictatorship to varying degrees of democracy in the previous thirty-five years, only a small minority did so through armed struggle from below or reform instigated from above. Hardly any new democracies resulted from foreign invasion. In nearly three-quarters of the transitions, change was rooted in democratic civil-society organizations that employed nonviolent methods.

Similarly, in the highly acclaimed book Why Civil Resistance Works, authors Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (decidedly mainstream, quantitatively oriented strategic analysts) note that of the nearly 350 major insurrections in support of self-determination and democratic rule over the past century, primarily violent resistance was successful only 26 percent of the time, whereas primarily nonviolent campaigns had a 53 percent rate of success. Similarly, they have noted that successful armed struggles take an average of eight years, while successful unarmed struggles take an average of only two years.

Nonviolent action has also been a powerful tool in reversing coups d’état. In Germany in 1923, in Bolivia in 1979, in Argentina in 1986, in Haiti in 1990, in Russia in 1991, and in Venezuela in 2002, coups have been reversed when the plotters...