The new velvet revolutionaries: agitating for kinder, gentler regime change.

• Author: Lake, Eli J.
• Position: 10 Miles Square

If you want America to invade your country, call the Pentagon. If you want to start a small guerrilla war, turn to the CIA. But if you need some advice on how to bring down an anthoritarian foreign government without firing a shot, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) is the place to go.

Located on the 7th floor of a skyscraper in downtown Washington (I have been asked, for security reasons, not to disclose the precise coordinates), the center is a small, privately funded undertaking with a big aim: to promote a set of rebellion strategies, from mass strikes to clever graffiti, that successful dissidents have used to topple tyrannical regimes. Founded in January 2002, the group has already arranged strategic training and provided other non-financial assistance to Iraqi Kurds and expatriates (before the U.S. invasion) and to Venezuelans working against the Hugo Chavez government, and supplied training materials to Iranian oppositionists. The group is now gaining notice from both neoconservatives and liberals, and its ideas are beginning to receive attention within the Bush administration.

The center represents the latest version of a kind of venture that has long thrived in D.C. The boutique nonprofit policy organization. From the liberal-left consumer groups which Ralph Nader created in the 1970s, clustered today among the few unrenovated buildings still left around Dupont Circle, to the more upscale outfits hunched by conservatives like Grover Norquist in the 1980s and 1990s, Washington tends to attract policy entrepreneurs who dream not of making billions but of altering the course of history.

The ICNC fits the pattern, even as it confounds ideological labels. Its founder is Peter Ackerman, a lanky 56-year-old with gray temples and a passing resemblance to Alan Alda. A Ph.D. turned finance whiz, Ackerman spent the late 1970s and 1980s at Drexel Burnham Lambert's Los Angeles office working with his colleague Michael Milken on popularizing junk bonds. Not surprisingly, the center's offices look less like a scruffy, under-funded human rights organization than a successful hedge fund, with new computers sporting flat-screen monitors and a gourmet coffee machine in the kitchen. Indeed, the office doubles as Ackerman's investment firm. "I think one of the reasons I get a lot of my phone calls answered is because people think I'm a financier," muses Ackerman.

In the early 1990s, he decided to pursue his true passion, the...