Report on CANVAS Summer Academy

I had the opportunity to attend a recent online Summer Academy in strategic nonviolent resistance hosted by the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS.  This online academy featured speakers and leaders from several nonviolent liberation movements around the world, and showcased the large diversity of nonviolent tactics being employed by men and women waging struggles for liberation or democracy under difficult and hostile regimes.

The first lecture presented a troubling statistic - namely, the number of formerly democratic regimes which have slid toward authoritarianism in the last ten years.  (Yes, the United States is in that list!)  That fact motivated the following goals for the Summer Academy:

• Understanding the principles of successful nonviolent movements
• Learning lessons from those movements which fail

The first lecture's host, Srdja Popovic, made a statement that he repeated several times during the workshop:

"There are only two kinds of nonviolent movements: those that are spontaneous, and those that are successful."

This highlighted the need for careful planning and development of wise strategy as a prerequisite for success.  One of the readings that went along with that first lecture was "How Protests Become Successful Social Movements."  Here we could see how, although protest can be an important element of a social movement, it is not enough in itself to guarantee movement success.  (Read the article if you want to find the additional required ingredients!  Also, note that "leaderless movements" like the Occupy protests are not likely to achieve anything without a means of clearly deciding and stating what their goals are.)

During the first lecture, a movement leader from another country discussed how his organization was opposing his country's authoritarian leadership by highlighting the regime's corruption.  Corruption is almost always the soft underbelly of authoritarian regimes, since these regimes are created by strongmen in order that the strongmen may receive all the economic and political benefits of the societies they rule while giving nothing back in return.  The spokesman for this movement organization talked about how in many towns and villages in his country, it is hard to get clean water because of burst water delivery pipes which the government has refused to fix until recently.  This man's movement organization therefore started printing large, highly visible "burst certificates" (sort of like a "birth certificate" notifying the world of the birth of a water leak)  and posting them next to broken water mains in locations which motorists could see.  This motivated the government to start fixing their water mains!

The second lecture discussed how social movement organizers are adapting to organizing during the current COVID-19 pandemic.  One organizer from Latin America described how her movement organization has provided basic health care education and services like free masks to poor people - showing the role of parallel institutions in building a successful social movement.

The third lecture was focused on the anti-racism protests that have taken place since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.  We heard from two Black Lives Matter organizers, and we also heard from Will Dobson, fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy and author of The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy.  Mr. Dobson spoke first, and his assessment of the Black Lives Matter protests was highly positive.  He spoke of the large shifts in public awareness and opinion over the last two months as a result of the protests, and he also spoke of how Donald Trump's response to the protests has actually hurt Trump's reelection prospects.  However, when the BLM organizers spoke, some of us (myself included) questioned them about whether they had created effective structures for weeding out violent infiltrators from their protests, whether they had a training program for participants in strategic nonviolent struggle, and whether they had explored other methods of movement struggle besides mass protest rallies.  Their answer was that they have indeed begun to explore these things, and there is a Black minister in Los Angeles who has started doing nonviolent resistance trainings in the style of the Reverend James Lawson, who conducted similar trainings in the 1960's. (Note that I called them "nonviolent resistance" trainings - not just "nonviolence trainings".  The word resistance is always an essential part of the phrase "nonviolent resistance.")

The last lecture was the most unexpectedly interesting, in my opinion.  It was titled, "Creative Activism, Dilemma Actions, And The Use of Humor - Hilariously Groundbreaking Tactics."  Sophia McLennen of Penn State University was the guest speaker.  To provide a bit of background, the OTPOR! movement (of which Srdja Popovic was one of the leaders and original organizers) depended on the use of humor as a key tactical weapon to de-legitimize Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.  It turns out that Sophia and Srdja have done some original research that shows that the use of humor and other dilemma actions greatly boosts the success rate of resistance struggles.  Moreover, dilemma actions and "laughtivism" can be used to de-legitimize the corporate or State-owned media of the oppressor.  Laughtivism can be used successfully against Fox News, One America, and other far-Right or White supremacist media, for instance...

An example of a dilemma action: toys protest corruption in Minsk.

Did the cops arrest the toys?  How did that make them look?

Image from Radio Free Europe article dated 10 February 2012, 

retrieved from Radio Free Europe on 16 August 2020

I am planning to write a series of posts walking us through a key text on strategic nonviolent resistance.  The name of the text is From Dictatorship to Democracy, by Gene Sharp.  Those who want to read ahead can download the print copy of the book here, or they can download an audio recording of the book here.  Remember this quote from Srdja: "There are only two kinds of nonviolent movements: those that are spontaneous, and those that are successful."