Gene Sharp and Social Movements: Contributions and Legacies.

• Author: Novak, Mikayla

Gene Sharp significantly contributed to both the intellectual and practical advancement of nonviolent approaches to conflictual activity against oppressive sources of power. His seminal statement, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, published fifty years ago, articulated the thesis that contentious nonviolent actions--such as public protests, demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, and other kinds of civil resistance--reveal a lack of uniform and consensual public obedience toward political authority. In doing so Sharp drew upon libertarian intellectual heritage, most notably in the form of Etienne de la Boetie's sixteenth-century writings questioning the merits of voluntary political servitude. Outlining the strategic, as opposed to strictly moral, nature of nonviolent action, and cataloguing an impressive array of resistance activities against the state throughout history, Sharp's book has inspired a globalized array of social movements from the 1980s anticommunist uprisings through to the 2010s' Arab Spring, and beyond. The practical influence of his legacy has been the subject of a wide-ranging scholarly literature in fields such as social movements studies, peace research, and collective action theory (e.g., McCarthy and Kruegler 1993; Ammons and Coyne 2018, 2020; Chenoweth 2021).

I draw directly from Sharp's fifty-year-old contribution to identify nonviolence as a "generic term covering dozens of specific methods of protest, noncooperation and intervention, in all of which the actionists conduct the conflict by doing--or refusing to do--certain things without using physical violence" (Sharp 1973, 64). The Politics of Nonviolent Action not only articulates the conceptual case for nonviolence as a mode of action to effect societal change. The book also outlines how nonviolence can be practically deployed as a tactic to counter adversaries and win key political concessions. Cataloguing 198 tactical methods of protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention, Sharp illustrates how collectives wishing to instigate change can adopt nonviolent tactics in a disciplined manner, jiu-jitsu style, to unbalance larger, more powerful political opponents and undermine repressive tendencies on the part of the latter. As stated, Sharp's ideas have been widely adopted by social movements, classified as collective entities aiming to effect societal change through counter-hegemonic, or extra-institutional means, that may assume disruptive dimensions to existing modes of order (della Porta and Diani 2015; Novak 2021).

To fulfill an objective of understanding the key contributions and legacies of Gene Sharp's book, I pursue two fields of inquiry. The first is to situate The Politics of Nonviolent Action within the context of social movement theorization, considering not only the time that Sharp wrote his book but also subsequent theoretical developments. The analysis is anticipated to help us better understand how factors affecting the balance between individual agency and cultural and institutional structures shape the selection of tactical dispositions by social movement participants. The second objective is to appraise the effectiveness of nonviolent tactics versus violent ones from an empirical perspective. As part of this appraisal I have drawn on a range of recent studies examining national and international bouts of activism. The pursuit of this objective is aimed at making some judgments about the veracity of Sharp's statements about what kinds of movement tactics tend to work in the real world.

The structure of the paper is as follows: The next section articulates the key theoretical values of Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action for social movement theory. This is followed by a discussion of key empirical studies addressing the question of nonviolent versus violent tactical effectiveness. A summary of arguments concludes the paper.

Sharp's Contributions to Movement Theory

Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action is celebrated as a foundational statement concerning nonviolent approaches toward civil resistance against authority figures, especially the wielders of tyrannical political power. Contemporary scholars identify Sharp as having provided a theoretical account of a specific aspect of social movement activity--being, of course, nonviolent techniques adopted by activists and their supporters (Nepstad 2013, 2015). Sharp's nonviolence theorization is identified as heavily informed by the pragmatic, even strategic, dimensions of nonviolent action, which has been seen by some as a forerunner to a "grounded theory" that is informed by data (Martin 2013). It is not surprising that scholarly attention has been drawn to the notion of a nonviolence praxis, given Sharp's early encounters with the Gandhian case of British colonial resistance, his conscientious objection to the Korean War and, later in life, his support for a range of protests and uprisings around the world.

Although some exceptions do apply (e.g., Martin 1989; Ammons and Coyne 2020), the broader connections between Sharp's contribution and developments in social movement theory have generally attracted insufficient attention. To the extent that Sharp is seen to have produced theoretical value, some scholars have claimed it has been overly restricted to a positivist, or rational-choice, account of movement goals, ways, and means (Chabot 2015). A more well-rounded account of Sharp's legacy would go further to note that The Politics of Nonviolent Action was published during a time of considerable innovation in social movement theory. The decades-long accounts of "collective behavior" theory, suggesting that movement activity and participation reflects irrational impulses by crowds of people swept up in gales of contention, gave way to new ideas from the 1970s onward. Rational-choice interpretations of activism, among other things, emphasized the criticality of resource accumulation toward movement success (McCarthy and Zald 1977) and, broadly, estimated the relative costs and benefits of contentious action. Not long thereafter, a new wave of institutionally aware approaches stressing political opportunities for movement dissent appeared (Tilly 1978; McAdam 1982), followed by theoretical ideas emphasizing how the likes of persuasive rhetoric (or "framing"), culture, and emotions shape movements (Snow et al. 1986; Buechler 1995; Jasper 2011).

In key respects Sharp explicated notions that either would be familiar to social movement theorists, or would serve as a precursor for a range of theoretical accounts of social movements found in the literature today. The Politics of Nonviolent Action exhaustively articulates the role of strategic behavior informing nonviolent activities. The individual participants of a social movement make their choices and, as Sharp described, do so through a strategic process involving deliberation, negotiation, and (arguably precarious) agreement among activists wishing to challenge existing societal institutions, operations, and practices. As Sharp (1973, 48) indicated, "Generalized obstinacy and collective stubbornness are not effective enough. General opposition must be translated into a strategy of action, and people need to know how to wage the struggle which will almost inevitably follow their initial act of defiance. This includes how to persist despite repression." The necessity for nonviolent strategy on the part of movement participants consists, in part, in intelligently countering the highly organized resistance to contention to be expected from political actors, and especially military and police forces.

The Sharpian emphasis on strategy, which encompasses tactical decisions applicable to specific circumstances within the broader conflict between activists and authorities, may fulfill several functions. It is speculated that Sharp's focus on strategy was part of an intellectual pivot to illustrate an alternative to the idealistic character of nonviolence motivation that arguably predominated previous literature (Sharp 1973, 494). Substantively, Sharp views strategy as a condition to facilitate the coordination of multiple activists, each with their own commitments, preferences, and values, in the direction of achieving a common social movement objective (492510). Of significance is that the strategy that Sharp refers to has come to be regarded as a constituent feature of individual agency; according to James Jasper (2004, 4)...