Reflections on Waging
Nonviolent Struggle
Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Dartmouth
College
Former
Secretary General, International
Peace Research Association
Reviewing Gene Sharp's Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential for Peacework Magazine, May 2005
Gene Sharp's Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st
Century Potential makes it clear that strategic nonviolence is a critical
tool for waging today's struggles. After explaining nonviolence as empowerment
through the capacity to struggle, he leads the reader through twenty-three
highly diverse historical cases of attempted large scale nonviolent action.
Sharp is very clear that one does not have to be a pacifist to choose
nonviolent means of struggle. Nonviolence includes an effective set of
strategies for bringing power imbalances to an end. The spiritual leadership of
Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were key factors in the development
of the global nonviolence movement, but as Sharp points out, their spiritual
grounding was amplified by a keen capacity for strategic thinking.
The development of strategic nonviolence will have a key role to play in the
evolution of a 21st century culture of peace. Nonviolent skills and strategies
are needed around the world. This is a "how-to" book. Theory and
practice are well-matched. Therefore, I strongly recommend Sharp's Waging
Nonviolent Struggle as the practitioner's handbook for the 21st century
nonviolence movement.