Social change is seldom either as incremental or predictable as insiders suggest. Instead, movements win by changing the political weather, turning demands considered unrealistic into ones that can no longer be ignored.
A case study in the strange alchemy of disruption and sacrifice.
Cross-posted from Waging Nonviolence. On November 9, 1989—twenty-five years ago—huge crowds of East Germans descended on the Berlin Wall. The restless citizens were responding to an announcement by authorities suggesting that the government would loosen travel restrictions. In truth, those …
Gandhi’s demands were ridiculed and his settlement with the British disappointed many. But the Salt March was a key symbolic win that spurred India’s independence movement toward victory.
How do we know when movements have died—and when are they primed to revive?
The rapidly expanding victory around same-sex marriage demonstrates how a transformational vision can create social change.
It is an old question in social movements: Should we fight the system or “be the change we wish to see”? Should we push for transformation within existing institutions, or should we model in our own lives a different set of political relationships that might someday form the basis of a new society?
Few scholars have done as much as Frances Fox Piven to describe how widespread disruptive action can change history, and few have offered more provocative suggestions about the times when movements—instead of crawling forward with incremental demands—can break into full sprint.
Cross-posted from Waging Nonviolence. Although Saul Alinsky, the founding father of modern community organizing in the United States, passed away in 1972, he is still invoked by the right as a dangerous harbinger of looming insurrection. And although his landmark …
Egypt is often held up as a success story of civil resistance. However, as the country has slid back into a repressive and undemocratic state, this success has been called into question. Did nonviolence fail in Egypt?
Few are aware that Martin Luther King, Jr. once applied for a permit to carry a concealed handgun. In his 2011 book Gunfight, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler notes that, after King’s house was bombed in 1956, the clergyman applied in Alabama for …
Environmental advocates face a question that has widespread implications for how we think about legislation, lobbying, mass movements, and social change: what do you do when an issue emerges as one of the most urgent matters of our time and, at the same instant, becomes firmly regarded as a political loser?
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