Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century.

• Author: Carpenter, Ted Galen

A PERSISTENT PROBLEM FACING THE victims of an invading army or an indigenous dictatorship is how to defend or restore their freedom, and especially how to do so without precipitating a bloodbath. The standard initial response to invading forces is conventional military defense, but that approach is not particularly practical when the aggressor is much larger and more powerful. The most common forms of resistance to entrenched repressive regimes, whether homegrown or installed by a conqueror, are guerrilla warfare and terrorism. But the success rates of those strategies are spotty at best and likely to increase the level of human carnage.

In Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century, Peter Ackerman, a visiting scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and Christopher Kruegler, president of the Albert Einstein Institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, present compelling arguments that a well-conceived campaign of nonviolent resistance may be a more feasible option. Their book, which builds on the pioneering studies of scholars such as Gene Sharp and Thomas Schelling, provides crucial insights into the reasons why some attempts at nonviolent resistance succeed and why others fail. Although the authors do not attempt to offer a comprehensive strategic blueprint--the varied circumstances of confrontational situations would make such a rigid formulation impractical--they do develop several important principles of nonviolent strategy.

The topic is of more than academic interest in the post-Cold War era. Ackerman and Kruegler's observations are pertinent to any number of contemporary geopolitical situations. Consider the tense relations between Russia and the small countries on its perimeter. The Baltic states fear the upsurge of Russian chauvinism symbolized by Vladimir Zhirinovsky and worry that it might be the prelude to a new wave of Russian expansionism. But there's no way that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, given their limited populations and resources, could ever hope to repel an invading army from a neo-imperial Russia. Or consider Cuba. The Cuban economy is so weak that it must ration butter, but the army is hardly lacking guns. Dissidents hoping to accelerate the demise of the Castro regime have few options other than nonviolent resistance.

As befits the relevance of its topic, Ackerman and Kruegler's book is not a dry theoretical treatise disconnected from the real world. The authors examine six historical episodes of nonviolent resistance undertaken by...