People Power and Political Change

Key Issues and Concepts

April Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415580489
• eBook ISBN: 9781136589669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the upsurge in mass popular protest against undemocratic regimes. Relating early revolutions to recent global trends and protests, it examines the significance of 'people power' to democracy.

Taking a comparative approach, this text analyses unarmed uprisings in Iran 1977-79, Latin America and Asia in the 1980s, Africa from 1989-1992, 1989 in Eastern Europe and ex-Soviet states after 2000, right up to the 2011 'Arab Spring'. The author assesses the influence on people power of global politics and trends, such as the growth of international governmental organizations and international law, citizen networks operating across borders, and emerging media (like Twitter and Wikileaks). Although stressing the positive potential of people power, this text also examines crucial problems of repression, examples of failure and potential political problems, disintegration of empires and the role of power rivalries. Drawing from contemporary debates about democratization and literatures on power, violence and nonviolence, from both academic sources and media perspectives, this text builds an incisive analytical argument about the changing nature of power itself.

People Power and Political Change is a must read for students and scholars of democratic theory, international politics and current affairs.

PART I

Resistance and political change

1 People power and nonviolent methods in historical perspective

This chapter sketches in the background for interpreting today’s people power movements, and has four main aims. The first is to illustrate and discuss the meaning of people power in more detail. The second is to indicate the range of nonviolent methods available: their differing cultural and historical sources in earlier centuries; their role in nineteenth- and twentieth-century social movements; and their importance in the evolution of unarmed national liberation struggles. The third is to consider in particular Mahatma Gandhi’s contribution from 1906 to 1947 in developing the ideas and strategy of nonviolent resistance, first in South Africa and then in the movement for Indian independence, and to assess his continuing influence. Finally, the chapter notes very briefly how in the past few decades the strategy, methods and symbols of nonviolent action have been elaborated and transmitted between campaigns.

The Meaning of ‘People Power’

After 29 days of mounting popular demonstrations in Tunisia, the president, who had imposed his dictatorial rule for 23 years, was forced to flee the country on 14 January 2011. The large and rejoicing crowds outside the Interior Ministry pictured on the TV screens that evening waved flags and slogans in Arabic, and one held up a homemade sign, clearly directed to the outside world, that read ‘people power’. The unrest, spurred by unemployment and economic hardship, rapidly developed into a popular political uprising against a brutal and corrupt regime; some protesters termed it a ‘mafia state’. The police killed scores of demonstrators in those 29 days (and they and other adherents of the old regime killed more in the next few days), but the uprising itself was unarmed and predominantly peaceful. Western media responded by hailing the Tunisian uprising as the first example of apparently successful people power in the Arab world, and some began to label it the ‘jasmine revolution’.

The demonstrations began in the town of Sidi Bouzid, where a young man, Mohammed Bouazizi, supporting his mother and the education of his sisters, made a precarious living by selling fruit and vegetables from a small cart and was often harassed by the local authorities. After they seized his cart, and insulted him when he tried to object, in anger and desperation he set himself on fire. Local townspeople took to the streets, and the images spread through Facebook and Twitter to other parts of Tunisia, where increasing numbers joined in the protests. This striking story simplifies a more complex background of economic hardship and protest, and long-term attempts to develop political opposition inside and outside the country. But the extent of the popular response was of revolutionary significance for Tunisia and the Arab world.

The term ‘people power’ was first widely used by demonstrators in the Philippines in 1986 to describe their peaceful overthrow of President Marcos, and since then has become a common political and journalistic description of the succession of peaceful national uprisings demanding major political change. ‘People power’ has three major advantages as a shorthand for this now common form of uprising:

• it reflects how those engaged in strikes, demonstrations and occupation of key buildings, and facing down armed security forces, see themselves: the people rising against oppressive rulers;
• it links the idea of resistance to the idea of democracy, which is the goal of these mass protests;
• it suggests the central strategy (conscious or intuitive) behind such primarily peaceful revolts: that rulers can be toppled when the ruled refuse to obey them any longer.

Using ‘people power’ to define determined large-scale resistance at a national level has two other advantages:

• it is now widely accepted and understood – although the term can be misused either to refer to minority pressure group activity or as a synonym for democracy; and
• it is both more accurate and more illuminating than many earlier terms coined to describe this kind of uprising.

The essentially nonviolent methods adopted either spontaneously or as a strategy in national people power movements have been used and elaborated in different forms of popular protest over many centuries and in very diverse cultural and political contexts (see below). But because resistance movements, and in particular nationwide uprisings against tyrannical governments or foreign oppressors, have historically been identified with violent and armed revolts, finding appropriate descriptions of mass unarmed resistance has proved difficult. By the early twentieth century the term ‘passive resistance’ had been coined. But activists in liberation struggles have often looked for words that rejected an image of passivity, and that had resonance for their own culture. Therefore Gandhi, in the course of the 1906–14 struggle against systematic legal and political discrimination against Indians settled in South Africa, chose the term satyagraha (‘truth force’ or ‘soul force’). After the Second World War, African campaigners for independence from colonialism who adopted unarmed resistance claimed they were taking ‘positive action’. The demonstrators in Burma in 1988 dubbed their tactics ‘political defiance’. In Latin America, where unarmed resistance became significant from the 1970s in helping to overthrow military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, firmeza permanente, or ‘relentless persistence’, was the description chosen. Whilst in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, the struggle that began in 1987, when people laid aside their guns and engaged in non-cooperation and boycotts, became known as the ‘intifada’ or ‘shaking off’ of Israeli control. Although the ‘Second Intifada’, that began after the breakdown of peace negotiations in 2000, rapidly became linked to armed resistance and suicide bombers, there has been a parallel and developing strand of unarmed protest.

The references in the same paragraph to campaigns led by Gandhi, the most famous exponent of strict nonviolence, and to the Palestinian First Intifada, in which demonstrators regularly threw stones at Israeli forces, highlight another important aspect of people power: that the term (and the ideas it encapsulates) embraces two distinct approaches to unarmed resistance. One approach is the evolving tradition of specifically nonviolent resistance, which stresses avoidance of all forms of physical force for moral and political as well as strategic reasons. The other is more pragmatic. People adopt street protests, strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience and peaceful occupations and blockades, because these are the methods immediately available to them, and/or the oppressors have overwhelming military might. But their unarmed status gives them the moral high ground – widely recognized in media responses to the 2011 popular protests and emphasis by demonstrators themselves that they were acting peacefully.

Some of the well-known examples of people power since Gandhi have emphasized the importance of avoiding resorting to even minor forms of violence. Whilst this commitment is always difficult to maintain in a movement involving large numbers of people over a period of time, there have been struggles where there are leaders at various levels making a political and moral case for avoiding violence and promoting an ethos of nonviolence. National leaders who become figureheads of nonviolent struggle, for example Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma or Ibrahim Rugova in Kosovo in the 1990s, and prominent intellectuals, such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron in Poland in the 1980s, who stress the need to avoid violence, help to identify the struggle with nonviolence both inside the country and in the international media. Sometimes religious groups demonstrate and reinforce a nonviolent discipline, for example Catholic monks and nuns in the Philippines in 1986, and the Theravada Buddhist monks, committed to nonviolence by their monastic code, central to the mass protests in Burma in 2007. Specific seminars and training in nonviolent action – provided for instance to hundreds of clergy, nuns and lay people in the Philippines – can also lessen the likelihood of the resisters’ turning to violence if frustrated or provoked (Zunes, 1999: 142). Ordinary demonstrators have also at times grasped the importance of avoiding provocation to security forces and of maximizing international sympathy: crowds in Central Eastern Europe in 1989 chanted ‘no violence’.

But in other cases of popular resistance, for example the mass protests and strikes that ousted both the El Salvador and the Guatemalan dictatorships in 1944, where there is no explicit commitment to avoid forms of violence, the label ‘nonviolent’ can be misleading. Even struggles that deliberately avoid provocative violence for strategic reasons, as in the East German uprising of June 1953, when building workers abstained from breaking down a door to trade union headquarters, and demonstrators locked up or destroyed any weapons they found, may involve crowd attacks on hated officials and some defensive violence against security forces (Ebert, 1969: 223–5). Moreover, occupation of public buildings, such as parliaments as in Serbia 2000 and Georgia 2003, tends to include degrees of physical force, such as breaking down doors or pushing aside guards. Unarmed movements occasionally involve attacking or burning down key symbolic buildings, as in the burning of the Belgrade TV headquarters, and during the mobilization against the Shah of Iran in 1978 (see Chapter 3). But both these struggles qualify as important examples of ‘people power’. An additional difficulty in calling some movements nonviolent is that, although the official strategy and the methods used may be inherently nonviolent, there is quite often a degree of social coercion, or even force, used to ensure communal participation, for example in strikes or boycotts. This was true of the independence movement in Zambia in the early 1960s.

The increasing number of unarmed resistance struggles in recent decades has led to a growing literature discussing the theory, strategy and methods of such resistance and describing individual movements (Carter, 2009). This literature has included a debate about terminology. Gene Sharp’s now classic study The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Sharp, 1973) helped to establish ‘nonviolent’ action or resistance as a frequently used term – even though he stressed political and strategic rather than moral arguments for avoiding violence, and has included a very wide range of unarmed struggles under that rubric. More recently Howard Clark (2009a: 4) has suggested ‘unarmed resistance’ is more accurate in describing many struggles as it is more neutral and more inclusive. Kurt Schock (2005: xvi), who equates people power with ‘unarmed insurrections’, defines these as ‘popular challenges to government authority that depend primarily on nonviolent action’.

A number of theorists of nonviolent action have since the 1960s chosen to use the alternative description ‘civil resistance’, which conveys that the mode of struggle is unarmed, is undertaken by those who are (or are claiming the status of ) citizens, and that it relies on social power (Randle, 1994; Roberts and Garton Ash, 2009). It can also suggest the idea of ‘civility’, and understanding of the political and possibly moral case for nonviolence in specific protests, without an absolute commitment to nonviolence. I have therefore adopted it where it seems appropriate in this book. Sometimes the term ‘civilian resistance’ has also been used, but, as Kieran Williams has noted, this would strictly exclude military or police resistance, which can – as in the popular opposition to the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia – be very important (Williams, 2009: 110–11). Civil resistance therefore conveys images similar to those evoked by people power, but is – like its equivalent nonviolent resistance – used also to cover social movements by specific sections of the population, for example the US Civil Rights Movement.

The growing academic literature on social movements has begun to include discussion of people power campaigns. Sidney Tarrow, for example, incorporates a discussion of the Serbian resistance to Milosevic and transnational support for it in his book The New Transnational Activism (Tarrow, 2005: 109–13). People power certainly uses many methods developed by earlier social movements, ‘forms of contention’ influencing ‘repertoires’ of action – concepts introduced by Charles Tilly in his study From Mobilization to Resistance (Tilly, 1978: 143–59). People power demonstrations also adopt new methods introduced recently by peace, feminist and green movements, such as forming human chains – a tactic used in the Baltic republics of the Soviet Union in 1989 to link symbolically Tallinn to Vilnius.

But social movements tend to promote specific social causes, or the demand by sections of the population for recognition of their rights or legitimate interests. People power movements unite large sections of the population in a common effort to achieve greater political freedom and a more democratic government. Moreover, many social movements flourish within representative democracies, whilst people power normally presupposes either semi-authoritarian or wholly dictatorial rule, or foreign occupation.

On the other hand, initially limited social movements can turn into a national, people power struggle. An obvious example especially well documented is the Solidarity Movement, which began as a series of strikes, notably in the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk, which rapidly spread and in due course embraced intellectuals, professional groups, students and the significant social grouping of small farmers, and was actively supported by the Catholic Church. Solidarity sought to reform Communist Party rule rather than overthrow it completely, but was clearly a major challenge to the essential nature of the regime and to Soviet dominance. A national struggle against political repression and rigged elections may also encompass more limited campaigns by particular occupational or social groups. For example, Janet Cherry has analysed how in Zimbabwe significant resistance since 2000 has been mounted by a range of trade unions, such as those representing radical teachers or workers on commercial farms, by urban community associations, organizations representing youth and students and religious bodies. A campaigning group of women, Women of Zimbabwe Arise, has been particularly active in spearheading opposition (Cherry, 2009: 50–63).

The now emblematic example of people power is represented by concentrated popular opposition to a repressive regime, as in East Germany in 1989, when tens of thousands, after attending prayers for peace, demonstrated on the streets of Leipzig on every Monday in October shouting ‘we are staying here’ (to indicate a more militant strategy than the mass emigration through Hungary earlier in summer of that year), and ‘we are the people’. After some clashes on 2 October, about 70,000 demonstrated nonviolently on 9 October, despite thousands of police poised to unleash violent repression. Two weeks later the General Secretary of the East German Communist Party resigned and on 9 November crowds peacefully crossed through the Berlin Wall and began to demolish it (Maier, 2009: 261–63).

Although many recent examples of people power suggest a brief, dramatic confrontation, highly organized mass popular resistance movements, for example those for national liberation, have often lasted for many years, or even decades, and developed through different stages. It is these long-term unarmed struggles that can be most directly compared with the strategy of ‘people’s war’ (see Chapter 2).

Opponents of a regime may attempt to spark mass resistance but only achieve quite limited protests that are easily suppressed. These protests do not in themselves qualify as people power as defined here. Nevertheless, people power is often preceded by years of much smaller-scale organization and resistance, for example the limited dissent of Charter 77 provided Civic Forum leaders in the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution of 1989. People power may also emerge out of a growing popular mobilization, for example the shipyard strikes in Poland in 1970 and 1976 that led up to Solidarity. Frequently, people power can be seen as the culminating stage of a longer, if often intermittent, build-up of civil resistance.

Background to Nonviolent Methods

The methods of protest and resistance adopted in different societies often reflect particular historical and cultural precedents, but also draw – at least in recent centuries – on a very wide range of possible methods that have been used by resistance movements throughout the world. These methods may be adopted by individuals or groups as the obvious response to the oppression or injustice they face; they may be promoted and elaborated by wider social movements; and they may be adapted to popular unarmed uprisings against central government or foreign rule. Thus refusal to obey an order deemed to be morally wrong is the basis of a long tradition of individual resistance by members of various Christian churches to military service, open civil disobedience to resist unjust laws or state demands has been adopted by social movements resisting unjust discrimination, and concerted refusal to pay taxes has been a strategy of some national liberation movements.

Drawing on Cultural and Religious Traditions and Institutions

Some modes of dissent are embedded in traditional societies. Gandhi himself was able to draw on the Indian practice of fasting as a form of pressure, and the long-standing observance of hartal, a day of mourning which involved religious rites and abstention from work (Bondurant, 1958: 118–19). Confucianism has recognized a right of moral remonstrance to unjust rulers; although often this has taken the form of a rebuke by an individual scholar, self-immolation has also been a more extreme form of remonstrance by scholars seeking reform in the Korean Confucian tradition. Korean students engaged in a desperate opposition to military rule adopted this method in 1986 (Kluver, 1998: 219–31).

Adherence to specific religious commitments has also quite often entailed conflict with a state that upholds an authorized set of religious beliefs and practices and demands public observance of them, or prohibits other forms of belief and worship. Christianity has often required its adherents to resist the state, for example by refusing to serve in the army, and in its original evolution within the Roman Empire this resistance usually took the form of hidden worship or open nonviolent defiance, creating martyrs who refused to worship the Emperor. Christian beliefs ceased to be closely associated with commitment to avoid arms after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and divisions within Christianity have often been associated with wars and armed rebellions. But the Reformation in Europe revived traditions of hidden religious observance, political disobedience and acceptance of martyrdom, both among Protestants resisting Catholic rule and Catholics defying Protestant monarchs. The Reformation also prompted theologians and philosophers to debate the obligation of subjects to unconditional obedience. Lutherans and Calvinists tended to endorse two extremes. The first allowed a purely individual ‘non-resistance’, when individuals sometimes had to obey God first to uphold their faith, but had to suffer the penalty passively without any organized opposition. The other extreme was tyrannicide and armed rebellion in defence of their faith; and some Catholic theologians opted for the latter (Skinner, 1978, Vol. 2). The more radical forms of Protestantism, however, generated a renewed commitment to renunciation of armed violence, that sometimes encouraged quietism and communal escape from the wider world where possible (for example the Amish), but also fostered an active Christian nonviolent resistance that has been manifested in organized political opposition to war and slavery (for example the Quakers and Mennonites).

The repertoire of methods of nonviolent protest has been enriched by drawing on various religious beliefs and practices that carry symbolic meaning in a particular society. Forms of worship such as prayer and religious chants or hymns have quite often been a means of protest, or incorporated into demonstrations. During the 1952 Defiance Campaign against the pass laws in South Africa women prayed outside the court where resisters were being tried for their defiance, and prayers were incorporated into the US Civil Rights campaign demonstrations (Sharp, 1973, Part 2: 137–8). Religious services have themselves been used as a means of dissent, or have been the starting point for protesting on the streets, for example the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Resistance and political change
• Part II: Central concepts and debates
• Part III: Implications of globalization for success of people power
• Conclusion
• Appendix: People power movements against political repression since 1975
• Bibliography
• Index