Missing in action: essential context in the Israeli attack on Gaza

Missing in action: essential context in the Israeli attack on Gaza
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
16 January 2024

“Most studies carried out prior to the current fighting in Gaza… have repeatedly found that it is the Israeli perspective that is favoured” in broadcast news coverage, Greg Philo and Mike Berry from the Glasgow Media Group recently noted in Open Democracy. Moreover, their own research in the 2000s found important historical background was often missing from UK media reporting.

For example, during the second intifada (the Palestinian uprising from 2000 to 2005) the two academics sampled 3,500 lines of transcribed news text from the first three weeks of the rebellion on BBC1 and ITV1 lunchtime, early evening and late news bulletins. Only 17 lines across both channels mentioned any aspect of the history of the conflict.

Since the October 7 attack on Israel, the mainstream media has continued to ignore crucial context and information.

Israel is using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war in Gaza

On October 9 Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant stated Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Predictably, in December Human Rights Watch reported “the Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip”, which is a war crime.

Israel targets medical facilities in Gaza

In December, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported “at least 364 attacks on healthcare services have been recorded in the occupied Palestinian territory” since October 7, “resulting in at least 553 people killed and 729 injured”. Israel has declared an “unrelenting war” on the health system in Gaza, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health Tlaleng Mofokeng stated. “The practice of medicine is under attack.”

In November, Médecins Sans Frontières reported one of their evacuation convoys “came under fire in Gaza City in what immediately appeared to be a deliberate attack against clearly identified MSF vehicles” (“all elements point to Israeli army responsibility,” was the report’s title).

This is not new. Based on testimony from doctors, nurses, and ambulance personnel, in 2014 Amnesty International called for an immediate investigation “into mounting evidence that the Israel Defense Forces launched apparently deliberate attacks against hospitals and health professionals in Gaza, which have left six medics dead”.

Israel has a long history of using human shields

“Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as human shields,” B’Tselem, Israel’s premier human rights organisation, confirmed in 2017. “As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more.”

Amnesty International have also documented the widespread use of human shields by Israeli forces, and a 2013 United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child report voiced concern about Israel’s “continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants”.

Israel helped to create Hamas

In a 2018 video for The Intercept Mehdi Hasan explained that in the 1970s and 1980s Israel empowered the precursor to Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Mujama al-Islamiya association, in an attempt to undermine the power of the dominant Palestinian force, the secular nationalist Palestinian Liberation Organisation. When Yassin – who went on to found Hamas – led the building of Islamist schools, clubs, clinics and mosques in Gaza, Israel helped fund some of the projects. “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, the Israeli official responsible for religious affairs in Gaza until 1994, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009.

And it’s not ancient history. In December the New York Times published a bombshell story, reporting that for many years Qatar has been sending millions of dollars month to Gaza, helping to prop up the Hamas government. In September Qatar asked Israel whether they wanted the payments to continue. Israel confirmed they did. According to the New York Times Israel saw the money as a way of maintaining the peace in Gaza, by keeping Hamas focussed on governing rather than fighting. However, the report also referred to “the Israeli government’s view that Hamas was… a political asset.” Why? We are back to divide and rule. In 2012 Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “told the prominent Israeli journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank… having two strong rivals… would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.”

Hamas has repeatedly offered peace to Israel

While Hamas is generally presented as a intransigent, fanatical organisation dedicated to the destruction of Israel, writing in Peace News recently Milan Rai explained “Hamas has consistently, repeatedly and publicly offered Israel a 10-year truce or hudna – on condition that Israel withdraw to its 1967 border”.

Rai lists ten examples of Hamas peace offers over the last 30 years, including when Jimmy Carter met Hamas leaders in Syria in 2008.

His reading is broadly confirmed by a 2009 report from the United States Institute of Peace, a think tank funded by the US Congress, which noted Hamas “has sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel” and “indicated on a number of occasions its willingness to accede to a hudna with Israel”.

Israel has repeatedly rejected peace with the Palestinians

“In the speeches of [US] politicians and in [US] newspapers op-eds, it’s a matter of faith that Israel has always yearned for peace but has been constantly rebuffed by the Palestinians,” The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz noted in November. “This is not quite 180 degrees the opposite of reality, but close. In the actual world… Israel could have had peace at many times in the past 75 years.” Schwarz continued: this would require “Israel giving up most of the Palestinian land – specifically, Gaza and

the West Bank, including East Jerusalem – it conquered in the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel has always preferred conflict with stateless Palestinians to that.”

The crucial obstruction is Israeli opposition to a viable Palestinian state. As liberal icon Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin explained after the much ballyhooed 1993 Oslo Accords, “We do not accept the Palestinian goal of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan. We believe there is a separate Palestinian entity short of a state.”

The US and UK have repeatedly blocked non-violent attempts by Palestinians to protect themselves from Israeli aggression and end the occupation

In 2015 the Palestinian Authority (PA) asked permission for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open an investigation in war crimes committed by Israel in the West Bank. “This led to the US and UK coming down on the PA like a ton of bricks,” the Guardian reported in November. After being urged to drop the ICC investigation by President Biden in 2022, the Guardian noted “[Palestinian President] Abbas refused, saying it was one of the few non-violent routes available to opposing Israeli settlements.”

Ditto the December 2022 request from the United Nations General Assembly for an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the legality of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories – also opposed by the US and UK. Indeed the Guardian disclosed that “even a modest attempt [by the Palestinians] to join the UN’s tourism body” in 2017 “was abandoned due to US pressure.”

And when Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, the US quickly moved to punish the winners of the democratic vote, imposing economic sanctions. More shockingly, the US covertly attempted “to provoke a Palestinian civil war”, Vanity Fair revealed in 2008. “The plan was [to arm Fatah]… with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power.”

Writing in his 2010 book Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide, Khaled Hroub explains the ramifications of Israeli, US and UK efforts to block Palestinian initiatives to protect themselves from Israeli aggression and end the occupation. “When [Palestinian] people have been more hopeful of movement in peace talks with Israel, Hamas’s ‘programme for resistance’ tended to generate more doubt, and a drop in Hamas supporters followed. By contrast, when frustration with fruitless talks has been mounting and exacerbated by continuous Israeli humiliation of Palestinians, in such a charged atmosphere Hamas has tended to gain more support in any elections held.”

Follow Ian on X @IanJSinclair.

Combatting the zombie myths about nonviolent struggle

Combatting the zombie myths about nonviolent struggle
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
28 November 2023

There is widespread ignorance on the Left about what is called civil resistance (AKA nonviolent struggle).

Let’s start with first principles. In her essential 2021 book Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know, Harvard University’s Professor Erica Chenoweth defines civil resistance as “a method of active conflict in which unarmed people use a variety of coordinated, noninstitutional methods – strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, alternative institution-building, and many other tactics – to promote change without harming or threatening to harm an opponent.”

Following the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas, various people told me on X/Twitter this method struggle is unrealistic, ineffective, not as powerful as armed resistance, relies the on inherent restraint of the oppressor, can only create gradual change, and so on.

On October 8, the popular Leftist X/Twitter account @zeisquirrel approvingly posted a video of Malcolm X asserting “You don’t get freedom peacefully. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn’t deserving of a peaceful approach.”

This echoes what Afua Hirsch, writing in the Guardian in 2018, argued about the end of Apartheid in South Africa: “Columnists did not cut it. Activists could not have done it. Peaceful protest did not do it. Sports boycotts, books, badges and car boot sales did not do it. It took revolutionaries, pure and simple. People willing to break the law, to kill and be killed.”

Fellow Guardian journalist Owen Jones agreed, tweeting: “Apartheid was brought down by revolutionaries, not peaceful protest. Brilliant piece by @afuahirsch.”

With all these assertions in mind, it is worth addressing some of the common myths about civil resistance.

Myth: Nonviolent struggle is not as effective as violent struggle

In their 2011 Columbia University Press book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan compare the efficacy of nonviolent and violent campaigns. Analysing 323 examples of resistance campaigns and rebellion from 1900 to 2006, the authors concluded that nonviolent campaigns have been twice as successful as violent campaigns in achieving their objectives. 

Research conducted by Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, currently a professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, broadly supports Chenoweth and Stephan’s thesis. Studying a different data set of violent and nonviolent strategies of organisations seeking self-determination between 1960 and 2005, in 2016 Cunningham concluded that non-violent resistance “is more effective than violence in obtaining concessions over self-determination”.

More recently, citing an updated dataset of 627 revolutionary campaigns from 1900-2019, in 2021 Chenoweth re-confirmed her earlier conclusion: over 50 per cent of nonviolent revolutions succeeded, compared to 26 per cent of violent ones.

And what about confronting murderous dictatorships? According to Chenoweth and Stephan “the notion that nonviolent action can be successful only if the adversary does not use violent repression is neither theoretically nor historically substantiated.” The removal of General Pinochet in Chile, the downfall of President Marcos in the Philippines, the ousting of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and, yes, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, all show that nonviolent struggle has played a decisive role in toppling the extremely ruthless regimes.

Myth: Nonviolent struggle is passive

In Civil Resistance, Chenoweth explains “civil resistance is a method of conflict – an active, confrontational technique that people or movements use to assert political, social, economic or moral claims… in a very real sense, civil resistance constructively promotes conflict.”

The strategically brilliant US civil rights movement provides a valuable case study. Writing about the representation of Martin Luther King in the 2014 movie Selma, US journalist Jessica Leber argues the nonviolent campaign he led for African-American voting rights in 1965 “was incredibly aggressive, brave, and strategic – in many cases aiming to force the state into violent opposition.”

The same applies to the successful campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference he led put together and executed a detailed plan for mass confrontation with the city’s white power structure. Writing in his famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail, King noted “The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

If anyone wants to read more about this extraordinary strategic intelligence, I would strongly recommend the 2022 book Waging A Good War: A Military History Of The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks.

Myth: The success of nonviolent struggle is based on appealing to the better nature of the enemy

“Civil resistance works not by melting the adversary’s heart,” Chenoweth explains in her Civil Resistance book. Chenoweth and Stephan elaborate in How Civil Resistance Works: “nonviolent campaigns achieve success through sustained pressure derived from mass mobilization that withdraws the regime’s economic, political, social, and even military support”.

The Indian independence movement led by Gandhi, the US civil rights movement, the struggle for independence in Ghana and Zambia, Otpor’s ousting of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia – the oppressors in these examples of successful civil resistance didn’t suddenly discover their better nature. They were forced to make concessions because of the unstoppable power of the movements they faced.

Myth: In the face of repression, nonviolence will mean lots of defenceless people get killed

After analysing a dataset of 308 resistance campaigns between 1950 and 2013, Evan Perkoski, an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, and Chenoweth highlight a “counterintuitive paradox” – that those campaigns which remain nonviolent and unarmed with no significant foreign support are safest from mass killings. “Nonviolent uprising are almost three times less likely than violent rebellions to encounter mass killings, all else being equal,” they conclude in a 2018 International Center on Nonviolent Conflict research paper.

Similarly, Chenoweth, citing her expanded and updated dataset, confirmed in 2021 that “nonviolent campaigns aimed at dislodging a power structure between 1946 and 2013 suffered remarkably fewer fatalities than their armed counterparts” – 105 deaths per year compared to 2,800 deaths per year.

For example, the largely nonviolent 2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt overthrew Tunisian president Ben Ali and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak with a relatively low number of deaths (estimated to be around 340 and 850, respectively). In comparison, the violent 2011 uprisings in Syria and Libya led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, as well as millions of refugees, a huge increase in international terrorism and the decimation of those countries’ economies.

When I interviewed him in 2011, nonviolent action guru Gene Sharp highlighted how the Baltic states won independence from the Soviet Union in 1990-91 – primarily using civil resistance. “They got out with very few casualties. I think in Lithuania it may have been 14 dead, in Latvia eight and in Estonia nobody was killed,” he noted.

Myth: Nonviolent struggle takes a long time

According to Chenoweth and Stephan’s 2011 study, on average nonviolent struggles either succeed or fail three times faster than their violent counterparts – likely one reason why nonviolent struggles generally experience less mass killings.

Again, it is instructive to compare the largely nonviolent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia with the violent uprisings in Libya and Syria. The movement sparked by the self-immolation of fruit and vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi took four weeks to overthrow Ben Ali, while Mubarak was toppled after just over two weeks of demonstrations. In contrast, Libyan leader Gaddafi was overthrown (with US-UK-NATO assistance) after eight months, and the Syrian civil war has now gone on for well over a decade.

To be clear, I do not think those of us living in relative privilege in the UK should judge anyone living under occupation who takes up arms against their oppressor (though, of course, I do condemn attacks on civilians). It’s possible civil resistance may not work in some settings. However, I do think it’s important to consider and publicise the evidence for the efficacy of nonviolent and violent resistance on a genera level. Because it seems to me the Left’s ignorance of nonviolent struggle has potentially damaging ramifications for the fight for a better world – namely the dismissal of what Professor Stephen Zunes has called “the most powerful political tool available to challenge oppression.”

Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know by Erica Chenoweth is published by Oxford University Press.

Follow Ian on X @IanJSinclair.

Book review: Waging A Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks.

Book review: Waging A Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks.
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
April-May 2023

A long-time war correspondent with the Washington Post, journalist Thomas E. Ricks has turned his attention to the American civil rights movement.

Why? ‘The overall strategic thinking that went into the Movement, and the field tactics that flowed from that strategy’ reminded him of US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The comparison with war fighting is certainly interesting but it’s his focus on strategy and tactics, including recruiting, training, planning, logistics and communications, that will surely be of supreme interest to Peace News readers.

This framing follows on from the in-depth work done by Gene Sharp on strategic nonviolence and, more recently, Mark and Paul Engler’s analysis of the civil rights movement in This Is An Uprising (Bold Type Books, 2017), which frustratingly Ricks doesn’t acknowledge.

Pushing past this lapse, I found Waging A Good War to be one of the most exciting, engrossing and inspiring books I’ve read, with Ricks’s journalistic style making it very accessible (there are extensive references for those who want to dive further into the topic).

Each chapter focusses on a key action – from successes like the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1963 Birmingham campaign and Selma, to less well-known defeats in early 60s Albany and Chicago in 1966.

Along the way a number of myths about the Movement are addressed. Martin Luther King is a central figure in the narrative, of course, though his human errors and the arguments of his Movement critics are highlighted. He also does an excellent job of foregrounding others who played a leading role in the fight, including trainer Septima Clark, gay ex-Communist Bayard Rustin and extraordinary young activists like James Bevel, Diane Nash, James Forman, Bob Moses and future Congressman John Lewis.

Far from being ‘passive’ the Movement was ‘militant from the start’, exhibiting an ‘aggressive’ approach ‘that seeks conflict with the adversary’.

For example, in 1960 the Gandhian James Lawson led hundreds of activists (‘the civil rights equivalent of paratroopers,’ according to Ricks) in a successful campaign to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville. The planning was extremely detailed, with activists trained in the theory of nonviolence, role-playing workshops to prepare for the violent response their actions would provoke, the scouting of targets, runners communicating with campaign headquarters, and multiple waves of activists sent out to the lunch counters (‘concentration of force’ in military terms).

While the Movement’s innovative tactics – including boycotts, pickets, sit-ins, overwhelming jails, mass meetings and the smart use of the press and emerging TV news industry – ‘was able to keep its opponents off-balance’, less radical actions were also highly valued. ‘We are on the threshold of a significant breakthrough and the greatest weapon is the mass demonstration,’ King noted in May 1963, a few months before the famous March on Washington was held.

Two years later President Johnson signalled victory when he ended a speech to Congress with the Movement slogan ‘We shall overcome’. The Voting Rights Act was passed soon after, following the enacting of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Alongside the 14-part PBS documentary Eyes On The Prize (which Ricks cites frequently), Waging A Good War is an absolute must read for anyone interested in the practice of strategic nonviolent struggle.

Research for the Revolution: Interview with James Ozden

Research for the Revolution: Interview with James Ozden
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
8-9 April 2023

Set up in 2022, according to its website the Social Change Lab “conducts and disseminates social movement research to help solve the world’s most pressing problems”, with a particular interest in environmental protest. This research, it hopes, will “inform advocates, decision-makers and philanthropists on the best ways to accelerate positive social change.”Founder and Director James Ozden tells Ian Sinclair about the Social Change Lab’s origins, some of its key research findings and the importance of Extinction Rebellion’s The Big One action taking place from April 21-24.

Ian Sinclair: What inspired you to set up Social Change Lab?

James Ozden: Before Social Change Lab, I spent several years working full-time for Extinction Rebellion and Animal Rebellion on their campaigns and strategy. Throughout this time, we had so many thorny questions on how to design and execute a good strategy: Who should we target? How disruptive should we be? How do we best mobilise people to join us? We had many more questions than answers and it didn’t seem like anyone was doing research that was directly helping us answer these questions.

In addition to this lack of relevant research, we also had a tough time fundraising as more institutional funders would express scepticism whether our campaigns were actually having a big impact, or even a positive impact. We would hear time and time again that our actions might be alienating people and putting them off the cause, even though there was very little research to back up these campaigns. Even though most of us had the intuition that we weren’t necessarily putting people off, based on the successful disruptive nature of previous people-powered movements like the US Civil Rights movement, we weren’t experts of the political science literature and struggled to prove this empirically.

As a result, I wanted to personally delve into the social movement literature to understand how valid these concerns were, as well as commissioning some high-quality public opinion surveys of UK direct action to understand the impact of ongoing campaigns. Then, Social Change Lab was born.

IS: The Social Change Lab has already published an impressive amount of research. What are some of your key findings so far about social movements?  

JO: One piece of research I’m particularly proud of is our work on the radical flank effect, which is the mechanism whereby radical factions of a movement can increase support for more moderate factions. This has been theorised for a long time and also demonstrated experimentally using online surveys with fictional organisations, but never in a real-life setting with existing campaigns. Using nationally representative YouGov surveys we commissioned, we managed to identify that increased awareness of Just Stop Oil after a disruptive campaign increased support for more moderate climate organisations, like Friends of the Earth. We also found that increased awareness of Just Stop Oil led to greater identification with Friends of the Earth, which is relevant as identification with a group or movement usually precludes getting actively involved. For us, this identification of a radical flank effect clearly shows the symbiotic nature of moderate and radical organisations within the same movement, and the importance of a plurality of nonviolent tactics.

Through other public opinion polling we’ve conducted, we’ve also found no evidence that exposure to disruptive tactics actually reduce support for the cause being protested about. We’ve observed that support for the particular organisation might go down, but this isn’t what grassroots activists actually care about. Ultimately, people care about overall support for the goals of a movement and their policies, which we’ve found no negative effects on. We’ve also found some positive indications of people being more willing to engage in climate action after being exposed to disruptive protests.

One smaller but quite interesting finding is the idea that politicians, and probably the public, are very affected by who the group protesting is. Particularly, this group is much more persuasive if it’s a group that doesn’t usually take part in street activism and protest. For example, Fridays for Future involved millions of schoolchildren taking to the streets all around the world – and it’s pretty rare for schoolchildren to protest! When things like this happen, it provides a much stronger signal to politicians, and the wider public, that this issue is so important that even groups that are generally less politically active are getting involved.

IS: Your research shows non-violent protest tends to be more successful than violence protest in achieving desired goals. Why do you think this is?

JO: Whilst it’s not a hard and fast rule, the academic literature suggests that nonviolent movements have higher odds of achieving their goals compared to movements who use more violent tactics. For example, research from the US Civil Rights movement showed that whilst nonviolent protests increased votes for Democratic candidates, violent protests actually increased votes for Republicans, antithetical to the aims of many activists.

There are a few mechanisms which might explain the relative strength of nonviolent tactics over violence, but most importantly, it’s the ability to turn out larger and more diverse crowds. Erica Chenoweth, a professor of political science at Harvard, studied over 300 social movements from 1900-2006. One of their key findings is that nonviolent movements tend to be larger in size, as well as more diverse. The reason for this is that violence only attracts a niche demographic, typically young men. Relatively very few people want to engage in physical violence – it presents risks to their safety if faced with police repression, which is especially true for more marginalised groups. However, movements are successful when they can attract people from all walks of life, whether that’s children, the elderly and everyday working people. As such, nonviolent movements provide a more inclusive and safe environment for broad swathes of the public, which in turn provide a compelling signal that an issue is cared about by the public at large.

IS: In January Extinction Rebellion announced a shift away from disruptive action, pushing for a turnout of over 100,000 people at The Big One – a more conventional, legal protest outside parliament on April 21. Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain have vowed to continue their disruptive civil resistance. What’s your take on Extinction Rebellion’s tactical shift, and what do you think the grassroots climate movement in Britain should do next?

JO: I think this was actually a pretty good move by Extinction Rebellion. The reality is, groups like Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain have been the main groups taking more disruptive forms of action over the past year. However, these actions tend to appeal to a fairly small subset of the population, so participation isn’t as large as one would hope. As a result, there are actually lots of people who want to take part in climate activism, but they aren’t willing to risk prison like many Just Stop Oil or Insulate Britain activists. This is exactly the gap that Extinction Rebellion is trying to fill – by organising mass, nonviolent protests that can draw a much larger and more diverse crowd.

I think it’s vital that the climate movement offers different levels of engagement, and think that this decision reflects that. Ultimately, we need a variety of approaches to tackle this huge problem, both disruptive and non-disruptive, and huge swathes of people getting involved. So if this decision means more people take part in climate action, I think that’s the right call.

Obviously, the proof will be in the pudding when we see how many people turn out for the Big One from April 21-24, but I’ve heard it’s on track to being the most well-attended Extinction Rebellion demonstration to date.

Fundamentally, Extinction Rebellion has always been an experimental organisation, and I think this decision reflects that. Whilst their disruptive tactics led to huge progress in 2019, significantly impacting UK public opinion and even global discourse on climate change, the results have been harder to see recently. Many people have been complaining that they support Extinction Rebellion’s goals but don’t agree with their tactics – well, this is Extinction Rebellion’s challenge to all those people: “We’ve changed our tactics, so now will you join us on the streets?”

https://www.socialchangelab.org/

Did the US and Britain invade Iraq to spread democracy?

Did the US and Britain invade Iraq to spread democracy?
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
8 March 2023

A little late to the party, I recently watched Once Upon A Time In Iraq, the BBC’s 2020 five-part documentary series about the US-British invasion and occupation of the Middle East nation.

During the episode about the capture of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in December 2003, the narrator noted “Though Iraq was still governed by the [US-led] coalition, the intention was to hold democratic elections as soon as possible.”

This fits with the common understanding of the Iraq War amongst the media, academic and political elites. For example, speaking on the BBC News at 10 in 2005, correspondent Paul Wood stated “The coalition came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights.” Likewise, writing in the Guardian in 2013, the esteemed University of Cambridge Professor David Runciman claimed “The wars fought after 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq were designed… to spread the merits of democracy.”

No doubt similarly benign framing of the West’s intentions and actions will be repeated as we approach the twentieth anniversary of the invasion on March 20 2003.

But is it true? As always it is essential to compare the narrative pumped out by corporate and state-affiliated media with the historical record.

We know that soon after US-led forces had taken control of the country Iraqis began holding local elections. However, in June 2003 the Washington Post reported “US military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.”

The report goes on to quote Paul Bremer, the chief US administrator in Iraq: “I’m not opposed to [self-rule], but I want to do it a way that takes care of our concerns… in a postwar situation like this, if you start holding elections… it’s often the best-organized who win, and the best-organized right now are the former Baathists and to some extent the Islamists.”

On the national level, Professor Toby Dodge, who advised US General David Petraeus in Iraq, notes one of the first decisions Bremer made after he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003 “was to delay moves towards delegating responsibility to a leadership council” composed of exiled politicians. Writing in his 2005 book Iraq’s Future, the establishment-friendly British academic goes on to explain “this careful, incremental but largely undemocratic approach was set aside with the arrival of UN special representative for Iraq, Vieira de Mello” who “persuaded Bremer that a governing body of Iraqis should be set up to act as a repository of Iraqi sovereignty.”

Accordingly, on 13 July 2003 the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) was set up. Dodge notes the membership “was chosen by Bremer after extended negotiations between the CPA [the US Coalition Provisional Authority], Vieira de Mello and the seven dominant, formerly exiled parties.” The IGC would “establish a constitutional process,” Bremer said at the time.

However, the Americans had a serious problem on their hands. In late June 2003 the most senior Shia religious leader in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa (a religious edict) condemning the US plans as “fundamentally unacceptable.”

“The occupation officials do not enjoy the authority to appoint the members of a council that would write the constitution,” he said. Instead he called for a general election “so that every eligible Iraqi can choose someone to represent him at the constitutional convention that will write the constitution” which would then be put to a public referendum.

“With no way around the fatwa, and with escalating American casualties creating pressure on President Bush,” the Washington Post reported in November 2003 that Bremer “dumped his original plan in favour of an arrangement that would bestow sovereignty on a provisional government before a constitution is drafted.”

This new plan, known as the November 15 Agreement, was based around a complex process of caucuses. A 2005 briefing from peace group Justice Not Vengeance explained just how anti-democratic the proposal was: “US-appointed politicians would select a committee in each province which would select a group of politically-acceptable local worthies, which in turn would select a representative… to go forward to the national assembly” which would “then by allowed to elect a provisional government.”

In response, Sistani made another public intervention, repeating his demand that direct elections – not a system of regional caucuses – should select a transitional government. After the US refused to concede, the Shia clerical establishment escalated their pro-democracy campaign, organising street demonstrations in January 2004. 100,000 people protested in Baghdad and 30,000 in Basra, with news reports recording crowds chanting “yes, yes to elections, no, no to occupation” and banners with slogans such as “We refuse any constitution that is not elected by the Iraqi people.”

Under pressure the US relented, agreeing in March 2004 to holding national elections in January 2005 to a Transitional National Assembly which was mandated to draft a new constitution.

The campaigning group Voices In The Wilderness UK summarised events in a 2004 briefing: “since the invasion the US has consistently stalled on on-person-one-vote elections” seeking instead to “put democracy on hold until it can be safely managed,” as Salim Lone, director of communications for the UN in Iraq until autumn 2003, wrote in April 2004.

Why? “An elected government that reflected Iraqi popular [opinion] would kick US troops out of the country and is unlikely to be sufficiently amenable to the interests of Western oil companies or take an ‘acceptable’ position on the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Voices In The Wilderness UK explained.

For example, a secret 2005 nationwide poll of Iraqis conducted by the UK Ministry of Defence found 82 per cent “strongly opposed” to the presence of the US-led coalition forces, with 45 per cent of respondents saying they believed attacks against British and American troops were justified.

It is worth pausing briefly to consider two aspects of the struggle for democracy in Iraq. First, the Sistani-led movement in Iraq was, as US dissident Noam Chomsky argued in 2005, “one of the major triumphs of non-violent resistance that I know of.” And second, it was a senior Iraqi Shia cleric who

championed democratic elections in the face of strong opposition from the US – the “heartland of democracy,” according to the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf.

It is also worth remembering, as activist group Justice Not Vengeance (JNV) noted in 2005, that Bush’s ultimatum days before the invasion was simply that “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours.” This was about “encouraging a last-minute coup more than the Iraqi leader’s departure from Baghdad,” the Financial Times reported at the time. In short, the US-British plan was not free elections via “regime change” but “regime stabilization, leadership change,” JNV argued.

This resonates with the analysis of Middle East expert Jane Kinninmont. Addressing the argument the West invaded Iraq to spread democracy, in a 2013 Chatham House report she argued “This is asserted despite the long history of Anglo-American great-power involvement in the Middle East, which has, for the most part, not involved an effort to democratise the region.” In reality “the general trend has been to either support authoritarian rulers who were already in place, or to participate in the active consolidation of authoritarian rule… as long as these rulers have been seen as supporting Western interests more than popularly elected governments would.”

This thesis is not short of shameful examples – from the West’s enduring support for the Gulf monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, to the strong backing given to Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt before both dictators were overthrown in 2011.

Back to Iraq: though far from perfect, national elections have taken place since 2003. But while the US has been quick to take the credit, the evidence shows any democratic gains won in Iraq in the immediate years after the invasion were made despite, not because of, the US and their British lackey.

Indeed, an October 2003 Gallup poll of Baghdad residents makes instructive reading. Fully one per cent of respondents agreed with the BBC and Runciman that a desire to establish democracy was the main intention of the US invasion. In contrast 43 per cent of respondents said the invasion’s principal objective was Iraq’s oil reserves.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Book review. Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know by Erica Chenoweth

Book review. Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know by Erica Chenoweth
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
February-March 2022

Nonviolent resistance campaigns have been twice as successful as violent campaigns in achieving their objectives. That was the conclusion of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, making it a seminal book in the study and practice of nonviolent struggle (see PN 2547 – 2548).

With Civil Resistance, Chenoweth, currently professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard university, has arguably written an even more important book.

As part of Oxford University Press’s ‘What Everyone Needs To Know’ series, the text is made up of nearly 100 questions and answers.

Chenoweth starts with the definition of civil resistance as ‘a form of collective action that seeks to affect the political, social, or economic status quo without using violence or the threat of violence against people to do so’.

She goes on to address common myths – that it’s passive, doesn’t work against dictators, only works by morally converting the opponent, and so on.

Chenoweth also highlights four key factors behind successful nonviolent campaigns: large-scale participation, loyalty shifts amongst regime supporters, tactical innovation, and resilience in the face of repression.

Along with celebrated movements like the US civil rights struggle and Otpor’s work to remove Serbian president Slobodan Milošević in 2000, plenty of lesser-known, inspiring nonviolent activism is also referenced. This includes the 1929 Igbo Women’s War in Nigeria, a mass nonviolent campaign by women opposing the attempt to levy taxes by British authorities. Another case mentioned is the use of female nudity by the Green Belt Movement to shame and repel the police in 1990s Kenya.

Having received criticism for ignoring the role of unarmed violence in successful campaigns, Chenoweth engages with the debate by devoting a whole chapter to the topic.

The data is clear, she argues. From 1900 to 2019, 65 percent of nonviolent campaigns without fringe violence succeeded in overthrowing regimes or winning self-determination, compared to only 35 percent of nonviolent campaigns that included some fringe violence. Why? ‘Fringe violence tends to drive supporters away… tends to repel potential allies, increase government repression, and discourage those supporting the regime from defecting.’

An accessible, one-stop bible of nonviolent struggle, Civil Resistance includes an academic-quality bibliography along with a helpful list of essential books, documentary films, websites and training guides. There is also a huge 30-page list of nonviolent and violent revolutionary campaigns between 1900 and 2019.

Civil Resistance is an absolutely essential book for peace activists and anybody interested in history or in creating a better world. So pretty much everyone, then.

Why the UK Left is wrong to be so dismissive of non-violent struggle

Why the UK Left is wrong to be so dismissive of non-violent struggle
by Ian Sinclair
Open Democracy
20 November 2021

Non-violence is under attack.

Many influential figures on the Left in the UK dismiss, misrepresent or ignore the concept of non-violent struggle, also known as civil resistance. Indeed, two books have recently been published that explicitly criticise non-violence – Andreas Malm’s ‘How To Blow Up A Pipeline’ and ‘In Defense of Looting’ by Vicky Osterweil. In a June 2020 editorial, the revolutionary Leftist magazine Salvage proclaimed: “Salvage glorifies the burning down of the Minneapolis third police precinct [in response to the murder of African-American man George Floyd]”.

Below I respond to some of the myths often repeated on the Left about non-violent struggle.

Myth One: violence is more effective than non-violence in making change

“Columnists did not cut it. Activists could not have done it. Peaceful protest did not do it. Sports boycotts, books, badges and car boot sales did not do it,” wrote Afua Hirsch in The Guardian in April 2018 about the end of apartheid in South Africa. “It took revolutionaries, pure and simple. People willing to break the law, to kill and be killed.”

Yet while there is disagreement about the relative importance of violence and non-violence in the struggle, it is clear that at the very least, non-violent struggle played an important contributory role in the end of apartheid.

Summarising the key events – which included labour strikes, boycotts, demonstrations and civil disobedience, activities involving hundreds of thousands of people – in a 2010 article for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Lester Kurtz, a professor at George Mason University, wrote: “In the end, a concerted grassroots non-violent civil resistance movement in coalition with international support and sanctions forced the white government to negotiate.” Of course, many highlight the importance of the armed resistance but I’m confident no serious historian or observer would be dismissive of the incredibly brave non-violent resistance to apartheid.

More broadly, to quote the non-violent action guru George Lakey, “the underlying assumption” of a view such as Hirsch’s “is that violence is the most powerful force in the world”. As Lakey noted in 2001: “This is conventional wisdom, shared by most right-wingers, left-wingers, and people in the middle. It’s as popular as the old consensus that the earth is flat. And it is just as incorrect.”

The 2011 book ‘Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict’ by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan provides academic evidence in support of the efficacy of non-violent struggle. The 2012 winner of the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, given annually for the best book on government, politics, or international relations, the study was a key inspiration for the founders of Extinction Rebellion, arguably one of the most successful protest movements in recent British history (though writing in Peace News Gabriel Carlyle notes their analysis of the book isn’t quite right).

Analysing 323 examples of resistance campaigns and rebellion from 1900 to 2006, the authors concluded that non-violent campaigns have been twice as successful as violent campaigns in achieving their objectives. They argued this difference is down to non-violent campaigns being more likely to attract mass support. This greater level of participation tends to lead to more tactical innovation, more loyalty shifts among the regime’s supporters, and raises the political, economic and social costs to the regime – all of which increase the chances of success.

Their findings are broadly supported by the research of Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland. Using a different data set of violent and non-violent strategies of groups seeking self-determination between 1960 and 2005, she concluded that non-violent resistance “is more effective than violence in obtaining concessions over self-determination”.

A 2020 journal article in the American Political Science Review by Omar Wasow of Princeton University provides further evidence. Evaluating Black-led protests in the US between 1960 and 1972, he found that “non-violent activism, particularly when met with state or vigilante repression, drove media coverage, framing, congressional speech, and public opinion on civil rights. Counties proximate to non-violent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share increase 1.6-2.5%.”

In contrast, “Protester-initiated violence… helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse, and public concern toward ‘social control’.” He concluded that violent protests likely caused a 1.5-7.9% shift among whites toward Republicans in the 1968 presidential election, tipping the close-run election for Richard Nixon.

Myth Two: non-violent struggle is passive

Hirsch’s framing above implies that ‘peaceful’ activists don’t break the law, aren’t willing to get killed, and aren’t revolutionaries. This ahistorical muddle feeds into another popular myth about non-violent struggle – that it is passive and avoids conflict.

Chenoweth sets out the reality in her new book ‘Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know’: “Civil resistance is a method of conflict – an active, confrontational technique that people or movements use to assert political, social, economic or moral claims… In a very real sense, civil resistance constructively promotes conflict.”

Having created a list of 198 methods of non-violent action, Gene Sharp – sometimes called “the Clausewitz of non-violent warfare” – described them as “non-violent weapons… the direct equivalent of military weapons”. Sharp saw non-violent struggle as a form of warfare, arguing that a non-violent campaign should have the same level of strategic vision, tactical smarts and coordination as a successful military campaign – one reason he sought out the influential military historian and strategist Sir Basil Liddell Hart to discuss the topic in the late 1950s.

The often strategically brilliant US civil rights movement provides a good case study. Writing about the representation of Martin Luther King in the 2014 film ‘Selma’, Jessica Leber noted that the non-violent campaign he led in 1965 for African-American voting rights “was incredibly aggressive, brave, and strategic – in many cases aiming to force the state into violent opposition”.

Myth Three: non-violent struggle isn’t a realistic option when confronting dictatorships

Writing last year in support of Palestinian armed resistance to the Israeli occupation, Louis Allday approvingly quoted the former resistance fighter and South African president, Nelson Mandela: “Non-violent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do, but if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end.”

Like Allday, Kehinde Andrews, professor of Black studies at Birmingham City University, also believes non-violent struggle is not a realistic tactic in the face of violence. Speaking to Giles Fraser on the latter’s Confessions podcast, Andrews argued: “You have to be realistic. If you create a politics which can overturn Western capitalism, you are going to have to use violence. You are not going to have a choice because there will be violence meted out against you.”

In contrast, Chenoweth and Stephan noted: “The notion that non-violent action can be successful only if the adversary does not use violent repression is neither theoretically nor historically substantiated.” They argued that their findings are “true even under conditions in which most people would expect non-violent resistance to be futile, including situations in which dissent is typically met with harsh regime pressure”. Writing in 2003 about the misconceptions around non-violent resistance, the political scientist Kurt Schock argued that the evidence actually points to the opposite conclusion: “In fact non-violent action has been effective in brutally repressive contexts, and it has been ineffective in open democratic polities.”

There are many historical examples showing how largely non-violent movements played a central role in overthrowing repressive governments. The Shah of Iran in 1979, President Marcos’s oppressive 20-year reign in the Philippines in 1986 and President Bashir in Sudan in 2019 are just a few.

One reason non-violent struggle can overthrow brutal dictatorships is because, as Chenoweth and Stephan note, government repression is more likely to backfire against a non-violent campaign than it is against a violent campaign. This backfiring often leads to even greater mobilisation against the government, shifts among loyalists to the regime and sanctions against the violent offender.

What’s more, using a data set of 308 resistance campaigns between 1950 and 2013, Chenoweth and Evan Perkoski, from the University of Connecticut, highlight a “counterintuitive paradox” – that those campaigns which remain non-violent and unarmed with no significant foreign support are safest from mass killings. They concluded: “Non-violent uprisings are almost three times less likely than violent rebellions to encounter mass killings, all else being equal.”

Myth Four: non-violence isn’t realistic in the Global South

Speaking on a Novara Media livestream last year, host Michael Walker explained that he supports a strategy of non-violence in countries like the US and UK, countries which “are liberal democracies where public opinion matters”. However, he went on to note “the limits of non-violence in Global South countries” such as Indonesia and Chile, where reformist, largely non-violent social democratic movements and governments were violently overthrown by the military and CIA.

Last year, Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik wrote that in 2010, as she was travelling to Sudan, the country of her birth, at the beginning of what became the Arab Spring, “it was simply unfathomable that peaceful protests would overthrow an Arab dictator. It had never happened before.”

In reality, movements that have primarily relied on non-violent struggle have a long history in the Global South, including some successes in the Arab world.

Sudan itself provides two examples, with dictatorships toppled in 1964 and 1985 “through massive civil resistance campaigns”, according to Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, an assessment confirmed by Dr Willow Berridge in his 2015 book ‘Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan: the “Khartoum Springs” of 1964 and 1985’.

It is also worth noting that in the Novara Media livestream, Walker was referring to President Suharto’s murderous seizure of power in Indonesia in 1967, and Augusto Pinochet’s destruction of Allende’s democratically elected government in Chile in 1973. But he failed to mention that non-violent campaigns played a central role in ousting Suharto in 1999 and Pinochet in 1988.

Though pretty much unknown in the West, there are many other examples of non-violent campaigns playing a central role in regime change in the Global South. In 1944 peaceful demonstrations overthrew the Guatemalan dictator General Ubico. The same year, President Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in El Salvador was removed by mass civil resistance. Influenced by Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah led a popular, largely non-violent uprising to win independence for Ghana in 1957. Many more examples of the power of non-violent struggle are listed in Chenoweth’s book ‘Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know’ – from the campaign for Zambia’s independence in 1964 to Brazil’s transition from military dictatorship to popular democracy in the 1980s, and Malawians bringing down 30-year dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda in the early 1990s.

Is the data on non-violence reliable?

As a seminal text with a bold conclusion, Chenoweth and Stephan’s ‘Why Civil Resistance Works’ has unsurprisingly received some criticism, including a number of academic responses.

All of the three critiques I have read argue the NAVCO database that Chenoweth and Stephan base their conclusions on is flawed.

In 2018 Mohammad Ali Kadivar and Neil Ketchley noted: “The coding of violence used in NAVCO derives primarily from the Correlates of War data set, which requires that all combatants be armed and for there to be at least one thousand battle deaths during the course of a campaign.” This definition, they added, “excises incidents of unarmed collective violence, which are otherwise coded as episodes of nonviolent protest.” Therefore, in addition to non-violent and violent campaigns, Kadivar and Ketchley presented a third category: “unarmed collective violence”, described as episodes which “inflict physical damage on persons and/or objects… without the use of firearms or explosives”.

With this expanded terminology, they concluded: “An event history analysis finds that riots are positively associated with political liberalisation in 103 non-democracies from 1990 to 2004,” and that, “In contrast to the assertions by non-violent resistance literature… acts of [unarmed collective] violence have not been detrimental to the cause of democratisation but may have even enhanced the chances of a democratising outcome.”

In a 2020 journal article in Critical Sociology, Alexei Anisin highlighted a number of campaigns that are missing from the NAVCO dataset. When these are included, he noted that from 1900-2006 non-violent campaigns were successful 48% of the time, unarmed violent campaigns 56% of the time, and violent campaigns 29% of the time.

Similarly, writing in the Comparative Politics journal in 2016, Fabrice Lehoucq noted that Chenoweth and Stephan omitted several campaigns that took place in Central America after 1900. Adding in these omitted examples he finds the success rate of non-violent and violent campaigns to be pretty much the same – 42% and 41%, respectively.

Chenoweth replied directly to Lehoucq’s criticism, noting the NAVCO database had been expanded and refined since 2011, and that “the aggregate statistics are virtually identical to those cited in ‘Why Civil Resistance Works’, with non-violent campaigns having a much higher success rate than violent campaigns.” Moreover, even if one were to agree that Lehoucq’s and Anisin’s analyses are accurate, then non-violent campaigns have close to the same success rate as “unarmed violence campaigns”, and close to or better success rates than “violent campaigns” – results which are very far away from the dismissive assertions of the UK Left.

It is also worth highlighting two key takeaways from ‘Why Civil Resistance Works’ that I am not aware of being seriously challenged. First, non-violent campaigns are associated with far less death and destruction than violent campaigns – compare the orgy of violence in Syria and Libya after 2011 with what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, for example. Second, non-violent campaigns are more likely to lead to more democratic forms of governance than violent campaigns, a finding which is echoed by a 2005 Freedom House study.

As Chenoweth noted in her reply to Lehoucq: “‘Why Civil Resistance Works’ was not intended to be the final word on the matter, but it has helped to provoke systematic academic inquiry on a topic that has long been neglected or even derided in scholarly circles.”

Future research will refine and challenge our existing assumptions about non-violence and violence. Having read a little around the subject, I’m struck by how complicated and often contradictory campaigns and movements are in the real world – history rarely provides definite answers. In addition to actively reading about the topic, supporters of non-violent action should welcome sincere, evidence-based research and criticism. This is, after all, how one gains a greater understanding of how the world works and how to make it better – not by reflexively rejecting and misrepresenting a concept that has a long history of creating positive change.

Book review: How To Start A Revolution by Ruaridh Arrow

Book review: How To Start A Revolution by Ruaridh Arrow
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
June-July 2021

Having directed the award-winning 2011 documentary about Gene Sharp, How To Start A Revolution, Ruaridh Arrow has now published an engrossing biography of the man who CNN once called ‘the father of nonviolent struggle’.

Sharp, who died in 2018 aged 90, led an extraordinary life.

He was sent to prison for refusing to be drafted at the time of the Korean War, worked as assistant editor at Peace News in the late 1950s, observed firsthand the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989, and trained activists in Burma in the early 1990s.

Along the way he corresponded with Albert Einstein, argued with Frantz Fanon in Accra and tried to convert Yasser Arafat into adopting a nonviolent strategy.

This was crucial: Sharp saw strategic planning as essential if a nonviolent movement was to succeed. ‘No military commander would ever dream of putting 1,000 soldiers on a battlefield without a strategy for how to use them and so it was of nonviolent action’, Arrow summarises.

Moreover, Sharp’s argument for pursuing nonviolent struggle is not that it is moral but that it’s the most effective method to effect change – something confirmed by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan in their 2011 book, Why Civil Resistance Works.

With his journalistic eye for a story and access to archival material, Arrow runs through a number of fascinating case studies, highlighting the impact Sharp’s thinking had on the first Palestinian intifada in 1987, as well as in Burma, the Baltic states (against the Soviet Union), the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt.

Arguably Sharp’s most spectacular influence was on the Otpor movement that played a central role in the overthrow of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević – described by Arrow as ‘the most advanced nonviolent campaign in history’.

Though he clearly admires Sharp, Arrow provides a rounded, very human portrait, noting how he could often be obstinate – it was Sharp who chose the Albert Einstein Institution as the confusing name of the organisation that he founded in 1983 – and how several close professional relationships eventually broke down.

Anti-imperialist activists will likely baulk at Sharp’s links with the US defence and state departments, as well as with organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute.

However, it’s Sharp’s huge, power-threatening body of work – something he argued could be used by anyone – that is most important to peace activists today. And there is much to do.

As Sharp told US activist George Lakey: ‘We are simply at the bow and arrow stage of the development of nonviolent struggle.’

For those hungry for more, Arrow provides good news – Jamila Raqib, Sharp’s colleague at the Albert Einstein Institution in his later years, is currently writing her own book about Sharp.

How To Start A Revolution is published by Big Inky Books, priced £14.99.

Book review. In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. Vicky Osterweil

Book review. In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. Vicky Osterweil
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
March 2021

Written in the wake of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Vicky Osterweil’s central argument is that looting and rioting are positive actions, which ‘in most instances… transform and build a nascent moment into a movement’. She maintains looting makes ‘day-to-day life easier by changing the price of goods to zero’, redistributes wealth and ‘reinforces bonds of solidarity’, concluding ‘we need to argue for and defend every tactic that might overturn’ white supremacy, capitalism, empire and property. [my emphasis added]

A significant part of the book is devoted to criticising nonviolent struggle which, at one point, she claims ‘is structured around victim blaming and anti-Blackness.’

Centred on the US, there are, to be sure, interesting sections – on the racial roots of property, the slavery origins of the police, and the Black-led resistance to these oppressive historical forces. There is a reliance on secondary sources, which wouldn’t be a problem if all the provocative arguments were referenced adequately. Instead, one can go pages without any citations, rendering assertions like Black riots formed ‘a central part of the [1960s civil rights] movement’s power and effectiveness’ largely meaningless.

I’m often attracted to polemical writing, but Osterweil is maddingly simplistic. One chapter is titled ‘All cops are bastards’. Elsewhere, she claims FDR’s New Deal ‘did nothing more than strangle a revolutionary movement in its cradle’ [my emphasis added], and seems to think pointing out Martin Luther King travelled with an armed entourage fatally undermines the case for nonviolence (there is no reference for this, of course, though a 2016 Associated Press report I found suggests this only applies to King’s early activism in the mid-50s).

Tellingly, Osterweil fails to engage with any of the academic or historical literature highlighting the efficacy of nonviolence, with no mention of the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, researchers in the orbit of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Gene Sharp or George Lakey.

She is also blasé about the fact looting and rioting often leads to people being injured, and sometimes killed – either by state repression or the rioters and looters themselves – and shows little interest in evidence confirming nonviolence engenders more support from the public and media. For example, a June 2020 Reuters/Ipsos poll of Americans about the Black Lives Matter protests found 73% of respondents supported ‘peaceful protest and demonstrations’, but only 22% backed violent protests. A recent peer-reviewed article in the American Political Science Review by Omar Wasow came to similar conclusions, as well as finding violent protest caused a rightward shift amongst voters.

Unserious and incurious, this book won’t change the minds of seasoned peace activists though, worryingly, it might influence those who are in the process of forming their views on protest and political change.

In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action is published by Bold Type Books, priced £16.99.

Book review. Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

Book review. Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
October 2020

The basic argument of this book is very simple. Contrary to the ‘persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish’, Dutch author Rutger Bregman argues that ‘most people, deep down, are pretty decent.’

The assumption of human selfishness underpins huge portions of mainstream political and economic thinking, including the influential veneer theory – ‘the notion that civilisation is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation’. Bregman believes the opposite to be true: ‘It’s when crisis hits… that we humans become our best selves.’

He considers the notion that humans are innately good to be a ‘radical idea’ with huge ramifications, because ‘to stand for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be’, for whom ‘a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening.’

Framing the book as a personal journey of discovery, Bregman ranges far and wide to construct and prove his proposition. He engages with thinkers and ideas from archaeology, anthropology, biology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, politics and history. The book’s plentiful references are similarly diverse, and provide a great guide for those interested in going deeper into particular subjects.

There is much here that will interest peace activists, including a discussion of SLA Marshall’s claim that only a minority of US soldiers in combat in the Second World War fired their weapons at the enemy in any given encounter, a passage looking at the ineffective Allied bombing of civilian areas in Germany in the 1940s and an inspiring account of the 1914 Christmas Truce.

Bregman is particularly keen on slaying a number of sacred cows, including two famous social psychology experiments that seemed to prove human beings’ darker nature: Stanley Milgrim’s 1960s work on obedience to authority and Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment.

Fittingly, the book ends by highlighting a number of hopeful initiatives from around the world that assume human beings want to do good, such as Universal Basic Income in Alaska, Norway’s progressive prison system and participatory budgeting in South America.

Bregman is a great storyteller, which makes for a really enjoyable and engaging read. Even though he approvingly quotes Bertrand Russell about not letting wishful thinking get in the way of the truth, the book is very much a polemic, with the nagging feeling of being guided down a particular path using carefully selected evidence and argument.

For example, while the many criticisms of Zimbardo’s work leads to Bregman dismissing the academic’s findings, when it comes to Marshall’s also heavily-criticised research, Bregman is happy to broadly accept his results, which happen to back up his argument.

But even if you aren’t completely persuaded by Bregman’s argument, Humankind is nevertheless a welcome rebalancing of the scales in the age-old ‘human nature’ debate in favour of co-operation, compassion and nonviolence – something that can only help peace activists and the struggle for a better world.

Humankind is published by Bloomsbury, priced £20.