Gene Sharp

Progressive, The, March, 2007 by Amitabh Pal

Gene Sharp is perhaps the most influential proponent of nonviolent action alive. His work has served as a how-to manual for activists in a swath of countries across Eastern Europe and Asia. For instance, his From Dictatorship to Democracy and The Politics of Nonviolent Action helped inspire the Serbian student movement that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

"Nonviolent action is possible, and is capable of wielding great power even against ruthless rulers and military regimes, because it attacks the most vulnerable characteristic of all hierarchical institutions and governments: dependence on the governed," writes Sharp.

Sharp drafted From Dictatorship to Democracy at the invitation of a Burmese activist. He was smuggled into Burma to assist in courses on nonviolent struggle for those resisting the military regime. He was in Tiananmen Square shortly before the tanks started rolling in. He has traveled to Israel and Palestine a number of times to disseminate his ideas. He was also invited into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, this time by the governments themselves. He consulted with ministers on the nature and requirements of the campaign that they were using to peacefully secede from the Soviet Union. The three governments also used as a guide his book Civilian-Based Defense. The three countries became sovereign with almost no loss of life.

His work has been translated into twenty-seven languages, ranging from Nepali and Chinese to Spanish and Arabic.

From Dictatorship to Democracy, Sharp's most widely used tract, is a booklet that summarizes his ideas. The Politics of Nonviolent Action is a three-volume primer in which he lays out 198 specific methods, such as skywriting and holding mock funerals. He is also the author of Gandhi as a Political Strategist (with an introduction by Coretta Scott King), Social Power and Political Freedom (with an introduction by former Senator Mark Hatfield) and, most recently, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential, an analysis of several historical cases of nonviolent protest. Another book of his, The Power and Practice of Nonviolent Struggle, has been published in Tibetan, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama.

Sharp has practiced what he preaches. As a young man, he was sentenced to two years in prison for civil disobedience during the Korean War. He was paroled after nine months.

He then worked for a short while with pacifist A. J. Muste. Sharp, who holds a doctorate in political theory from Oxford University, was a researcher for nearly thirty years at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs, and was also affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

In 1983, he founded the Albert Einstein Institution to help propagate his work. Due to financial difficulties, the organization now operates out of two rooms in Sharp's three-story brick home in an East Boston residential neighborhood.

I interviewed Sharp on a late October morning. I was greeted by Jamila Raqib, the institution's executive director. Sharp, dressed completely in black, received me inside. The two rooms were filled with newspapers, boxes, and books, the first room with works on Nazism and communism, and the second with books on Gandhi and Sharp's own writing. One of the rooms had a frayed portrait of Gandhi that was given to Sharp by an Indian graduate student more than fifty years ago. The other room had a banner gifted to Sharp by the Serbian Otpor student movement.

Q: What sparked your initial interest in the field of nonviolence?

Gene Sharp: The world was quite a mess. The Second World War had just recently finished. Atomic weapons were new. The U.S. was starting to build a hydrogen bomb. There was racial segregation in the United States, including discrimination in Columbus, Ohio [Sharp's hometown]. European colonialism was still alive. I was always trying to figure out how this alternative mode could be applied in the real world. How much more could we do?

I discovered actions of nonviolence dating from a long time back; Gandhi did not invent nonviolence.

Q: You mentioned racial segregation. Were you actively involved in the civil rights movement?

Sharp: A little. Somewhere around 1949-1950, in Columbus, we did lunch counter sit-ins. This was long before the lunch counter sit-ins in the South. I worked with the Congress for Racial Equality, or CORE, as it was called, with George Houser and others. But I spent ten years in England and Norway. So I missed most of the civil rights movement period.

Q: Did you come into contact with any of the civil rights leaders?

Sharp: I knew Bayard Rustin for a time. And after I moved back to the United States, Coretta Scott King invited me to Atlanta. They used to have a summer school on nonviolence, and she had me down there at least three times. But I wasn't at Selma and Montgomery. I was in London or Oslo.

Q: I've read that you met with people in Norway who were involved in the resistance against Hitler. This raises the ultimate dilemma for people inclined toward pacifism: How do you deal with someone like Adolf Hider?