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Making Europe Unconquerable: A Civilian-Based Deterrence and Defense System
Book by Sharp, Gene
- GenresSociology
252 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
52 people want to read
About the author
Gene Sharp
80 books262 followersGene Sharp was an American political scientist. He was the founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the study of nonviolent action, and professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He was known for his extensive writings on nonviolent struggle, which have influenced numerous anti-government resistance movements around the world.
Sharp received the 2008 Int’l Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award for his lifelong commitment to the defense of freedom, democracy, and the reduction of political violence through scholarly analysis of the power of nonviolent action. Unofficial sources have claimed that Sharp was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015, and had previously been nominated three times, in 2009, 2012 and 2013. Sharp was widely considered the favorite for the 2012 award. In 2011, he was awarded the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize. In 2012, he was a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award for "developing and articulating the core principles and strategies of nonviolent resistance and supporting their practical implementation in conflict areas around the world".
Sharp received the 2008 Int’l Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award for his lifelong commitment to the defense of freedom, democracy, and the reduction of political violence through scholarly analysis of the power of nonviolent action. Unofficial sources have claimed that Sharp was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015, and had previously been nominated three times, in 2009, 2012 and 2013. Sharp was widely considered the favorite for the 2012 award. In 2011, he was awarded the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize. In 2012, he was a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award for "developing and articulating the core principles and strategies of nonviolent resistance and supporting their practical implementation in conflict areas around the world".
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June 12, 2021
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Reviews and influence
Reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, International Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, and elsewhere.
In the New York Review of Books, George F. Kennan, widely viewed as a major architect of the US approach to the cold war, wrote that Sharp's "primary purpose in writing the book was... 'to make civilian-based deterrence and defense a thinkable policy which is recognized as meriting further research, policy studies, and an evaluation.' And for this, he makes a reasonably good case."
Kennan stated that "the view advanced in this book deserves consideration, if only because of the bankruptcy of all the visible alternatives to it."
---
Kennan viewed Sharp's approach as requiring
a change in political philosophy. For it taps, as Mr. Sharp says in his final passages, ‘a crucial insight into the nature of power’—namely, that ‘all political power is rooted in and continually dependent upon the co-operation and obedience of the subjects and institutions of the society…. It is indeed possible for whole societies to apply that insight’
---
Kennan wondered "whether, if this change in political philosophy were to take place, it might not have wider effects than just those that relate to the concepts of national security—whether many other things might not also change, and, in the main, usefully so," and advised that Sharp
must not expect... that the effort to win understanding for his views will be easy going... It will arouse in many circles the same skepticism, and perhaps the same derision, that this reviewer brought down upon himself when he had the temerity to advance somewhat similar ideas in a widely publicized radio lecture delivered over the facilities of the BBC many years ago.
---
In the New York Times, Karl E. Meyer described the book as "reflective," and stated that "there is considerable merit to [Sharp's] contention that 'all peoples can with effort make themselves politically indigestable to would-be tyrants.'"
Meyer also argued that Sharp's approach "has its flaws... If the stakes are deemed sufficiently vital, civilian resistance seems unlikely to dissuade a determined aggressor."
---
In Foreign Affairs, Andrew Pierre wrote that
The value of this thoughtful work is in the alternative it suggests: ‘civilian defense’ through advance training for such actions against an intruder as mass public demonstrations, boycotts and strikes, demoralization of enemy troops, and the like.
— pp. 872–73
He added that "The author's proposals go against the grain of mainstream thinking, and to this reviewer leave many questions unanswered, but they are carefully put forward in a nonpolemical manner and clearly merit sustained attention and thought" (p. 873).
---
Ted Taylor, himself a former designer of nuclear weapons, reviewed the book in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He quoted Einstein:
‘The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.’ Although Albert Einstein's admonition has been quoted innumerable times, it has not, with few exceptions, led to deep and persistent thought about alternatives... One of these exceptions is in the writings of Gene Sharp about what he calls ‘civilian-based defense’... Making Europe Unconquerable is especially timely. (p. 54)
He added that "The side effects of pursuing a civilian-based defense strategy are especially interesting, since they tend to be beneficial in peacetime. This is a book that should be read attentively by anyone seriously searching for new ways of thinking about how we can stop our "drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." (p. 56).
---
Making Europe Unconquerable contains 7 chapters entitled
1 Meeting Europe's defense needs
2 Civilian-based defense for Western Europe?
3 Transarmament
4 Preventing attack
5 In face of attack
6 Defeating attack
7 Assessing the potential
---
In its opening pages, Making Europe Unconquerable states that
This book is mostly about... ‘civilian-based defence’... In this policy, the whole population and the society's institutions become the fighting forces. Their weaponry consists of a vast variety of forms of psychological, economic, social, and political resistance and counter-attack... to deny the attackers their objectives and to make consolidation of political control impossible. These aims would be achieved by applying massive and selective noncooperation and defiance [and seeking] to create maximum international problems for the attackers and to subvert the reliability of their troops and functionaires.
— pp. 2–3
---
Making Europe Unconquerable is a book about how civilian-based defense can be incorporated into the foundations of European defense and collective security.
Written by Gene Sharp, the book was originally published in the United Kingdom and United States in 1985. Its subtitle was the potential of civilian-based deterrence and defense.
Although it advocated a significant departure from existing defense policies, it received a favorable review from George F. Kennan, widely perceived as one of the major architects of the US approach to the cold war.
Later in the same year, the book was republished with a foreword from Kennan.
---
Gene Sharp
Fields
Political science, civil resistance, nonviolent revolution
Institutions
University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth
Harvard University
Albert Einstein Institution
Influences
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Henry David Thoreau
A. J. Muste
Saul Alinsky
others
---
Works
The Politics of Nonviolent Action
The three volumes (or parts) of The Politics of Nonviolent Action contain a total of 14 chapters, as well as a preface by the author, and an introduction by Thomas C. Schelling.
Volume 1 addresses the theory of power that implicitly or explicitly underlies nonviolent action (1973) 114 pages
Volume 2 offers a detailed analysis of the methods of nonviolent action (1973) 348 pages
Volume 3 analyzes the dynamics of nonviolent action (1985) 466 pages
[In Armed Forces & Society, Kenneth Boulding described the book as monumental, writing that there are some works which bear the unmistakable stamp of the classic... and this work is a good candidate.]
Gandhi as a Political Strategist (1979)
[Introduction by Coretta Scott King]
Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-based Deterrence and Defense (1985)
From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (1994)
[Essay on the generic problem of how to destroy a dictatorship and to prevent the rise of a new one]
---
Biography
Sharp was born in North Baltimore, Ohio, the son of an itinerant Protestant minister. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences in 1949 from Ohio State University, where he also received his Master of Arts in Sociology in 1951.
In 1953–54, Sharp was jailed for nine months after protesting the conscription of soldiers for the Korean War. He discussed his decision to go to prison for his beliefs in letters to Albert Einstein, who wrote a foreword to his first book on Gandhi. He worked as factory laborer, guide to a blind social worker, and secretary to A. J. Muste, America's leading pacifist.
Between 1955 and 1958, he was Assistant Editor of Peace News (London), the weekly pacifist newspaper from where he helped organize the 1958 Aldermaston March.
The next two years he studied and researched in Oslo with Professor Arne Næss, who together with Johan Galtung drew extensively from Mohandas Gandhi's writings in developing the Satyagraha Norms.
In 1968, he received a Doctor of Philosophy in political theory from Oxford University.
Funding for Sharp's research at this time came from the DARPA project of the US Department of Defense.
Sharp was appointed a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 1972.
He held research appointments at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1965.
In 1983 he founded Harvard's Program on Nonviolent Sanctions in Conflict and Defense (PNS), which "continued in the spirit of its founder" and in 1995 was merged with another Harvard organization.
In 1983 Sharp also founded the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization devoted to studies and promotion of the use of nonviolent action in conflicts worldwide.
The Albert Einstein Institution has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the International Republican Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy, while some former directors have come from the RAND Corporation and the Ford Foundation.
In 2004, the Albert Einstein Institution lost much of its funding (with income dropping from more than $1m a year to as little as $160,000), and from then on was run out of Sharp's home in East Boston, near Logan Airport.
---
Sharp's contributions to the theory of nonviolent resistance
Sharp's key theme is that power is not monolithic; that is, it does not derive from some intrinsic quality of those who are in power. For Sharp, political power, the power of any state – regardless of its particular structural organization – ultimately derives from the subjects of the state. His fundamental belief is that any power structure relies upon the subjects' obedience to the orders of the ruler(s). If subjects do not obey, rulers have no power.
In Sharp's view, all effective power structures have systems by which they encourage or extract obedience from their subjects.
States have particularly complex systems for keeping subjects obedient.
These systems include specific institutions (police, courts, regulatory bodies, etc.), but may also involve cultural dimensions that inspire obedience by implying that power is monolithic (the god cult of the Egyptian pharaohs, the dignity of the office of the president, moral or ethical norms and taboos, etc.).
Through these systems, subjects are presented with a system of sanctions (imprisonment, fines, ostracism) and rewards (titles, wealth, fame) which influence the extent of their obedience.
Sharp identifies this hidden structure as providing a window of opportunity for a population to cause significant change in a state.
---
How to Start a Revolution, a feature documentary by the Scottish director Ruaridh Arrow about the global influence of Gene Sharp's work, was released in September 2011. The film won "Best Documentary" and the "Mass Impact Award" at the Boston Film Festival in September 2011.
---
Sharp's influence on struggles worldwide[
Sharp has been called both the "Machiavelli of nonviolence" and the "Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare."
It is claimed by some that Sharp's scholarship has influenced resistance organizations around the world. His works remain the ideological underpinning of the work for the Serbian-based nonviolent conflict training group the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies which helped to train the key activists in the protest movement that toppled President Mubarak of Egypt, and many other earlier youth movements in the Eastern European color revolutions.
Sharp's writings on "Civilian-based defense" were used by the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian governments during their separation from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Lithuanian Defence Minister Audrius Butkevicius declared at the time, "I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb".
The Iranian government charged protesters against alleged fraud in the 2009 elections with following Gene Sharp's tactics.
The Tehran Times reported:
"According to the indictment, a number of the accused confessed that the post-election unrest was preplanned and the plan was following the timetable of the velvet revolution to the extent that over 100 stages of the 198 steps of Gene Sharp were implemented in the foiled velvet revolution."
Former members of the IRA are reported to be studying his work.
Sharp and his work have been profiled in numerous media however some have claimed Sharp's influence has been exaggerated by Westerners looking for a Lawrence of Arabia figure.
---
Influence in Egypt
Coverage of Gene Sharp's influence in the Egyptian revolution produced a backlash from some Egyptian bloggers. One, journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, stated that
"Not only was Mubarak's foreign policy hated and despised by the Egyptian people, but parallels were always drawn between the situation of the Egyptian people and their Palestinian brothers and sisters. The latter have been the major source of inspiration, not Gene Sharp, whose name I first heard in my life only in February after we toppled Mubarak already and whom the clueless NYT moronically gives credit for our uprising."
Another Egyptian writer and activist, Karim Alrawi, argued that Gene Sharp's writings are more about regime change than revolution.
He defines the latter as having an ethical as well as a material dimension that Sharp deliberately avoids engaging with, and credits local circumstances and the spark provided by the Tunisian revolution for the Egyptian success.
However, evidence and testimony from four different activist groups working in Egypt at the time of the revolution contradict these claims.
Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist said that activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp's work into Arabic, and that his message of "attacking weaknesses of dictators" stuck with them.
Ahmed Maher a leader of the April 6 democracy group also stated in the How to Start a Revolution documentary, "Gene Sharp's books had a huge impact" among other influences.
The Associated Press reported as early as September 2010 more than four months before the revolution that Gene Sharp's work was being used by activists in Egypt close to political leader Mohamed ElBaradei.
Finally The New York Times reported that Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy had been posted by the Muslim Brotherhood on its website during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
---
Criticism
Gene Sharp has been accused of having strong links with a variety of US institutions including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and Republican-related institutions, i.e. International Republican Institute, RAND Corporation, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
---
He held research appointments at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1965.
As for the Center for International Affaira
Robert Richardson Bowie - Director - CFIA 957–1972
[Bowie was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; the Trilateral Commission; the American Law Institute; the American Academy of Diplomacy; and served as CIA chief national intelligence officer from 1977 to 1979.]
Samuel P. Huntington - Director - CFIA 1978–1989
[Mentor to generations of scholars in divergent fields, he was the author or coauthor of a total of seventeen books on American government, democratization, national security and strategic issues, political and economic development, cultural factors in world politics, and American national identity.]
[The Third Wave (1991) studied the cascade of dictator-toppling, democracy-creating episodes around the world from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, giving persuasive reasons for this trend in democratization well before the fall of the Berlin wall.]
[The book that brought him into the public eye, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), pointed to the significance of religious and other cultural values as ways of understanding cohesion and division in the world. It became a bestseller after 9/11.]
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. - Director - CFIA - 1989–1992
[He has also worked in three government agencies. From 1977 to 1979, Nye served as deputy to the under secretary of state for security assistance, science, and technology and chaired the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. He was chair of the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates intelligence estimates for the president.]
Reviews and influence
Reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, International Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, and elsewhere.
In the New York Review of Books, George F. Kennan, widely viewed as a major architect of the US approach to the cold war, wrote that Sharp's "primary purpose in writing the book was... 'to make civilian-based deterrence and defense a thinkable policy which is recognized as meriting further research, policy studies, and an evaluation.' And for this, he makes a reasonably good case."
Kennan stated that "the view advanced in this book deserves consideration, if only because of the bankruptcy of all the visible alternatives to it."
---
Kennan viewed Sharp's approach as requiring
a change in political philosophy. For it taps, as Mr. Sharp says in his final passages, ‘a crucial insight into the nature of power’—namely, that ‘all political power is rooted in and continually dependent upon the co-operation and obedience of the subjects and institutions of the society…. It is indeed possible for whole societies to apply that insight’
---
Kennan wondered "whether, if this change in political philosophy were to take place, it might not have wider effects than just those that relate to the concepts of national security—whether many other things might not also change, and, in the main, usefully so," and advised that Sharp
must not expect... that the effort to win understanding for his views will be easy going... It will arouse in many circles the same skepticism, and perhaps the same derision, that this reviewer brought down upon himself when he had the temerity to advance somewhat similar ideas in a widely publicized radio lecture delivered over the facilities of the BBC many years ago.
---
In the New York Times, Karl E. Meyer described the book as "reflective," and stated that "there is considerable merit to [Sharp's] contention that 'all peoples can with effort make themselves politically indigestable to would-be tyrants.'"
Meyer also argued that Sharp's approach "has its flaws... If the stakes are deemed sufficiently vital, civilian resistance seems unlikely to dissuade a determined aggressor."
---
In Foreign Affairs, Andrew Pierre wrote that
The value of this thoughtful work is in the alternative it suggests: ‘civilian defense’ through advance training for such actions against an intruder as mass public demonstrations, boycotts and strikes, demoralization of enemy troops, and the like.
— pp. 872–73
He added that "The author's proposals go against the grain of mainstream thinking, and to this reviewer leave many questions unanswered, but they are carefully put forward in a nonpolemical manner and clearly merit sustained attention and thought" (p. 873).
---
Ted Taylor, himself a former designer of nuclear weapons, reviewed the book in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He quoted Einstein:
‘The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.’ Although Albert Einstein's admonition has been quoted innumerable times, it has not, with few exceptions, led to deep and persistent thought about alternatives... One of these exceptions is in the writings of Gene Sharp about what he calls ‘civilian-based defense’... Making Europe Unconquerable is especially timely. (p. 54)
He added that "The side effects of pursuing a civilian-based defense strategy are especially interesting, since they tend to be beneficial in peacetime. This is a book that should be read attentively by anyone seriously searching for new ways of thinking about how we can stop our "drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." (p. 56).
---
Making Europe Unconquerable contains 7 chapters entitled
1 Meeting Europe's defense needs
2 Civilian-based defense for Western Europe?
3 Transarmament
4 Preventing attack
5 In face of attack
6 Defeating attack
7 Assessing the potential
---
In its opening pages, Making Europe Unconquerable states that
This book is mostly about... ‘civilian-based defence’... In this policy, the whole population and the society's institutions become the fighting forces. Their weaponry consists of a vast variety of forms of psychological, economic, social, and political resistance and counter-attack... to deny the attackers their objectives and to make consolidation of political control impossible. These aims would be achieved by applying massive and selective noncooperation and defiance [and seeking] to create maximum international problems for the attackers and to subvert the reliability of their troops and functionaires.
— pp. 2–3
---
Making Europe Unconquerable is a book about how civilian-based defense can be incorporated into the foundations of European defense and collective security.
Written by Gene Sharp, the book was originally published in the United Kingdom and United States in 1985. Its subtitle was the potential of civilian-based deterrence and defense.
Although it advocated a significant departure from existing defense policies, it received a favorable review from George F. Kennan, widely perceived as one of the major architects of the US approach to the cold war.
Later in the same year, the book was republished with a foreword from Kennan.
---
Gene Sharp
Fields
Political science, civil resistance, nonviolent revolution
Institutions
University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth
Harvard University
Albert Einstein Institution
Influences
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Henry David Thoreau
A. J. Muste
Saul Alinsky
others
---
Works
The Politics of Nonviolent Action
The three volumes (or parts) of The Politics of Nonviolent Action contain a total of 14 chapters, as well as a preface by the author, and an introduction by Thomas C. Schelling.
Volume 1 addresses the theory of power that implicitly or explicitly underlies nonviolent action (1973) 114 pages
Volume 2 offers a detailed analysis of the methods of nonviolent action (1973) 348 pages
Volume 3 analyzes the dynamics of nonviolent action (1985) 466 pages
[In Armed Forces & Society, Kenneth Boulding described the book as monumental, writing that there are some works which bear the unmistakable stamp of the classic... and this work is a good candidate.]
Gandhi as a Political Strategist (1979)
[Introduction by Coretta Scott King]
Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-based Deterrence and Defense (1985)
From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (1994)
[Essay on the generic problem of how to destroy a dictatorship and to prevent the rise of a new one]
---
Biography
Sharp was born in North Baltimore, Ohio, the son of an itinerant Protestant minister. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences in 1949 from Ohio State University, where he also received his Master of Arts in Sociology in 1951.
In 1953–54, Sharp was jailed for nine months after protesting the conscription of soldiers for the Korean War. He discussed his decision to go to prison for his beliefs in letters to Albert Einstein, who wrote a foreword to his first book on Gandhi. He worked as factory laborer, guide to a blind social worker, and secretary to A. J. Muste, America's leading pacifist.
Between 1955 and 1958, he was Assistant Editor of Peace News (London), the weekly pacifist newspaper from where he helped organize the 1958 Aldermaston March.
The next two years he studied and researched in Oslo with Professor Arne Næss, who together with Johan Galtung drew extensively from Mohandas Gandhi's writings in developing the Satyagraha Norms.
In 1968, he received a Doctor of Philosophy in political theory from Oxford University.
Funding for Sharp's research at this time came from the DARPA project of the US Department of Defense.
Sharp was appointed a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 1972.
He held research appointments at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1965.
In 1983 he founded Harvard's Program on Nonviolent Sanctions in Conflict and Defense (PNS), which "continued in the spirit of its founder" and in 1995 was merged with another Harvard organization.
In 1983 Sharp also founded the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization devoted to studies and promotion of the use of nonviolent action in conflicts worldwide.
The Albert Einstein Institution has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the International Republican Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy, while some former directors have come from the RAND Corporation and the Ford Foundation.
In 2004, the Albert Einstein Institution lost much of its funding (with income dropping from more than $1m a year to as little as $160,000), and from then on was run out of Sharp's home in East Boston, near Logan Airport.
---
Sharp's contributions to the theory of nonviolent resistance
Sharp's key theme is that power is not monolithic; that is, it does not derive from some intrinsic quality of those who are in power. For Sharp, political power, the power of any state – regardless of its particular structural organization – ultimately derives from the subjects of the state. His fundamental belief is that any power structure relies upon the subjects' obedience to the orders of the ruler(s). If subjects do not obey, rulers have no power.
In Sharp's view, all effective power structures have systems by which they encourage or extract obedience from their subjects.
States have particularly complex systems for keeping subjects obedient.
These systems include specific institutions (police, courts, regulatory bodies, etc.), but may also involve cultural dimensions that inspire obedience by implying that power is monolithic (the god cult of the Egyptian pharaohs, the dignity of the office of the president, moral or ethical norms and taboos, etc.).
Through these systems, subjects are presented with a system of sanctions (imprisonment, fines, ostracism) and rewards (titles, wealth, fame) which influence the extent of their obedience.
Sharp identifies this hidden structure as providing a window of opportunity for a population to cause significant change in a state.
---
How to Start a Revolution, a feature documentary by the Scottish director Ruaridh Arrow about the global influence of Gene Sharp's work, was released in September 2011. The film won "Best Documentary" and the "Mass Impact Award" at the Boston Film Festival in September 2011.
---
Sharp's influence on struggles worldwide[
Sharp has been called both the "Machiavelli of nonviolence" and the "Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare."
It is claimed by some that Sharp's scholarship has influenced resistance organizations around the world. His works remain the ideological underpinning of the work for the Serbian-based nonviolent conflict training group the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies which helped to train the key activists in the protest movement that toppled President Mubarak of Egypt, and many other earlier youth movements in the Eastern European color revolutions.
Sharp's writings on "Civilian-based defense" were used by the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian governments during their separation from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Lithuanian Defence Minister Audrius Butkevicius declared at the time, "I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb".
The Iranian government charged protesters against alleged fraud in the 2009 elections with following Gene Sharp's tactics.
The Tehran Times reported:
"According to the indictment, a number of the accused confessed that the post-election unrest was preplanned and the plan was following the timetable of the velvet revolution to the extent that over 100 stages of the 198 steps of Gene Sharp were implemented in the foiled velvet revolution."
Former members of the IRA are reported to be studying his work.
Sharp and his work have been profiled in numerous media however some have claimed Sharp's influence has been exaggerated by Westerners looking for a Lawrence of Arabia figure.
---
Influence in Egypt
Coverage of Gene Sharp's influence in the Egyptian revolution produced a backlash from some Egyptian bloggers. One, journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, stated that
"Not only was Mubarak's foreign policy hated and despised by the Egyptian people, but parallels were always drawn between the situation of the Egyptian people and their Palestinian brothers and sisters. The latter have been the major source of inspiration, not Gene Sharp, whose name I first heard in my life only in February after we toppled Mubarak already and whom the clueless NYT moronically gives credit for our uprising."
Another Egyptian writer and activist, Karim Alrawi, argued that Gene Sharp's writings are more about regime change than revolution.
He defines the latter as having an ethical as well as a material dimension that Sharp deliberately avoids engaging with, and credits local circumstances and the spark provided by the Tunisian revolution for the Egyptian success.
However, evidence and testimony from four different activist groups working in Egypt at the time of the revolution contradict these claims.
Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist said that activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp's work into Arabic, and that his message of "attacking weaknesses of dictators" stuck with them.
Ahmed Maher a leader of the April 6 democracy group also stated in the How to Start a Revolution documentary, "Gene Sharp's books had a huge impact" among other influences.
The Associated Press reported as early as September 2010 more than four months before the revolution that Gene Sharp's work was being used by activists in Egypt close to political leader Mohamed ElBaradei.
Finally The New York Times reported that Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy had been posted by the Muslim Brotherhood on its website during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
---
Criticism
Gene Sharp has been accused of having strong links with a variety of US institutions including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and Republican-related institutions, i.e. International Republican Institute, RAND Corporation, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
---
He held research appointments at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1965.
As for the Center for International Affaira
Robert Richardson Bowie - Director - CFIA 957–1972
[Bowie was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; the Trilateral Commission; the American Law Institute; the American Academy of Diplomacy; and served as CIA chief national intelligence officer from 1977 to 1979.]
Samuel P. Huntington - Director - CFIA 1978–1989
[Mentor to generations of scholars in divergent fields, he was the author or coauthor of a total of seventeen books on American government, democratization, national security and strategic issues, political and economic development, cultural factors in world politics, and American national identity.]
[The Third Wave (1991) studied the cascade of dictator-toppling, democracy-creating episodes around the world from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, giving persuasive reasons for this trend in democratization well before the fall of the Berlin wall.]
[The book that brought him into the public eye, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), pointed to the significance of religious and other cultural values as ways of understanding cohesion and division in the world. It became a bestseller after 9/11.]
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. - Director - CFIA - 1989–1992
[He has also worked in three government agencies. From 1977 to 1979, Nye served as deputy to the under secretary of state for security assistance, science, and technology and chaired the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. He was chair of the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates intelligence estimates for the president.]
June 12, 2021
wikipedia
Reviews and influence
Reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, International Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, and elsewhere.
In the New York Review of Books, George F. Kennan, widely viewed as a major architect of the US approach to the cold war, wrote that Sharp's "primary purpose in writing the book was... 'to make civilian-based deterrence and defense a thinkable policy which is recognized as meriting further research, policy studies, and an evaluation.' And for this, he makes a reasonably good case."
Kennan stated that "the view advanced in this book deserves consideration, if only because of the bankruptcy of all the visible alternatives to it."
---
Kennan viewed Sharp's approach as requiring
a change in political philosophy. For it taps, as Mr. Sharp says in his final passages, ‘a crucial insight into the nature of power’—namely, that ‘all political power is rooted in and continually dependent upon the co-operation and obedience of the subjects and institutions of the society…. It is indeed possible for whole societies to apply that insight’
---
Kennan wondered "whether, if this change in political philosophy were to take place, it might not have wider effects than just those that relate to the concepts of national security—whether many other things might not also change, and, in the main, usefully so," and advised that Sharp
must not expect... that the effort to win understanding for his views will be easy going... It will arouse in many circles the same skepticism, and perhaps the same derision, that this reviewer brought down upon himself when he had the temerity to advance somewhat similar ideas in a widely publicized radio lecture delivered over the facilities of the BBC many years ago.
---
In the New York Times, Karl E. Meyer described the book as "reflective," and stated that "there is considerable merit to [Sharp's] contention that 'all peoples can with effort make themselves politically indigestable to would-be tyrants.'"
Meyer also argued that Sharp's approach "has its flaws... If the stakes are deemed sufficiently vital, civilian resistance seems unlikely to dissuade a determined aggressor."
---
In Foreign Affairs, Andrew Pierre wrote that
The value of this thoughtful work is in the alternative it suggests: ‘civilian defense’ through advance training for such actions against an intruder as mass public demonstrations, boycotts and strikes, demoralization of enemy troops, and the like.
— pp. 872–73
He added that "The author's proposals go against the grain of mainstream thinking, and to this reviewer leave many questions unanswered, but they are carefully put forward in a nonpolemical manner and clearly merit sustained attention and thought" (p. 873).
---
Ted Taylor, himself a former designer of nuclear weapons, reviewed the book in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He quoted Einstein:
‘The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.’ Although Albert Einstein's admonition has been quoted innumerable times, it has not, with few exceptions, led to deep and persistent thought about alternatives... One of these exceptions is in the writings of Gene Sharp about what he calls ‘civilian-based defense’... Making Europe Unconquerable is especially timely. (p. 54)
He added that "The side effects of pursuing a civilian-based defense strategy are especially interesting, since they tend to be beneficial in peacetime. This is a book that should be read attentively by anyone seriously searching for new ways of thinking about how we can stop our "drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." (p. 56).
---
Making Europe Unconquerable contains 7 chapters entitled
1 Meeting Europe's defense needs
2 Civilian-based defense for Western Europe?
3 Transarmament
4 Preventing attack
5 In face of attack
6 Defeating attack
7 Assessing the potential
---
In its opening pages, Making Europe Unconquerable states that
This book is mostly about... ‘civilian-based defence’... In this policy, the whole population and the society's institutions become the fighting forces. Their weaponry consists of a vast variety of forms of psychological, economic, social, and political resistance and counter-attack... to deny the attackers their objectives and to make consolidation of political control impossible. These aims would be achieved by applying massive and selective noncooperation and defiance [and seeking] to create maximum international problems for the attackers and to subvert the reliability of their troops and functionaires.
— pp. 2–3
---
Making Europe Unconquerable is a book about how civilian-based defense can be incorporated into the foundations of European defense and collective security.
Written by Gene Sharp, the book was originally published in the United Kingdom and United States in 1985. Its subtitle was the potential of civilian-based deterrence and defense.
Although it advocated a significant departure from existing defense policies, it received a favorable review from George F. Kennan, widely perceived as one of the major architects of the US approach to the cold war.
Later in the same year, the book was republished with a foreword from Kennan.
---
Gene Sharp
Fields
Political science, civil resistance, nonviolent revolution
Institutions
University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth
Harvard University
Albert Einstein Institution
Influences
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Henry David Thoreau
A. J. Muste
Saul Alinsky
others
---
Works
The Politics of Nonviolent Action
The three volumes (or parts) of The Politics of Nonviolent Action contain a total of 14 chapters, as well as a preface by the author, and an introduction by Thomas C. Schelling.
Volume 1 addresses the theory of power that implicitly or explicitly underlies nonviolent action (1973) 114 pages
Volume 2 offers a detailed analysis of the methods of nonviolent action (1973) 348 pages
Volume 3 analyzes the dynamics of nonviolent action (1985) 466 pages
[In Armed Forces & Society, Kenneth Boulding described the book as monumental, writing that there are some works which bear the unmistakable stamp of the classic... and this work is a good candidate.]
Gandhi as a Political Strategist (1979)
[Introduction by Coretta Scott King]
Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-based Deterrence and Defense (1985)
From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (1994)
[Essay on the generic problem of how to destroy a dictatorship and to prevent the rise of a new one]
---
Biography
Sharp was born in North Baltimore, Ohio, the son of an itinerant Protestant minister. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences in 1949 from Ohio State University, where he also received his Master of Arts in Sociology in 1951.
In 1953–54, Sharp was jailed for nine months after protesting the conscription of soldiers for the Korean War. He discussed his decision to go to prison for his beliefs in letters to Albert Einstein, who wrote a foreword to his first book on Gandhi. He worked as factory laborer, guide to a blind social worker, and secretary to A. J. Muste, America's leading pacifist.
Between 1955 and 1958, he was Assistant Editor of Peace News (London), the weekly pacifist newspaper from where he helped organize the 1958 Aldermaston March.
The next two years he studied and researched in Oslo with Professor Arne Næss, who together with Johan Galtung drew extensively from Mohandas Gandhi's writings in developing the Satyagraha Norms.
In 1968, he received a Doctor of Philosophy in political theory from Oxford University.
Funding for Sharp's research at this time came from the DARPA project of the US Department of Defense.
Sharp was appointed a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 1972.
He held research appointments at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1965.
In 1983 he founded Harvard's Program on Nonviolent Sanctions in Conflict and Defense (PNS), which "continued in the spirit of its founder" and in 1995 was merged with another Harvard organization.
In 1983 Sharp also founded the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization devoted to studies and promotion of the use of nonviolent action in conflicts worldwide.
The Albert Einstein Institution has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the International Republican Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy, while some former directors have come from the RAND Corporation and the Ford Foundation.
In 2004, the Albert Einstein Institution lost much of its funding (with income dropping from more than $1m a year to as little as $160,000), and from then on was run out of Sharp's home in East Boston, near Logan Airport.
---
Sharp's contributions to the theory of nonviolent resistance
Sharp's key theme is that power is not monolithic; that is, it does not derive from some intrinsic quality of those who are in power. For Sharp, political power, the power of any state – regardless of its particular structural organization – ultimately derives from the subjects of the state. His fundamental belief is that any power structure relies upon the subjects' obedience to the orders of the ruler(s). If subjects do not obey, rulers have no power.
In Sharp's view, all effective power structures have systems by which they encourage or extract obedience from their subjects.
States have particularly complex systems for keeping subjects obedient.
These systems include specific institutions (police, courts, regulatory bodies, etc.), but may also involve cultural dimensions that inspire obedience by implying that power is monolithic (the god cult of the Egyptian pharaohs, the dignity of the office of the president, moral or ethical norms and taboos, etc.).
Through these systems, subjects are presented with a system of sanctions (imprisonment, fines, ostracism) and rewards (titles, wealth, fame) which influence the extent of their obedience.
Sharp identifies this hidden structure as providing a window of opportunity for a population to cause significant change in a state.
---
How to Start a Revolution, a feature documentary by the Scottish director Ruaridh Arrow about the global influence of Gene Sharp's work, was released in September 2011. The film won "Best Documentary" and the "Mass Impact Award" at the Boston Film Festival in September 2011.
---
Sharp's influence on struggles worldwide[
Sharp has been called both the "Machiavelli of nonviolence" and the "Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare."
It is claimed by some that Sharp's scholarship has influenced resistance organizations around the world. His works remain the ideological underpinning of the work for the Serbian-based nonviolent conflict training group the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies which helped to train the key activists in the protest movement that toppled President Mubarak of Egypt, and many other earlier youth movements in the Eastern European color revolutions.
Sharp's writings on "Civilian-based defense" were used by the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian governments during their separation from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Lithuanian Defence Minister Audrius Butkevicius declared at the time, "I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb".
The Iranian government charged protesters against alleged fraud in the 2009 elections with following Gene Sharp's tactics.
The Tehran Times reported:
"According to the indictment, a number of the accused confessed that the post-election unrest was preplanned and the plan was following the timetable of the velvet revolution to the extent that over 100 stages of the 198 steps of Gene Sharp were implemented in the foiled velvet revolution."
Former members of the IRA are reported to be studying his work.
Sharp and his work have been profiled in numerous media however some have claimed Sharp's influence has been exaggerated by Westerners looking for a Lawrence of Arabia figure.
---
Influence in Egypt
Coverage of Gene Sharp's influence in the Egyptian revolution produced a backlash from some Egyptian bloggers. One, journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, stated that
"Not only was Mubarak's foreign policy hated and despised by the Egyptian people, but parallels were always drawn between the situation of the Egyptian people and their Palestinian brothers and sisters. The latter have been the major source of inspiration, not Gene Sharp, whose name I first heard in my life only in February after we toppled Mubarak already and whom the clueless NYT moronically gives credit for our uprising."
Another Egyptian writer and activist, Karim Alrawi, argued that Gene Sharp's writings are more about regime change than revolution.
He defines the latter as having an ethical as well as a material dimension that Sharp deliberately avoids engaging with, and credits local circumstances and the spark provided by the Tunisian revolution for the Egyptian success.
However, evidence and testimony from four different activist groups working in Egypt at the time of the revolution contradict these claims.
Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist said that activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp's work into Arabic, and that his message of "attacking weaknesses of dictators" stuck with them.
Ahmed Maher a leader of the April 6 democracy group also stated in the How to Start a Revolution documentary, "Gene Sharp's books had a huge impact" among other influences.
The Associated Press reported as early as September 2010 more than four months before the revolution that Gene Sharp's work was being used by activists in Egypt close to political leader Mohamed ElBaradei.
Finally The New York Times reported that Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy had been posted by the Muslim Brotherhood on its website during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
---
Criticism
Gene Sharp has been accused of having strong links with a variety of US institutions including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and Republican-related institutions, i.e. International Republican Institute, RAND Corporation, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
---
He held research appointments at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1965.
As for the Center for International Affaira
Robert Richardson Bowie - Director - CFIA 957–1972
[Bowie was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; the Trilateral Commission; the American Law Institute; the American Academy of Diplomacy; and served as CIA chief national intelligence officer from 1977 to 1979.]
Samuel P. Huntington - Director - CFIA 1978–1989
[Mentor to generations of scholars in divergent fields, he was the author or coauthor of a total of seventeen books on American government, democratization, national security and strategic issues, political and economic development, cultural factors in world politics, and American national identity.]
[The Third Wave (1991) studied the cascade of dictator-toppling, democracy-creating episodes around the world from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, giving persuasive reasons for this trend in democratization well before the fall of the Berlin wall.]
[The book that brought him into the public eye, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), pointed to the significance of religious and other cultural values as ways of understanding cohesion and division in the world. It became a bestseller after 9/11.]
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. - Director - CFIA - 1989–1992
[He has also worked in three government agencies. From 1977 to 1979, Nye served as deputy to the under secretary of state for security assistance, science, and technology and chaired the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. He was chair of the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates intelligence estimates for the president.]
Reviews and influence
Reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, International Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, and elsewhere.
In the New York Review of Books, George F. Kennan, widely viewed as a major architect of the US approach to the cold war, wrote that Sharp's "primary purpose in writing the book was... 'to make civilian-based deterrence and defense a thinkable policy which is recognized as meriting further research, policy studies, and an evaluation.' And for this, he makes a reasonably good case."
Kennan stated that "the view advanced in this book deserves consideration, if only because of the bankruptcy of all the visible alternatives to it."
---
Kennan viewed Sharp's approach as requiring
a change in political philosophy. For it taps, as Mr. Sharp says in his final passages, ‘a crucial insight into the nature of power’—namely, that ‘all political power is rooted in and continually dependent upon the co-operation and obedience of the subjects and institutions of the society…. It is indeed possible for whole societies to apply that insight’
---
Kennan wondered "whether, if this change in political philosophy were to take place, it might not have wider effects than just those that relate to the concepts of national security—whether many other things might not also change, and, in the main, usefully so," and advised that Sharp
must not expect... that the effort to win understanding for his views will be easy going... It will arouse in many circles the same skepticism, and perhaps the same derision, that this reviewer brought down upon himself when he had the temerity to advance somewhat similar ideas in a widely publicized radio lecture delivered over the facilities of the BBC many years ago.
---
In the New York Times, Karl E. Meyer described the book as "reflective," and stated that "there is considerable merit to [Sharp's] contention that 'all peoples can with effort make themselves politically indigestable to would-be tyrants.'"
Meyer also argued that Sharp's approach "has its flaws... If the stakes are deemed sufficiently vital, civilian resistance seems unlikely to dissuade a determined aggressor."
---
In Foreign Affairs, Andrew Pierre wrote that
The value of this thoughtful work is in the alternative it suggests: ‘civilian defense’ through advance training for such actions against an intruder as mass public demonstrations, boycotts and strikes, demoralization of enemy troops, and the like.
— pp. 872–73
He added that "The author's proposals go against the grain of mainstream thinking, and to this reviewer leave many questions unanswered, but they are carefully put forward in a nonpolemical manner and clearly merit sustained attention and thought" (p. 873).
---
Ted Taylor, himself a former designer of nuclear weapons, reviewed the book in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He quoted Einstein:
‘The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.’ Although Albert Einstein's admonition has been quoted innumerable times, it has not, with few exceptions, led to deep and persistent thought about alternatives... One of these exceptions is in the writings of Gene Sharp about what he calls ‘civilian-based defense’... Making Europe Unconquerable is especially timely. (p. 54)
He added that "The side effects of pursuing a civilian-based defense strategy are especially interesting, since they tend to be beneficial in peacetime. This is a book that should be read attentively by anyone seriously searching for new ways of thinking about how we can stop our "drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." (p. 56).
---
Making Europe Unconquerable contains 7 chapters entitled
1 Meeting Europe's defense needs
2 Civilian-based defense for Western Europe?
3 Transarmament
4 Preventing attack
5 In face of attack
6 Defeating attack
7 Assessing the potential
---
In its opening pages, Making Europe Unconquerable states that
This book is mostly about... ‘civilian-based defence’... In this policy, the whole population and the society's institutions become the fighting forces. Their weaponry consists of a vast variety of forms of psychological, economic, social, and political resistance and counter-attack... to deny the attackers their objectives and to make consolidation of political control impossible. These aims would be achieved by applying massive and selective noncooperation and defiance [and seeking] to create maximum international problems for the attackers and to subvert the reliability of their troops and functionaires.
— pp. 2–3
---
Making Europe Unconquerable is a book about how civilian-based defense can be incorporated into the foundations of European defense and collective security.
Written by Gene Sharp, the book was originally published in the United Kingdom and United States in 1985. Its subtitle was the potential of civilian-based deterrence and defense.
Although it advocated a significant departure from existing defense policies, it received a favorable review from George F. Kennan, widely perceived as one of the major architects of the US approach to the cold war.
Later in the same year, the book was republished with a foreword from Kennan.
---
Gene Sharp
Fields
Political science, civil resistance, nonviolent revolution
Institutions
University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth
Harvard University
Albert Einstein Institution
Influences
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Henry David Thoreau
A. J. Muste
Saul Alinsky
others
---
Works
The Politics of Nonviolent Action
The three volumes (or parts) of The Politics of Nonviolent Action contain a total of 14 chapters, as well as a preface by the author, and an introduction by Thomas C. Schelling.
Volume 1 addresses the theory of power that implicitly or explicitly underlies nonviolent action (1973) 114 pages
Volume 2 offers a detailed analysis of the methods of nonviolent action (1973) 348 pages
Volume 3 analyzes the dynamics of nonviolent action (1985) 466 pages
[In Armed Forces & Society, Kenneth Boulding described the book as monumental, writing that there are some works which bear the unmistakable stamp of the classic... and this work is a good candidate.]
Gandhi as a Political Strategist (1979)
[Introduction by Coretta Scott King]
Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-based Deterrence and Defense (1985)
From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (1994)
[Essay on the generic problem of how to destroy a dictatorship and to prevent the rise of a new one]
---
Biography
Sharp was born in North Baltimore, Ohio, the son of an itinerant Protestant minister. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences in 1949 from Ohio State University, where he also received his Master of Arts in Sociology in 1951.
In 1953–54, Sharp was jailed for nine months after protesting the conscription of soldiers for the Korean War. He discussed his decision to go to prison for his beliefs in letters to Albert Einstein, who wrote a foreword to his first book on Gandhi. He worked as factory laborer, guide to a blind social worker, and secretary to A. J. Muste, America's leading pacifist.
Between 1955 and 1958, he was Assistant Editor of Peace News (London), the weekly pacifist newspaper from where he helped organize the 1958 Aldermaston March.
The next two years he studied and researched in Oslo with Professor Arne Næss, who together with Johan Galtung drew extensively from Mohandas Gandhi's writings in developing the Satyagraha Norms.
In 1968, he received a Doctor of Philosophy in political theory from Oxford University.
Funding for Sharp's research at this time came from the DARPA project of the US Department of Defense.
Sharp was appointed a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 1972.
He held research appointments at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1965.
In 1983 he founded Harvard's Program on Nonviolent Sanctions in Conflict and Defense (PNS), which "continued in the spirit of its founder" and in 1995 was merged with another Harvard organization.
In 1983 Sharp also founded the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization devoted to studies and promotion of the use of nonviolent action in conflicts worldwide.
The Albert Einstein Institution has received funding from the Ford Foundation, the International Republican Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy, while some former directors have come from the RAND Corporation and the Ford Foundation.
In 2004, the Albert Einstein Institution lost much of its funding (with income dropping from more than $1m a year to as little as $160,000), and from then on was run out of Sharp's home in East Boston, near Logan Airport.
---
Sharp's contributions to the theory of nonviolent resistance
Sharp's key theme is that power is not monolithic; that is, it does not derive from some intrinsic quality of those who are in power. For Sharp, political power, the power of any state – regardless of its particular structural organization – ultimately derives from the subjects of the state. His fundamental belief is that any power structure relies upon the subjects' obedience to the orders of the ruler(s). If subjects do not obey, rulers have no power.
In Sharp's view, all effective power structures have systems by which they encourage or extract obedience from their subjects.
States have particularly complex systems for keeping subjects obedient.
These systems include specific institutions (police, courts, regulatory bodies, etc.), but may also involve cultural dimensions that inspire obedience by implying that power is monolithic (the god cult of the Egyptian pharaohs, the dignity of the office of the president, moral or ethical norms and taboos, etc.).
Through these systems, subjects are presented with a system of sanctions (imprisonment, fines, ostracism) and rewards (titles, wealth, fame) which influence the extent of their obedience.
Sharp identifies this hidden structure as providing a window of opportunity for a population to cause significant change in a state.
---
How to Start a Revolution, a feature documentary by the Scottish director Ruaridh Arrow about the global influence of Gene Sharp's work, was released in September 2011. The film won "Best Documentary" and the "Mass Impact Award" at the Boston Film Festival in September 2011.
---
Sharp's influence on struggles worldwide[
Sharp has been called both the "Machiavelli of nonviolence" and the "Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare."
It is claimed by some that Sharp's scholarship has influenced resistance organizations around the world. His works remain the ideological underpinning of the work for the Serbian-based nonviolent conflict training group the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies which helped to train the key activists in the protest movement that toppled President Mubarak of Egypt, and many other earlier youth movements in the Eastern European color revolutions.
Sharp's writings on "Civilian-based defense" were used by the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian governments during their separation from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Lithuanian Defence Minister Audrius Butkevicius declared at the time, "I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb".
The Iranian government charged protesters against alleged fraud in the 2009 elections with following Gene Sharp's tactics.
The Tehran Times reported:
"According to the indictment, a number of the accused confessed that the post-election unrest was preplanned and the plan was following the timetable of the velvet revolution to the extent that over 100 stages of the 198 steps of Gene Sharp were implemented in the foiled velvet revolution."
Former members of the IRA are reported to be studying his work.
Sharp and his work have been profiled in numerous media however some have claimed Sharp's influence has been exaggerated by Westerners looking for a Lawrence of Arabia figure.
---
Influence in Egypt
Coverage of Gene Sharp's influence in the Egyptian revolution produced a backlash from some Egyptian bloggers. One, journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, stated that
"Not only was Mubarak's foreign policy hated and despised by the Egyptian people, but parallels were always drawn between the situation of the Egyptian people and their Palestinian brothers and sisters. The latter have been the major source of inspiration, not Gene Sharp, whose name I first heard in my life only in February after we toppled Mubarak already and whom the clueless NYT moronically gives credit for our uprising."
Another Egyptian writer and activist, Karim Alrawi, argued that Gene Sharp's writings are more about regime change than revolution.
He defines the latter as having an ethical as well as a material dimension that Sharp deliberately avoids engaging with, and credits local circumstances and the spark provided by the Tunisian revolution for the Egyptian success.
However, evidence and testimony from four different activist groups working in Egypt at the time of the revolution contradict these claims.
Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist said that activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp's work into Arabic, and that his message of "attacking weaknesses of dictators" stuck with them.
Ahmed Maher a leader of the April 6 democracy group also stated in the How to Start a Revolution documentary, "Gene Sharp's books had a huge impact" among other influences.
The Associated Press reported as early as September 2010 more than four months before the revolution that Gene Sharp's work was being used by activists in Egypt close to political leader Mohamed ElBaradei.
Finally The New York Times reported that Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy had been posted by the Muslim Brotherhood on its website during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
---
Criticism
Gene Sharp has been accused of having strong links with a variety of US institutions including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and Republican-related institutions, i.e. International Republican Institute, RAND Corporation, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
---
He held research appointments at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1965.
As for the Center for International Affaira
Robert Richardson Bowie - Director - CFIA 957–1972
[Bowie was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; the Trilateral Commission; the American Law Institute; the American Academy of Diplomacy; and served as CIA chief national intelligence officer from 1977 to 1979.]
Samuel P. Huntington - Director - CFIA 1978–1989
[Mentor to generations of scholars in divergent fields, he was the author or coauthor of a total of seventeen books on American government, democratization, national security and strategic issues, political and economic development, cultural factors in world politics, and American national identity.]
[The Third Wave (1991) studied the cascade of dictator-toppling, democracy-creating episodes around the world from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, giving persuasive reasons for this trend in democratization well before the fall of the Berlin wall.]
[The book that brought him into the public eye, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), pointed to the significance of religious and other cultural values as ways of understanding cohesion and division in the world. It became a bestseller after 9/11.]
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. - Director - CFIA - 1989–1992
[He has also worked in three government agencies. From 1977 to 1979, Nye served as deputy to the under secretary of state for security assistance, science, and technology and chaired the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. He was chair of the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates intelligence estimates for the president.]
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August 10, 2019Example of how civilans can make a nonviolent defense in case of direct attack on the continent.
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