Leaderless revolutions and their

challenges: a PS21 discussion

with Srdja Popovic and Jack
Goldstone
February 9 2015

Jack Goldstone: Im very pleased to be hosting this group. This is one of several
kind of intellectual feasts that the Project for the Study of the 21 st Century is
organizing here and in London so I welcome those of you here in Washington today
and those of you who are getting the information via the internet. Im glad to have
you all here. Our guest today is Srda Popovich. Srda is an activist, a politician, and
an author. We have his latest book on sale here. Ive already bought my copy and I
urge you to do the same. Its called Blueprint for Revolution: How to use Rice
Pudding, Lego Men, and other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities,
Overthrow Dictators, or simply Change the World. That tells you our speaker is
someone with indefatigable optimism. He has been a speaker throughout the world
on the topic of nonviolent resistance and has been something of a guru for activists
in a wide variety of countries and movements.
I heard last week at a conference here in Washington that you can learn a lot from
scholars and books about nonviolent resistance, but there is absolutely no
substitute for the wisdom and inspiration of those who have actually participated in
movements that have achieved change and thats something that out guest has
done. Ill say briefly that my name is Jack Goldstone and I am a scholar at the
George Mason University and the Woodrow Wilson Institute. Ive spent most of my
career studying revolutions from the safety of the library and the armchair and
going over data and trying to discern patterns behind what this revolutionary
change and revolutionary success. So youll get the academic and the activist
perspectives here, maybe clashing, maybe merging, youll have to wait and see.
Im going to start with a few questions for our guest and then after a brief
conversation here well open the floor to all of you.
Srdja, again, thank you for coming here and let me say were sitting here, were
being tweeted and I hope this will be broadcast, at least the audio, on the web, and
I hope you get some traditional media coverage as well. But you said in one of your
presentations that you cannot change the world simply by sitting and clicking. With
all the enthusiasm we now about virtual communities, online activism, the role of
social media, Twitter revolutions, what are your reflections now on the role of social
media and making nonviolent resistance work?

Srdja Popovic: Well, first of all, glad being here, glad being part of PS21. I know
some great guys who are working there and I am honored to be on a PS21 event
and thank you to Peter Apps, who is not here, but who really made this thing.

Jack: Can everyone hear by the way? Good.

Srdja: So one of the reasons why we came out with this idea of Blueprint for
Revolution and this book presents a bunch of stories of the common people, which
I love to call hobbies, who are changing the world and some of them are traditional
leaders of political movements, people who we know from history, people like
Martin Luther King or Harvey Milk, and some of them are nowadays heroes who are
sitting in jails in Egypt or who are running the shows in places like Venezuela. And
what you will discover is that these are people like us and I think one of main
reasons we really wanted to step out of this book is that its people like us. Second,
is that these people are making change in the real world which addresses your
question on the social media. We tackle this a little bit in the book and there is a
great person in NYU, where I teach, and hes like Clay Shirky, hes a worldwide
expert on media mobilization and social media and has a great book called Here
Comes Everybody. He is super enthusiastic that new media will change the course
of nonviolent struggles.
I think there are three positive impacts on the new media, and were trying to put
this in a course at Harvard and NYU. First, new media makes things faster and
cheaper. So fifteen years ago if you wanted to organize a rally, you needed posters,
leaflets, radio commercials, knocking on doors, and a large organization. Plus it
came with a certain amount of risk because the people who proposed this are very
slow. Now I can make a Facebook group and everyone will know. The second very
important thing that new media brought to nonviolent struggles is the phenomenon
you call citizen journalism and wherever you can look in the world, even the most
offline place like Yemen, you can see people demonstrating but theyre videotaping
it on their cameras. So you can make sure that any kind of state/police brutality
that happens will be seen by the world. Unlike Assads father, who could kill twenty
thousand people in Hama twenty-five years ago, all he needed to do was expel
foreign journalists and nobody can see, it goes under the carpet. Now, whatever
you do, everybody sees it. The last, and in my case most important event that new
media brings is the power of horizontal learning. For us, learning from Gene Sharp,
learning from different academics in the Serbian struggle was a tough choice
because you really needed all of these fat volumes, and Sharp liker her books, and
putting them in a short manual and presenting them there. Now you look at, for
example, the power of viral video.
There is a little girl who made a viral video called Whats Wrong with Venezuela: In
a Nutshell and it became viral. Three million people have seen it. The price for
producing the video was anywhere between thirty and forty dollars. Now somebody
sees it in Ukraine. Here comes the video in Ukraine with seven million views. The

ways that groups can learn from this child is something that were really really
exploring now. My organization is called the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action
and Strategies and we produce this tool for activists so theyre available for free
download in six languages. Our book on how to create movements has been
downloaded seventeen thousand times during the time of the Green Revolution in
Iran. Can you imagine the level of effort and risk you need bring on the forbidden
book to a place like Iran in seventeen thousand copies? Its probably close to
impossible. We are now exploring the possibility of teaching courses online to the
activists so this is one big event.
But every coin has two sides. Im super thrilled about making things fast and
cheap, but, I will tell you, clicktivism is a big problem. We all remember many great
online campaigns like Kony 2012. It was super exciting, a lot of people were
working there. Millions were raised, but Kony is still unfortunately where Kony used
to be in 2012. The fact that youre liking the page for saving the polar bears
doesnt necessarily mean that you have saved the polar bears. So this is the
phenomenon of clicktivism. Nonviolent struggles are waged in the real world. The
second very important thing it can be used for is a tool against the actors because
the first thing a government will do now is track your Facebook password, so now it
can be used as a tool to lure your friends into a trap. Because unlike a phone,
where I can tell if its you or a secret police guy, I cant tell who is talking through
your social network profile. The last thing of great importance for me when it
comes to this real problem with new media is this phenomenon we call
Occupyism. What is it? You look at the tactics of nonviolent struggle, there are
two hundred of them and probably one hundred and fifty of them mentioned in this
book, and you always look at the tactics of dispersion. Concentration is super sexy
for media, but theyre very demanding on the part of the organizer to put ten
thousand people in one place. Its a waste. You want to use these ten thousand
people to cover more territory, to reach more people, especially if theyre doing the
high risk tactics of occupation. Look at Hong Kong. All mainland China needed to do
was sit and wait. And all they needed to do was maintain this protest day after day
after day, disrupting traffic, disrupting trade, making enemies of the very people
they tried to recruit as supporters. And all they had to do was sit and wait.
I think the real problem with new media is that however thrilling it may be to big
together a lot of people fast, gaining numbers in a nonviolent struggle, which is
partly the lesson in Blueprint for Revolution, if you gain numbers before you have
organization, you will lose the numbers or you will lose the nonviolent discipline and
end up with people throwing stones at the police. These are the big menaces. The
very power to summon a lot of people in one place leads you to this idea: Oh lets
occupy and lets go stay there forever. But then on day three, how are they going
to go to the toilet? On day six and day eight? You need to think about this stuff
before you click invite to ten thousand people on your Facebook event. So its a
double-headed sword. Its a great tool for organizers, but please dont think that
these battles are won in the virtual world. They are won and lost in the real world
which is where the change occurs.

Jack: Now you mentioned the ease of dispersing information. Sometimes I wonder
if the media has made it too easy. In the old days, you had to print mimeos and
task people to carry them out to certain areas, you had to organize on the basis of
building trust, building organization, learning to cooperate. And those things are
still absolutely important right?

Srdja Popovic: Absolutely. I think the power of the organizationThis is the thing
that the story book takes you through its a story of: It will never happen here.
You start thinking that fear and apathy in your society are too big to break. And
then you think big and start small. And small means achieving small, tangible
victories. Things like graffiti, recruiting ten people, street theater. These things are
tremendously important because they show your commitment, they show your
presence, but they also build your numbers. Also they teach your people how to do
stuff. And whenever you look at a nonviolent social change, and whenever it was
successful, there was a tremendous level of grassroots organization. And I think
nothing can replace a grassroots organization in such a type of movement.
Plus grassroots movements also guarantee that you can control your troops
because one of the thing you want to win at is unity, you need a unifying force. And
whenever you look at a conflict you can have the perfect conditions for change, like
in Venezuela now, but then you have disunited opposition which is completely
incapable of challenging the government because these guys spend too much
energy fighting each other. And then you look at the planning, which is exactly
what you say, you need meticulous planning from planning your strategy, planning
transition, to planning what you are going to do tomorrow. And then you need
nonviolent discipline, and I think a powerful grassroots organization is a recipe for
nonviolent discipline. And this is a skill, because one single stone or Molotov
cocktail can completely destroy the reputation of the movement. Plus it will give
fuel to your enemy to respond very actively and nastily.

Jack: I was with your friend Maria Stephan last week. She was in Washington.
Maria Stephan was coauthor of an extremely influential and important book that
analyzed the success of nonviolent resistance and finding over the last thirty-five
years that nonviolent movements have a much higher success rate in changing
regimes and leading to democracies and going against hard authoritarian regimes
than do violent movements. So it is very good evidence and encouragement of
Srdas point of view. But she also confided to me that in the last four years, the
data does not look as favorable to the success of nonviolent movements. If you
look at the Green Movement in Iran which did bring millions of nonviolent protesters
into the street, it did not get anywhere. Hong Kong, which you mentioned, I was in
Hong Kong and I could not imagine a more discipline or orderly social protest and
the young people in Hong Kong maintained for months, and yet, as you say, the
government just waited them out. In Bahrain you probably had a larger
mobilization as a portion of the population than anywhere in history, over ten

percent of the entire population, seems to have been involved on the peak day of
the movements and yet, that was suppressed.
So this is frustrating at the very least, so let me ask: Do you think that dictators are
also learning and becoming more effective? Do the tactics have to change in order
for things to work? I mean, do you think the same things that worked before 2010
will also work in the future or does the formula really have to be revamped?

Srdja: Well its both. I think, first of all, that there is another great book youll want
to read if youre into dictatorship. Its called The Dictators Learning Curve. It is
written by Phil Dobson, the very person who is taking me to an NBA game after this
event here and a dear friend and a great guy. He was looking at how dictators
learn. So we know the groups learn, we know there is horizontal learning, we know
that there is training, and we know that the groups are very creative in coming out
with new tactics. But also dictators learn. I think the main lesson that people like
Putin got, was that they need to prevent these events before they come into place
and before the movements get into the engagement phase, which is the phase
when we are talking about the numbers, the organization, and the strategies. And
this is where suppressing the movement is really really high cost, when you have
tens of thousands are in the street, you really need to invest a lot into breaking this
down. And you can see that the dictators are learning as well and I think theyre
learning several things.
The first thing they learn is to put a velvet glove on the iron fist. There are more
NGOs shut down in oppressive places in the world for not following fire regulations,
as opposed to being anti-governmental. They will find a sneaky way to ban your
work. Oh its absolutely legal to have a demonstration in Russia, all you need to do
is put down a $10,000 deposit. Which of course you dont have. Its like, you
know, there are ways that they try to discover. Secondly, its also a propaganda
war. And now there are groups that are trying to distract people from the very idea
to get to this knowledge because this knowledge is coming from the CIA, secret
service, whatsoever. So they are trying to label this thing as something that is
exported/imported rather than something that is indigenous, because the worst
nightmare of this type of regime is people discovering that they, in fact, have
power. Which is why the Blueprint for Revolution is talking about stories of Frodo,
you know, the most unlikely person to bring the change to Middle Earth is, at the
end, the person who brought the change to Middle Earth. We looked through the
history of these uprisings and its always the outsiders, the power of outsiders in
modern political life, whether we agree with them or disagree with them, its
growing. We are looking at the outsiders playing the very important roles in
elections and mainstream politics in Europe as we are speaking. So, I mean, this
role of unlikely political players which are somehow shaking the sclerotic and not
very responsive mainstream political institutions in the world we are living in. But
what we need to is, we need to enable these groups to learn faster. Weve spent
the last two years cutting the stack of content down to the very basic level so my
organization will be out with free video on how you create a vision of tomorrow, on

how you challenge authority, how you bring down regimes. Like five minute
animated cartoons designed for people, and of course translated and subtitled in
different languages. And this book is more for college students. This is not our
attempt to get scientific. At the same time, we are talking with Harvard and NYU
and several very prominent schools about how we can structure the online courses
because we want hundreds of people across the world to participate. And it comes
with a great cost.
And, you know, getting educational institutions in this will not only help educate
activists. We need elites who are educated in understanding what the movements
do. And we really have the elites who have a great idea about what movements do.
I mean, look at the contemporary media. The reason Im honored that Peter invited
me to be with PS21 is that how pissed off I get when I watch mainstream media.
Every time there is an anchor standing in front of a crowd saying, How beautiful
spontaneous demonstration is I mean, for Gods sake, there are only two types
of political movements in history: theyre either spontaneous or successful. Ok,
there is no such thing as a spontaneous and successful nonviolent movement.
Because you dont get from ten to ten percent of the population by being
spontaneous. No, you get there by being strategic, by planning, by recruiting,
achieving small victories, getting to unity, and also focusing on two things, which
this book is about. One is doing political ju-jitsu with oppression because you can
make oppression backfire and groups have done this in the past. And, at the same
time, the use of humor. And this book tells a lot about how humor is an unlikely, but
very very powerful tool against different opponents. Sometimes all it takes to bring
down state actors and politicians is knowing how sensitive they are.

Audience Question: Could you give us an example that you didnt include in the
book?

Srdja: I can give you several examples. From the point of humor, we coined this
thing called laughtivism, and were looking for it throughout the many many
different ages. Serbia. The Serbs are known for not being politically correct. We
are super non-politically correct and we grew up on Monty Python slang so its the
worst combination of Serbian non-political correctness and evil British cynical
humor. It cant get much worse than that. So we started bybecause we were a
really small group of people we took a petrol barrel and put the face of Mr.
President on the petrol barrel. And there is a hole in the top of the barrel so you put
a coin in. And there is a bat so you can hit him. And then you will leave it in the
main street, like Georgetown, where people are running with their bags. So
immediately, you show people how the drill works and there is a line of the people
ready to do this. Thats not the funniest part. The funniest part is when the police
arrive because: What will they do? Leave people to hit the face of the beloved Mr.
President so people everywhere around the country get the idea that this is the way
to spend the afternoon? Or arrest people for doing this and accuse them of what? I
mean, they would be released in five minutes. So of course they did the most

stupid thing: they arrested the barrel. So now theyre dragging the barrel into the
police car and stuff like that. Photo Slate published this photo which is in the book.
So, where ever you look, humor plays a major, gigantic role of successful nonviolent
movements. You want to look at Russia in 2012. You have these protests in St.
Petersburg and Moscow and the government was clever not to bring them down
but, anywhere else, you couldnt protest so in small town in Siberia, which is the
place I cant find on a map, five thousand people beg, and here are the people with
a great idea. They take the Lego toys from their kits and build a Lego town and
here come the Lego toys with signs that say 106% for Putin, protesting the
election fraud. And the first day, everyone is taping, everyone is having, the police
are happy, but then it goes on YouTube and it get viral. The Kremlin calls the police
chief in this little town of Siberia and says, This must stop. So now the protesters,
when they apply for the next protest, which is on Thursday, they get a ban signed
by the chief of police for the demonstration of one hundred Lego soldiers, thirty toy
cars, fifty Lego toys are banned because the toys are not citizens of Russia and only
citizens of Russia can protest. And now we are talking about Putin being afraid of
toys and I will remind that this is the guy who spends a lot time posing shirtless,
wrestling Siberian tigers, saving dolphins from drowning, all this kind of stuff. Hes
afraid of toys. The difference between simple political satire and the laughtivism is
the framework of dilemma action. And this is effective because someone was
putting the opponent into a lose-lose scenario. So if they let toys protest,
everybody will see the toy protest, but if ban toy protests then they are afraid of
toys.
So now you understand how this drill functions. This idea of laughter and the use of
humor and of course there are several others working on this, and there is a young
Thai girl who published her PhD in the use of laughter in nonviolent struggle. This is
a growing field. And of course I am not a scientist in this field, but I am getting the
fantastic stories which are very inspiring, and what is really really interesting is that
whenever you squeeze one space, it somehow appears somewhere else. And the
more youre squeezing, the more of the laughtivism youre getting. I think the role
of humor, which we tried to explain in the book, is threefold. First, humor breaks
fear. When you need to go to a surgery, the last thing you want to hear is how the
doctor will open your chest, and operate on the heart and then here comes the knife
and scissors. You want to hear a joke and then you get relaxed. Second, humor is a
cool factor. Who is the most popular person you know in your private life: the
richest one, the smartest one, the tallest one, or the one who can make you laugh?
So laughter is the natural attraction to the people and movements are building this
cool factor. Last but not of least importance, there is phenomenon with politicians,
not only autocrats, democratically elected politicians get this. They call this mirror
disease. Because theyve seen too much of themselves on the cover pages of the
newspaper, on the billboard, on the poster, on the TV, and they start believing this
image. So the moment you start mocking them, they dont know how to deal with it
which will probably lead them to do something stupid, which will leave them looking
even more ridiculous at the end of the day. So Laugh Your Way to Victory is a
chapter in the book.

Jack: Well, Im going to be the dry academic here. I agree with you that laughter is
critical, but I going to ask you to get serious for a moment here.

Srdja: Very difficult to makes Serbs serious. You tried bombing our country and it
didnt work.

Jack: You did a wonderful TED video in 2011 on how to topple dictators in which
you described 2011 very colorfully and accurately I thought as a bad year for bad
people. And it was. Certainly, Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and
Muammar Gaddafi lost their countries, Bashar al-Assad lost about a third to a half of
his country and it was a year really full of hope. I mean, the lessons that you tried
to communicate and that other nonviolent activists tried to communicate seemed to
be paying off. In Egypt, people took back the street, they took back control of their
country, and they achieved a popular election for president for the first time in
history. In Libya, people managed to unite from the North and the South, the East
and the West against great odds and overcame a very brutal regime that required
bombing as a support, but they did overcome Gaddafi and his mercenaries. And in
Tunisia they had it best of all. The lessons of organization seemed to be followed
and people not only organized to force Ben Ali out, but they continued to use their
organizations to build the basis for compromise and new institutions. Unfortunately,
we now look at 2014 and it looks like a good year for bad people.

Srdja: Or the year of bad hangovers as I like to call it.

Jack: Yes perhaps. Or a bad year for good people if you want to look at it that way
because a lot of good people have taken some very harsh blows in Syria, the
Ukraine, and in Egypt. So my question now is: reflecting on whats happened in the
last three years, what lessons do you draw about how did things that started so well
turn out in such a disappointing fashion? Are there things like opportunities that
were missed, lessons that are even more vital for the future? How do we
understand what happened because, frankly, a lot of my friends in Egypt, and even
the Ukraine are starting to lose hope. They think that this doesnt work so it was be
great if you could say, Dont give up hope. Here are some things that could have
been done differently, and there are still reasons to be hopeful going forward.

Srdja: Absolutely, and I think the challenge of finishing what you started, which is
one of the things we talk about, it starts with Egypt, the book starts with Egyptian
activism and Serbia and it ends with them being in a desperate situation. So its

like we are following several of these things. First of all, failures are the places to
learn, far more than the victories, and I think this is what we need to all look at.

Jack: Spoken like a true entrepreneur.

Srdja: And the point here is that its really difficult to answer the question, Why do
movements fail? There are so many different reasons why movements fail and
they can fail in the very early stage like Occupy if they cant define the strategy or
fail to build up the numbers or the serious organization. They can fail in the
engagement phase by making strategy mistakes. In 2007 in Burma, they built
number and then they just lost the offense and allowed the military to do whatever
they wanted to do. From Tiananmen, there is a story here from a Chinese dissident,
whom I met during the research for the book, and he told me this tremendous thing.
There were a lot of things that the Chinese government was ready to succumb to
during the negotiations in Tiananmen. If these people would go for a settled
agreement, proclaimed victory, and got out of there, China would probably be a
very different place right now. There are also many many failures. If you look at the
Stephan/Chenoweth book called, Why Civil Resistance Works, and they come out
with the hard data, and I love these two women. They are my idols and I am glad I
can call Maria a friend. I also know Erica. They say that forty-two percent of
successful nonviolent struggles end up in a democracy. Thats a lot. If you have a
cancer called Mubarak and someone gives you medicine with a forty-two percent
chance to get rid of this cancer, you will probably take the medicine without even
thinking. But then what about the other fifty-eight percent? This is a large portion.
And then you look at the successful transitions and the messy transitions. The only
things we can say are form our experiences. Im an expert in freshwater fish not
political movements when it comes to my MA. I do teach political movements, but
this is America so everything is possible. The point is that you can look the
successful and unsuccessful stories. One of the reasons I think the Serbian
transition was fairly successful, in that terms that you live in a stable democracy,
that youre going towards the EU, whether the EU is the same animal we dreamed
about ten years ago is not really important, its what the movement wanted and it
got it. And then you know we had free and fair elections and its a different place
than it was under Milosevic, being relatively peaceful, normal policy towards
neighbors as opposed to war with neighbors. So all these things are in place. How
come?
First of all, I think what went particularly bad in some of the cases was that these
people did not understand this conflict as a video game. If you play video games,
you understand that video games are made of levels. And then, when Mubarak is
down you dont claim game over. You just say, Ok, the more nasty people are
coming in a nastier spaceship and they will throw more bombs at you. A new army
of Nazi zombies, if this is a video game, is coming. So here come the transitions.

One thing to understand is that this is a process and that this process should be
planned very early.
The second thing is losing unity too early and think unity, which is very important
for victory whether we are talking about the political unity which was important in
Serbia or the religious unity or the ethnic unity, which was part of the reason why
Syria failed, because the Sunnis couldnt bring the Kurds and the Christians to their
side in opposed Assad. Thats exactly the reason Nelson Mandela succeeded in
South Africa because he brought colored and the Indians, which were the two tiny
minorities, but very important and they just left the white Afrikaans naked and
standing alone and oppressing everybody. I think this unity was very important
after the process. Look at the Ukraine in 2003. Tremendous nonviolent struggle.
Great victory in the Orange Revolution and then Tymoshenko and Yushchenko start
fighting the moment they start sharing the office and it all falls apart. Losing unity,
not understanding the necessity for transition, and also I think the big problem is
building around persona not values. I think if you oust Mubarak, but dont say, This
is the Egypt we want to make The reason why Serbias transition was successful
was because we knew what we wanted early in the process and when we won we
put pressure on the new government to deliver it without even giving them the
chance to think that Milosevics shoes are very comfortable. The real problem is
that when the new guys step in they may find that they can fire minsters or deploy
the military or be on the TV all day. Its a very attractive thing.
Srdja: Telling the story of the meeting I had with Occupy, a very good friend of
mine, Todd Gitlin, who is a very prominent lefty teacher at Columbia University, told
me Oh you need to meet these guys!

And that was at the peak of their popularity, I think October or November 2011.
Everybody was super thrilled. And I was finding myself sitting with maybe 50 people
in a room like this, I think it was in NYU in Washington Square in New York.
Exceptionally bright, exceptionally educated, exceptionally vocal, really great group
of people, you can tell that some of them are you knowI love sitting with people
who are more intelligent than me. And, first of all, I couldnt figure out what they
want. Which is very difficultif you cant explain this to me, its very unlikely that
you will recruit people who know less about the political movements. It was only an
endless list of the things they are against.

So the way you want to look at your political movement or nonviolent struggle, and
this is what the book tells a story about, isyou are the king for the day, how will
you fix whats wrong? Its like, you need to think dreaming big and then doing small
things. So if we hate things because they are 1, 2, 3, 4, what is the alternative? And
how are we going to fix this problem? If we need crooks to be in jail, once we put
them in jail, who is going to run the show? And all of these things should be put as
your movements vision.

And then you build a strategy and then you build tactics. Too often movements start
with tactics and stick with tactics, thats a big problem. Second problem is
inclusivity. And if you look at the hard figures of Stefan Chengovic (?) you will see
that movements need anywhere between 2.5 and 8 percent of populations to
succeed. So all you really need to do is understand that the numbers are not on the
fringe, theyre in the mainstream. So while we say super lefty, super liberal, super
this and super that, you will never be able to build these numbers.

This book tells a story about Harvey Milk learning this the hard way and trying to
run once on a gay platform, losing, trying to run twice, concentrating on the vote
from San Francisco, losing. And then understanding that what people in San
Francisco really care about is not sexuality but the dogs poop. And then saying,
whether straight or gay, Im the person who will get rid of in San Francisco the dogs
poop. And he gets it. And the rest is, of course, history.

Now, the next Republican presidential candidate will probably be pro gay marriage.
Okay, but it takes the small things. So my point with them was that enthusiasm is
great, topic of social inequality is the most important topic of the 21 st century. So
the necessity for the movement is there.

But you look at what they do and you say okay, what if they just named themselves
The 99 Percent? Instead of naming themselves after the tactic. Tactics: very
demanding, very hard to maintain, plus, this guy has to teach, he shares the values,
but he cant sit all day long, he has work to do. I have a 6 month old son. He
demands my attention. However passionately I stand for what they do, itsso on
one level, its understanding that you need the rednecks from Iowa to join this
movement, not only movement of liberal lefty people. Now the powerful rap singer
comes in, says I want to support you, and you say you rich scumbag! You dont do
this--you want to embrace, you to grow. Movements are building numbers by
pulling, not pushing. So you really want to find a way to become inclusive and let
these people shift sides and come to your point of view.

So I absolutely agree that the change of distribution in power in this country and
many other countriesI mean Russia is far more unfair than America when it comes
to power concentration. Serbia is not falling very much behind. So I mean its like
this is the problem of the modern world. But in order to do it, you want to look at
some of the movements like how Spanish Indignados survived and transformed
themselves into something that will probably be the winning party in these
elections. By going into every neighborhood, by understanding that they need the

uneducated housewives together with left-leaning cool students with piercings, and
going outside of the zone of comfort.

The real problem with these movements is that sometimes you feel so good and so
right that you dont even want to spoil this. And also its problematic with Occupy
that they have adopted this [waves hands] we need to build a consensus around
everything every time. Thats death for an organization. Democracy should exist in
these organizations but democracy executing organizations is anarchy and you will
never get there.

So these are all the reasons why this movement failed and Im very sad for it but
the necessity is there and it takes some time for people to rethink what they want
and to come back with what they want. But well see more and more anti-inequality
movements in the Western world as the time comes. And some of them will be
super organized and turning themselves into viable political forces, some of them
like in Bosnia will only be the crime of people breaking out of the buildings, but well
see this stuff over and over again because this is the big problem. We are
witnessing a generation of young peopleI was in NYU last week and you teach this
to the students.

Jack: [] were seeing the revival of this utopian view. This time it takes the role of
a religious utopianism like we havent seen for several hundred years in the West.
But the Islamic State and the Dayashas are kind of pushing this vision of a purified
Sunni society as an ideal, virtuous society and they kill anyone who gets in their
way. The military in Egypt is adopting the opposite view, they see all religion as
dangerous and they condemn everyone and so on and so onand unfortunately,
yes, youre right, were getting there again, but it doesnt always have to happen.
There are at least some examples of how to get to a better place.

Althea Middleton-Detzner: My name is Althea, and Ive worked with the

International Center on Nonviolent Conflict for a number of years which is how I met
Srdja. I was wondering if you could go back to talking a little bit about what you
mentioned earlier about when movements build their numbers too quickly but dont
have the organizational structure to support it. I think it actually touches on the
coalitions conversation as well where oftentimes movements dont work with
institutionalized groups, NGOs, etc, because theyre not really supportive of their
tactics a lot of times or doing things through institutionalized channels. So how do
movements sort of negotiate the momentum in the structure? This is a conversation
that comes up a lot with former Occupy folks here in the US and Id love to hear
your thoughts on that.

Srdja: Well, first of all, glad to see you here, and Im really glad this question comes
through. As you said, also, I think theres a very underestimated understanding of
why this coalition building is important and I think the first step is to see the vision
of tomorrow. It is, what is the smallest common denominator your movement comes
out with and how this relates to different quotient groups.

And in Serbian experience we are really reluctant to talk to political parties because
the very reason that the king was put in place [?] was that the political parties and
opposition miserably failed. But we were very open to speak with student groups
and with independent media and with university groups and with labor unions. So
one of the things we do, and we decide to teach it in the workshops, we put this
very traditional thing on the table which is called a spectrum of allies.

So start by listing different groups in society and put them anywhere between 1 and
10 where the 1 would be super opposed to you and ready to act and 10 would be
the people who you started with at the very beginning. And then you start looking
at their motivations. Why are the people opposed to gay rights? What about gun
control, why is the right opposed to gun control? I mean, whatever is the topic that
youre fighting with, you want to put the people on a different kind of spectrum. If
youre planning a movement, you have a spectrum of allies on the table to look at
where the numbers lie.

One thing we learned through our experience especially working with different
groups is that too rarely groups are ready to listen. Listening is a crucial skill in
nonviolent struggle because you need to understand that people or groups will
participate in your movement because there is something for them. People are
selfish. Not too much people are activists per se. They want to see there is
something for them. And that something could be like, you know, equal education
opportunities for your kids. It doesnt necessarily need to be something very
political or very ethical like you know financial equality. And you listen to these
groups and try to tailor your vision of tomorrow so it becomes kind of the smallest
common denominator that you start your negotiations about.

And as Maria, we can give her the chair and let her teach, because she knows
negotiations far better than me, as she would say, you do constantly two types of
negotiations in your process. One is horizontalyou negotiate with your potential
allies and you try to put this group a little bit bigger. And then you need to negotiate
what you want to do with them. And then you negotiate what is the feedback of this
because you know Churchill said however the strategy runs, even if good, you may
want to look at the results.

Groups too rarely do this kind of stuff. And then the next step is you do vertical
negotiations, you negotiate with your opposition. Maybe you are knocking on the
open door. Maybe you use the tactic of conversion, maybe I can convert you to my
goal. Maybe a little irritation is enough. Too rarely movements say, no, get engaged
in the conflict only if youre equal. If youre weak, considerate itif youre strong, go
in and demand surrender. Dont fight. The conflict is the final last resort.

So I think negotiating the vision and then negotiating the strategy and then
negotiating the tactics and then negotiating the position. And this is so exhausting.
And its far less sexy than bringing people to the street and shouting to bring down
the government. But this is the necessary job that should be done.

This is when I want to look at the title of this event, which is, by the way, the title of
a book by another good friend, Leaderless Revolutions its called. There is this big
misconception in nonviolent struggle which Althea and me have heard over and
over: you cant do this because you dont have a charismatic leader. And if you look
at the history of the nonviolent movements you will actually find all kinds of
animals. You will find movements that have a charismatic leader like Gandhi who is
at the same time the strategy, the speaker, the flagship and the CFO.

Then you have another type of movement by people like Nelson Mandela, and these
people are not more than flags. Because theyre sitting in a damn jail! They couldnt
lead things. Nelson Mandela had to write, to write one letter every six months.
Which was of course read by authorities, so, I mean, what could he lead? He could
grow a garden on Robin Island I suppose.

Then you have the type of movements like Chilean, also kind of the
Czechoslovakian and the Serbian, who couldnt really put a finger on a person and
say okay, this was the guy, or the woman. But leadership is important, and this is
the thing people too often underestimate, and I think the real problem with social
media is that it is giving us this idea of total anarchy or total democracy, however
you want to put it, that we are all believers. And yes, in a successful movement we
are training people to be leaders and to really feel like leaders. But there must be a
certain level of organization. Somebody needs to get tactics executed.

Somebody needs to take responsibility for failure. Somebody needs to lead from the
front, though we have a president who leads from behind which is exactly a phrase I
dont understand

Jack: We dont either.

Srdja: I didnt understand it because you know if you want to lead a nonviolent
movementand then you need two types of leadership. There is a great friend of
mine and the Yoda of nonviolent struggle, Bob Hally, who was mentioned in the
book, he often says this is like watching the wild river from the top of the
mountain. You have somebody sitting on the top of the mountain and then
somebody who takes care of the scrottage. Because if youre in a boat you see only
the next curve of the river. If youre involved in demonstrations and day-to-day
tactics.

And it is so seductive. Ive been with movements. Ive been to the exciting places.
There is nothing more thrilling than the smell of the tear gas. But if you spend too
much time smelling the tear gas then youll find yourself too busy for planning. The
moment that the leaders tell you, oh we cant plan were too busy, is the moment
when the failure starts.

So negotiations are important, smallest common denominator is important, which is

the reason why we named one of the chapters in this book Its Unity, Stupid.

Jack: If I can add something to this, this is picture of me with Umbrella Man in Hong
Kong

Srdja: Umbrella You.

Jack: Yeah, Umbrella Meif youre gonna have a successful movement, you have to
be willing to change tactics. The Civil Rights Movement in this country, they used
sit-ins, they used marches, voter mobilization tactics and bus rides, and whatever
probing weakness they could find. What happened in Hong Kong was an initial great
success, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the street. Defying the tear
gas, getting the police to back down. But because of that success, they didnt feel
the need to change tactics.

[] I saw national guardsmen with automatic weapons stationed throughout Los

Angeles. I thought, this is really sad that its come to this, that I actually have to feel
reassured to see armed soldiers standing in the streets of my city. So we dont want
to get there. And because of that most regions have had much more effect with
police training and community relations.

As it happened, Ferguson was not one of those. Ferguson was unfortunately one of
those areas where there was still a residual effect of an overwhelmingly white police
force in what had become a majority black community. And thats always been a
high risk situation and its not surprising that it started. What is, I think, good is that
it did provoke a series of examinations of similar incidents around the country and a
series of protests that were national in scope. And confessions on the part of police
commissioners and mayors that they want something done, they dont want this
repeated.

So you can criticize some of the actions by protestors but overall I thought the
system worked as it should, and by the system I mean the freedom of people to
demonstrate, to get their voice heard, and a responsibility of leaders to respond.

Srdja: Three short answers and I think this will be the end. I like this because of
course its understanding the American context very well. One of the points that we
figured out is that the social distance is exactly what our opponent wants us to
have. And it is us, and them. And we started by howling at the police, so when they
see policemen they go ow ow ow, like we are not better than the dogs.

Obviously they were super happy meeting us after that.

And we ended up chanting at them [something in Serbian] which is like blue guys,
blue guys which is the color of the dress of the national soccer team. It took us 8
years to go from here to there and understand that the policemen were just men or
women. Thats one thing. Its like one of the things.

Second thing, what you want to do with this type of movement is individualize or
totalize. One of the things weve done specifically well in Serbia is calling the
majority of the police people and focusing on those who are really torturing and
beating and doing this for fun or the ideology, and saying okay, these are the
people with names and badge numbers. So we want a campaign of social ostracism
against this guy, by telling everybody else in the police: we are doing this for your
best interest, because these guys are giving you a bad name. So this is not like us
and them. These are just a few idiots who are killing people and giving you a bad
name.

When you reshape the narrative that way you will find a tremendous number of
policemen ready to listen. And now you can talk these people and understand what
they want. But also you show yourself as somebody who is normal, because they
have also been propagandized with the idea that it is us and them. Because the

core of the police force, they want to keep them on their side. And this is one
lesson.

When it comes to nonviolent discipline I think this is key to understanding

nonviolent struggle. And as you said with the Hong Kong activists, and we wrote a
piece in Slate about how thats the worlds most polite protestorsthese guys
published a manual on how to deal with the police weeks before they went in the
street. And they performed trainings for hundreds of people to make sure that none
of their activists were out of line. And they make it an ideology.

Also, one of the things that you want to do, you can bet that there will be a new
case of a white policeman killing a black person in anger, as you can bet that there
will be a next opportunity for launching a nationwide campaign for gun control.
Because you are going to have a crazy kid who goes and shoots up a Walmart
again. You cant say when, but these things are happening. So you want to make
sure that you have a movement in place which is ready to respond to this, by clever
tactics, by low risk tactics rather than going in front of a police station when people
are angry. Because this is a recipe for disaster.

So I have a very interesting exercise for my Harvard class and that was one of the
topics, this, and then someone came out proposing actually invitingthe real
problem is as you say the white policemen in the black neighborhoods. They are
behaving as an occupation force. Their psychology is the psychology of the
occupation force. And they are patrolling in a hostile environment where they are
considered an occupation force. So breaking this perception, whether by employing
different police persons, but also bringing these people to the lunch after the church
event, because this is how the people in these neighborhoods build communities.
And they do invite white atheists to this type of event. Ive been to a few.

So I mean its not very difficult to develop this type of conversation. And this is
actually drying the swamp as opposed to killing these kids.

Jack: We dont have that much time so Ill take any other questions as a group.

Nejla Asimovic: Im Nejla, I intern in this building actually, so, I have two
questions. The first one is this idea of clicktivism that I find really interesting and
increasingly problematic. So Id like to hear your thoughts on how can we fight this
growing phenomenon. And the other thing is, we talk a lot about unity, but how do
we go about achieving unity in divided communities? I mean Im from Bosnia so
division is our way of life so

Jack: Second question?

Audience Member: My question involves inclusion in an institution where you have

to exclude some people, and also about your strategy for finding some
momentumwould you accept one from anybody, or would some organizations or
people be told to go away?

Jack: Third question?

Diane Perlman: Thanks, Diane Perlman, I study conflict analysis and resolution. This
is a really different context, but the UN Trading Review Conference is coming up and
every year hundreds of NGOs will be presentingthere are all kinds of dynamics
soIm thinking of humor strategies and applying this to that.

Jack: So we have clicktivism, unity and divided

Srdja: Inclusion, funding and?

Jack: Making nuclear threats funny.

Srdja: Okay, so, unity first. I think that its a great challenge but in our experience it
is exactly the unity that is most difficult to achieve that is most important to
achieve. So in the Serbian case it was political unity, in places like Bosnia it would
beI mean, these are very much common problems. I had a great conversation
with the editor in chief of one of the Bosnian papers recently. And we went through
this over and over.

So its like, how the hell can you cooperate on things like unemployment,
corruption, a very inefficient state system? I mean, Bosnia has the largest number
of paid elected officials per capita in the worldor in Europe, like maybe secondlargest in the world. These guys have like, one minister, one MP for 7 people

Nejla: Like one in five people run for president. Like who does that?

Srdja: Yes! Every other Bosnian is an elected paid official. So its probably the most
inefficient andso there are so many things on which you can cooperate and
finding the smallest common denominator can sometimes be tough but you can do
it, and I think Bosnians and Serbs, theyre capable of cooperating. Especially
because theyre having a very lousy economic perspective, they feel humiliated.
And I think there can be a smallest common denominator for people to function
there.

What was funny is that the people who were protesting, theyre from different parts
of Bosnia, which was completely uncooperative but they were protesting for the
same reasons. So that was really weird. I agree with you.

Clictivism, you dont fight clicktivism, you just understand that it and new media are
the tools, not the means. And you stop measuring things by numbers of clicks.
Thats what the new media brought us, the super fast oh, this has been shared
3,000 times! This is really important! No, its not really important, it doesnt make a
change on the ground.

Inclusion and exclusion are really interesting stuff. When you talk about nonviolent
discipline. It is commitment to nonviolence. So one of the tricks you need to apply,
its like on one level you preach the discipline, second level you train your troops to
be nonviolent when faced with a risk of getting violent. Third and very important, to
avoid being aligned with the groups who stand for violence. And there have been
numerous cases where its like, we have this problem with soccer fans in Serbia.
They were super anti-Milosevic. But the moment they saw the police they would get
into a fight. We ended up organizing human chains protecting the police from antiregime soccer fans. It may sound bizarre but that was really really important at the
time.

The very interesting point was done in Italy. There was a series of demonstrations in
support of Occupy in November 2011. And one of the things when you organize a
demonstration in Rome, you know that the Black Bloc will be there. Like the Black
Bloc is this bunch of radical people, or anarchists, Im not really sure what they
stand for. They are creating havoc. And they appear and spoil every single
demonstration for a good purpose including G8 Summit and then all you see is a
Black Bloc burning cars. A leftist in Italy demonstrates, all you see is a Black Bloc
burning cars. For some reason if you have one hundred thousand people
demonstrating and these people have five people burning the cars, guess who is on
the cover page of tomorrows New York Times? These five idiots.

So what the Italians did was particularly good. They organized a kind of contest, and
I think there was some kind of awards, like funny awards, like you get a cookie or
something like that, for the best photo or video of the people from Black Bloc
committing violence. So they actually trained their own troops to help police
document but also to help media understand what it is all about.

Its very easy for a Reuters camera to take a photo of 10,000 people peacefully
demonstrating and then a shot of a burning car and what you get on CNN looks very
different from the message you want to send. Plus, the people who spent so much
time training people in nonviolent discipline get a very bad name. So you dont want
to be aligned with groups like that and you need to say very early in the process
everybodys welcome if there is a commitment to nonviolence.

And, yes, funding, this is a really interesting thing. And I think the big thing here is
understanding that first, if youre fighting the state, you will never be capable of
fighting it on material resources because of course the state has budgets, they have
taxes and resources. And they will be much richer than you. If youre fighting the
big corporation, same thing.

So one of the things we want to do is to bypass this. The way to bypass this is to
focus a lot on investment and training and recruiting the volunteers. Because the
moment my momentum was at the peak, we had twenty or thirty thousand daily
activist supporters. Im not talking about people with signs or a piece of paper, Im
talking about somebody ready to do the stickers, ready to demonstrate, ready to
call the police station, like, you know. This is forty thousand working hours a day,
equivalent.

Now we are talking about a McDonalds-size corporation and you dont need to pay
for these people! So building your volunteer base is one way to compete with the
material resources of your opponent. And of course we need to put this base in use.

When it comes to the funding you will look at the three circles of funding. The first
one would be, if you expand your membership base, you will be able to fundraise
within your membership base. Plus new media gives you the great opportunity of
crowdsourcing which is something that groups are using more and more although
that wasnt happening in Serbia.

The second one would be, you will find the pillar of the business community. The
moment you become effective you will find the businessesfirst the small
businesses and then the big businesseswe have the businessmen who are sitting

with the government daily on press conferences meeting us in the bars at night and
giving us the money. Because the way these guys work, they play red on roulette,
but they also want to play a little bit the black, because you never know how it
willand their interest is to run their business however change dictates.

And last and most important, you can take money from internationals, but you want
to avoid governments. Because the governments often dont have friends, they
have interests. So if you can use the money for your own purposes instead of
following somebody elses agenda, I would advise to do that. If you are not sure
whether this money will taint you, I say dont take it. Because its always easy to
bypass the money and fill it with more work. So this is the money issue.

How to make nuclear conference interesting? Well, I dont know, make them read
this book.

Diane: The NGOs, yeah.

Srdja: The NGOs. I think there are plenty of NGOs across the world who do very
important stuff. Imif you read the book you will find me sometimes being very
evil towards the NGOism of this world because I found thisI really hate finding
myself in conferences where you find people from oppressed and poor countries in
Africa running around in their suits shooting out the phrases like possibility-building
or social entrepreneurship. I think these guys are actually wasting the resources of
the real guys in the field. Which doesnt necessarily need to relate to the nuclear
weapon control and I think there are a lot of good NGOs across the world and this is
why we really wrote this book, simply and easy, not for the real scientists like my
friend over here, like his colleague and my great friend Lester Kurtz

Jack: Yeah, yeah.

Diane: So even I can understand it.

Srdja: Even I can understand it!

Jack: I also wrote a simple book on revolutions. Its called Revolutions: A Very Short
Introduction, its about 140 pages so its even shorter I think.

Srdja: How many footnotes?

Jack: None! Its Oxford University Press and its 5,000 years of revolution from
ancient Greece to the Arab revolutions.

Diane: Do you have any here?

Jack: No, sorry. Its like six dollars for an e-version, I mean, really cheap on the net.

Revolutions have been with us for thousands of years. Its surprising that people
dont learn the lessons. You see this over and over again because were captured by
this myth of revolution, that if you just get enough people in a crowd to show up one
day, the world will change. I wish it was that simple. But it takes coalition building,
organizational building, thinking about the day after the revolution. And the day
after that, and the year after that. Keeping a focus on your goals and not being
distracted by the immediate conflicts.

These are hard things to keep in mind, but they are what we learn. And its good to
know the lessons from this book or my book. I was actually pleased to find out, a lot
of convergents here, right, in how we think about these things. Now, you can buy
Srdjas book right here, sixteen dollars, and lets applaud our speaker.
This was a talk that I wish had gone out to a thousand or ten thousand people, but
even for every one of you here, if you tell one or two friends and ask them to look at
this book it will eventually reach a thousand or more. Thats the magic of
communication. So thank you all very much for being here, thanks to the Project for
Study of the 21st Century for organizing this and keep your eye out for more such
events, its gonna be a fun ride.