2011 has begun as a momentous year in the history and practice of nonviolent civil resistance. Tunisia and Egypt have sparked movements across North Africa and the Middle East as ordinary people rise up to resist the autocracy, corruption, and abuse they have lived under for decades. This method of struggle is by no means new, however. People throughout history have waged nonviolent struggle to gain independence, dissolve oppressive structures, and demand rights. With each new movement we are given an opportunity to learn from those who wage these struggles. Here’s what we can learn from Egypt…so far.

Social media does and can play a significant role in civil resistance. Due to the sexy, catchy narrative that “Twitter” and “Facebook” revolutions provide for the mainstream media – something akin to the old guard kissing up to the very platforms that will eventually dismantle their monopoly on information – the impact of social media is often attacked for being overblown. Has it been? Sure. But in an attempt by some scholars, writers, and pundits to throw a wet blanket on these new modes of communication and information sharing, they have fallen into the trap of stubbornly hanging on to an argument that flies in the face of what’s actually happening.

What Egyptians have demonstrated is that a Facebook group—We Are All Khaled Said—can make people more aware and fed up with the injustice and brutality they face at the hands of their government. Young Google executive, Wael Ghonim, was the creator of said page, which soon became a platform for others to share stories, videos, and images of police brutality. Reporting on Ghonim’s efforts, Newsweek reporter Mike Giglio writes, “the page quickly became a forceful campaign against police brutality in Egypt, with a constant stream of photos, videos, and news. Ghonim’s interactive style, combined with the page’s carefully calibrated posts—emotional, apolitical, and broad in their appeal—quickly turned it into one of Egypt’s largest activist sites.” So it is no surprise that when this Facebook page called for mass demonstrations on January 25, which is also National Police Day in Egypt, that large numbers of Egyptians were sufficiently informed and enraged to a point of heeding the call for direct action.

In 2008, the April 6 Youth Movement blossomed out of a Facebook page that, for the next three years, became the virtual staging ground for a larger coalition of groups working together to demand an end to Mubarak’s reign, envision a new government, and organize protests and demonstrations in that effort.  Two young Egyptians, Ahmed Maher and Esra Abdel-Fatah, started the April 6 Youth Movement Facebook page to organize demonstrations in solidarity with a labor strike set to take place on April 6.  When the page first went live on March 23, 2008, the power of social networking took immediate effect.  David Wolman with Wired magazine writes, “By the end of March, the group was pushing 40,000 members. Participants began changing their profile pictures to the April 6 logo, which meant the logo kept popping up in the News Feed of anyone on Facebook who was connected to someone in the April 6 group. Adding to this barrage, the activists kept loading a link to the group into their Status Update fields, further flooding Egypt’s Facebook universe with connections to the group and its message.”

The organizing utility of Facebook was immediately apparent. The April 6 demonstrations became one of the biggest in Egypt’s history and put the opposition movement and larger Kefaya (Enough) coalition on the map in a big way. The Internet, blogs, and social networks were seen as a new virtual space for people to organize campaigns and discuss social and political issues that were extremely difficult and dangerous to hold offline in physical spaces.

Twitter hashtags – #egypt, #jan25, #tahrir, #mubarak – provided, real-time, citizen perspectives of what was happening on the ground in the middle of Tahrir square and in cities across Egypt.  Twitter was also used to confirm or deny rumors of certain developments being reported by the mainstream and state media outlets.  It stripped the power and concentration of information away from the state and instead Twitters set up their own system of trending certain topics and verifying credible sources.

Videos captured on cell phone cameras and posted on YouTube exposed what government censors didn’t want people to see – be it abuse at the hands of the government or movement successes that would add fuel to the resistance.  These videos were then remixed and mashed up by digital creatives into music videos, which became a source of inspiration to keep the movement strong and inspire other oppressed people to rise up.

SMS helped activists coordinate actions – where and when to meet, sharing protest routes, reminding people to remain nonviolent, sharing methods to protect one’s self from tear gas and rubber bullets. This instant communication could be texted to a small group of direct action takers or tweeted out to millions of followers.

Is it possible to do all these things without the Internet, social platforms, and digital tools? To a certain extent, yes. Do social platforms, digital tools and the Internet as a whole allow for this kind of coordination and information sharing to happen more quickly and be more widely shared – in other words, increase the chance the movement becomes viral? Absolutely.

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The residents of al-Arakib, a Bedouin village in Israel’s Negev Desert, refuse to leave and they refuse to cease rebuilding, despite 17 demolitions in a span of just eight months -  the most recent taking place on Wednesday.  As the number of demolitions has risen, the severity of force used against al-Arakib residents, who rightfully resist the demolition of their homes, has also risen. Those at the scene on February 16, reported that Israeli forces arrived and immediately began shooting tear gas, stun grenades, and foam-tipped bullets at the residents. Tamar, an Israeli activist who was present during the most recent round of demolitions reported on the Israeli forces’ indiscriminate use of violence:

The police harshly beat the women and children who were standing in quiet protest, they simply beat women and children…I stood alongside a woman who was beaten by four police officers, actual fists in her face, ears and neck, in addition to kicks until she almost lost consciousness…people are sitting on the ground, in the rain, and not moving, women and children. The police shot stun grenades and foam bullets directly at the women, at point blank.

The Bedouins of al-Arakib comprise a few hundred of the more than 100,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel living in the Negev. Nearly half of the that population live in villages that the State of Israel doesn’t officially recognize. Unrecognized villages are not connected to the electrical grid, water mains, or trash pick-up and sewage systems.

Many are calling the demolitions in al-Arakib the “ethnic cleansing of the Negev Desert.” Demolitions carried out by the Israel Land Administration are made possible by the overwhelming presence of Israeli riot police and their gross use of force. The demolitions are an attempt to Judaize more territory in the Negev by forcing Bedouin residents off their ancestral land and into the towns that Israeli created in the late 70′s/early 80′s for the purpose of concentrating the Arab Negev population.

In the most recent demolitions, activists reported that the bulldozers that razed the dwellings and animal enclosures were not Israel Land Administration equipment, as used previously, but were marked as belonging to the Jewish National Fund (see here and here for harrowing video of previous demolitions).

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The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee has just put “Death and Taxes,” a film they made on war tax resisters and their motives, online. You can also download a teacher’s guide, find or organize a screening of the film, and purchase a copy on their website.

• In Egypt, hundreds of workers went on strike on Thursday along the Suez Canal, one of the world’s strategic waterways, joining workers at textile mills, pharmaceutical plants, chemical industries, the Cairo airport, the transportation sector and banks pressing demands for better wages and conditions.

• Around 1,500 Jordanians demonstrated on Wednesday in the northern city of Irbid, calling for a “trial of the corrupt” and demanding a new electoral law as well as economic reforms.

• At least 14 Libyan demonstrators were reported to have been killed in clashes with pro-government forces Thursday, as protesters seeking to oust longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi defied a crackdown and took to the streets of four cities.

• In Iraq, protests hit the southern city of Kut, the oil hub of Basra, the northern oil city of Kirkuk and other towns — the latest in a series of demonstrations against local governments and demanding an end to food and power shortages.

• Clashes are continuing in Yemen after over a week of protests against U.S.-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh. On Thursday, government loyalists attacked a crowd of more than 6,000 protesters in the capital Sana’a. At least five people were wounded.

• Massive labor protests in Wisconsin have entered their fifth day. On Thursday 30,000 teachers, students, and state and municipal workers took part in a noontime rally at the state house in Madison to oppose Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for most public workers as well as slash their pay and benefits. Another 20,000 people took part in a rally last night at the state capitol.

• In Pakistan, over 8,000 teachers working in 400 educational institutions went on indefinite strike on Thursday with a pledge not to resume academic activities until the issuance of notification regarding implementation of teachers’ package announced by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in November 2010.

• In Egypt, Forty-five prisoners at the central prison in Arish, North Sinai, have begun a hunger strike to protest being detained without trial.

It’s a happy day when good ideas—and the people who create them—get their due. Today was one of those days. Thanks in large part to The New York Times’s feature on the backdrop of the revolution in Egypt, and then a profile devoted to him (which as I write is still #1 on the most-emailed list), interest in the work of Gene Sharp, the foremost living strategist of nonviolent action, has been exploding. Today, as well, I had the opportunity to talk with him, for an interview that just appeared at The Immanent Frame.

In preparation for the phone call, I looked back at the Times’s previous coverage of him, and noticed that, over the years, whenever some big uprising flares up somewhere, the world seems to rediscover all over again the unusual man who works out of his own home to create the blueprints for transforming the world. I asked him if this time—after successful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia—he feels that something truly different is happening, or if it’s just the same thing he’s seen before all over again. “No,” he said. “Maybe some things are being repeated. But this phenomenon, and the interest in it—what they did, the response, and the interest in that, that’s new. That’s quite new.”

Here’s a bit of the interview:

NS: What was the first thing that crossed your mind when you heard that President Mubarak had fallen from power in Egypt?

GS: That it can be done. In past years, there have been a lot of misconceptions about nonviolent action. People used to think that it was very weak and that only the violence of war could remove extreme dictators. Here was another example that shows this myth isn’t true. If people are disciplined and courageous, they can do it.

NS: Did anything surprise you about how the events unfolded? Did it teach you anything new?

GS: One thing that surprised me were the numbers, and the spread of people participating—that’s just amazing in itself. A second thing was that, in Egypt, people were saying they had lost their fear. That’s a step Gandhi was always calling for, and one that even I thought was a little too hopeful. But that seems to have been what happened in Egypt. When people lose their fear of an oppressor’s regime, the oppressor is in deep trouble. A third thing was how well they maintained nonviolent discipline. We heard reports on television that, when there was an area where things were getting a little difficult and might break out into violence, people were chanting among themselves, “Peaceful, peaceful, peaceful.” That was quite amazing too.

Continue reading at The Immanent Frame.

Charles Levinson and Margaret Coker had an extraordinary article in the Wall Street Journal last week explaining how the Cairo protests were anything but spontaneous and unplanned—and how they depended on more than Facebook:

The plotters, who now form the leadership core of the Revolutionary Youth Movement, which has stepped to the fore as representatives of protesters in Tahrir Square, in interviews over recent days revealed how they did it.

In early January, this core of planners decided they would try to replicate the accomplishments of the protesters in Tunisia who ultimately ousted President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Their immediate concern was how to foil the Ministry of Interior, whose legions of riot police had contained and quashed protests for years. The police were expert at preventing demonstrations from growing or moving through the streets, and at keeping ordinary Egyptians away.

“We had to find a way to prevent security from making their cordon and stopping us,” said 41-year-old architect Basem Kamel, a member of Mohamed ElBaradei’s youth wing and one of the dozen or so plotters.

They designated 20 protest gathering sites, which were all heavily guarded and prevented by police from reaching Tahrir Square. But there was one more:

They sent small teams to do reconnaissance on the secret 21st site. It was the Bulaq al-Dakrour neighborhood’s Hayiss Sweet Shop, whose storefront and tiled sidewalk plaza—meant to accommodate outdoor tables in warmer months—would make an easy-to-find rallying point in an otherwise tangled neighborhood no different from countless others around the city.

The plotters say they knew that the demonstrations’ success would depend on the participation of ordinary Egyptians in working-class districts like this one, where the Internet and Facebook aren’t as widely used. They distributed fliers around the city in the days leading up to the demonstration, concentrating efforts on Bulaq al-Dakrour.

Read the rest of the article. It’s really a gripping story.

Virtually all analyses that I have encountered in the mainstream media on the Tunisian and Egyptian democracy uprisings have emphasized material causes: poverty, widespread unemployment, food prices, lack of political participation, corruption, denial of human rights, oppression, torture and so on. These may be grounds for deep grievances. But they do not explain the sweep of national nonviolent mobilizations across the Eastern bloc and into the Soviet Union, starting in 1980 with Poland. They do not explain the Israeli and Palestinian joint committees that worked together to develop new symbols starting in 1981, and which became the first harbinger for the 1987 Palestinian intifada. They do not explain the decade-long U.S. civil rights movement.

Indian resistance to colonial rule was strong throughout the 19th century; more than 100 peasant revolts were politically shallow and easily suppressed. Yet it was not deprivation or colonial exploitation that caused multiple, multi-decade independence struggles to unify virtually the entire Indian population in the early 20th century.

Tunisia and Egypt’s upheavals were years in the making, as are all national nonviolent revolutions that I’ve studied. Many tragic events had transpired, but had not set off a national movement. Not only does suffering not explain the emergence of a movement, what may trigger a mobilization in December or January may not have had any effect in months or years earlier.

Material causes are less important than other factors. Knowledge can be more important than deprivation. Some of the elements are as follows:

• The ability to build cross-cutting broad coalitions. Numbers count, so breadth of appeal is important. Alliances encourage pluralism, inclusivity, and are emboldening. Closely related is the capacity to empower ordinary people.
• Facility in spreading information. Whether through houses of worship, the clandestinely circulated materials of the Eastern bloc national mobilizations, or by electronic means, all nonviolent movements use the latest technology for dissemination of knowledge on how civil resistance works, or sharing information on the latest inexcusable excrescence. In Eastern Europe, the covert distribution of samizdat (Russian for self-published) underground publications played a critical role in the democratic transitions. Beware the facile Twitter explanation.
• At the most fundamental level, clear communications about the grievances and the goal and objectives of the mobilization is essential for successful nonviolent action. If you want someone to stop doing something, or start doing something, you must be able with clarity to put across your ideas, aspirations, and demands. This is why logos, symbols, slogans, and motifs are so critical in civil resistance.
• A people’s ability to envisage or foresee an alternative to the continuance of oppression. In other words, a belief that popular action might be effective, a conviction that history can be made by ordinary mortals and not solely economic and martial forces—human agency.
• The extent of free-standing civil society organizations with independent leadership, which can provide a corporate capacity for mobilization.
• Dispersed or diffused centers of power lay the basis for broad resistance and social movements. Effective action requires varying institutions in a society that can provide constraints on the target group’s sources of power. Fragmentation of authority goes with diffusion of the centers of power, which help to elude interruption and generate independent leadership.
• An ability, or opening, in which civil society groups can capitalize on the political vulnerability of the opponent. The chance to seize a moment when the opponent has revealed its indifference and cruelty, or the ability opportunistically to raise the costs of its continuing repression. A perception of the weakness of the target group.
• The degree to which groups or organizer intellectuals who can act as interpreters have learned or studied the basic theories and methods of the technique of nonviolent civil resistance. In the civil rights movement, we had little in print. The sharing of knowledge took place by word of mouth, by professionals who had traveled to India and met with participants in the independence struggles. Today, basic works and case studies by foremost scholars and theoreticians are freely available for download in dozens of languages.
• Activist intellectuals in today’s societies can change the frames through which old grievances are viewed. Something endured for decades can be re-framed as now amenable to popular defiance.
• A willingness to include the opponent in the envisioned future can help to break the ranks of the opponent’s security services or police. By refusing to allow an “us” and “them” polarization to develop, a bridge can be laid for the security services to cross over to the side of the nonviolent challengers.
• Perhaps most importantly, the degree to which there exists a latent or explicit understanding by the guiding thinkers, or a popular appreciation, that no system can continue or succeed if the people cease to obey or cooperate with it.

All of these factors were present and operative in Tunisia and Egypt in 2010-2011, in varying degrees of intensity and pervasiveness.

I have not mentioned the charismatic leaders that are supposedly required of nonviolent movements, because I find little evidence of this phenomenon as a factor. More typically, movements thrust forward the leaders that exemplify their quest and raise up those who personify their emerging mobilization. Effective spokespersons must sometimes materialize rapidly, even if they must stay nameless or faceless in movements that are obliged to remain clandestine to survive.

I would rank all of these factors as more important than the exact nature of the underlying fundamental material grievances that so dominated the analysis by the North American and European news media.

We do not yet know the eventual outcomes in Tunisia and Egypt, although we do know that the more advance study, planning, and preparation the better. Poorly planned, improvisational mobilizations have historically led to coups d’état or merely opened the doors to a new set of thugs.

Analogies to Iran and Gaza are utterly misplaced. If you want analogies, look to the Eastern bloc. Educated middle classes of today’s societies can make judgments about ethics, principles, values, and basic rights based on a wider framework of analysis than those with little education. The artistic and literary activist scholars who addressed their work and communications to these middle classes in the Eastern bloc helped them to comprehend the corruption of the system, and hence played a major role. They needed receptive listeners and readers, but their work unraveled Eastern European communism. There, as in North Africa and on the Nile, movements grew from the broad numbers who came to see through the lies on which whole systems of patronage were based.

The people of Egypt have achieved a tremendous victory, one that has inspired the whole world to celebrate. The possibilities it raises for peace and democracy not only give hope to a region beset by authoritarian rule and Western intervention, but prove that nonviolent action is alive and well in the Muslim world.

Unfortunately, this latter point is often lost or overlooked by our major media outlets, whose experts and analysts have so little knowledge of the history and dynamics of nonviolence that they typically don’t know how to interpret what they’ve just seen. To counter this shortcoming, Waging Nonviolence has asked a wide range of eminent thinkers to discuss their initial thoughts on this historic moment, the challenges ahead and what it all means for the future of nonviolent action.

This is the fifth and final installment of their responses, which we’ve been presenting as a series over the last few days. (Here are links to Part 1, 2, 3 and 4.)

Are there any final thoughts you’d like to share on the Egyptian uprising?

“The vulnerability of dictatorships to this type of resistance has been displayed very clearly and witnessed by people (and governments) on all corners of the globe.  This will no doubt have very important consequences in terms of how people view political power, and how it can be gained and lost.  People have seen what is possible.  This new awareness will make it more difficult for those whose rule depends on the complacency and helplessness of their population.” – Jamila Raqib, Executive Director, Albert Einstein Institution

“One improtant point is related to the impact this wave of nonviolent social change may have on the rest of the world.  The fact is that after many years where world political and media attention have been focused on other issues (from terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, to the world ecconomic crisis) the issues of democracy, and human rights, especially after yesterday’s address by President Obama and representatives of EU, is now on the top of the agenda of world leaders and the international media. This is good and encouraging news for those who bravely struggle for democratic changes as we speak throughout the remaining dictatorships in the world – from Algeria, Yemen and Iran, to Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Burma. The inspiration and know-how coming from the impressive Egytpian people is out there.” – Srdja Popovic, Founder, Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS)

“I want to comment on the meme that the uprising in Egypt wasn’t truly nonviolent because there were some clashes between protesters & police, some acts of vandalism, rock throwing and other isolated incidents of rage.

It is true that there was an undisciplined element in the uprising, but that is always inevitable as these things grow, because not everyone has been trained in nonviolent strategy.

But the movement itself is/was nonviolent and they’ve been preparing for this confrontation for a long time. They understand the necessity of strict nonviolent discipline.Just as there was a radical flank in South Africa, in the US Civil Rights movement, in the Chilean resistance to Pinochet, and in many other nonviolent uprisings, there may have been a more radical flank here. So it is/was the job of the movement to a) distinguish themselves from that contingent, b) make it clear that no violence will be tolerated as part of the struggle, and c) train and discipline new activists on the ground as they join. They succeed on all counts.

It is important to see that the Egyptian regime was doing everything it could to provoke violence (or at the least, the perception of it) by the movement. They wanted to create the notion that what the movement was doing was not nonviolent and therefore not legitimate. It was very important that the activists minimized their vulnerability to such agent provocateurs, which they did extraordinarily well, especially considering the size of this movement. It is also important now that we (as observers) do not inadvertently serve the interests of dictators like Mubarak or of other similar regimes, who seek to take volition and credit away from brave nonviolent activists. This was their victory and they earned it.” – Cynthia Boaz, Assistant Professor, Sonoma State University

“What comes to mind is a conversation I had in January with a member of the South African military. I told him, well, I believe peace education is more important than military education because if you use nonviolence the costs are lower and benefits higher. He said, well, what about Cote d’Ivoire? How do we get that guy out? I told him that the ultimate Weapon of Mass Insurrection was general strike. Do it completely long enough and you win, except in the cases like Tibet, where a colonizing population has made the indigenous population less necessary. Sure enough, just when it looked like Egypt could be quite bloody or be crammed back into the Mubarak mold, labor and others joined the rise up and that was decisive. That, I believe, was the tipping point.” – Tom Hastings, Director of Peace and Nonviolence, Portland State University

“Though there is much work to be done I am tremendously optimistic and have great faith that the Egyptian people will continue fighting to make their democracy real.” – Mary Joyce, Founder and Executive Director, Meta-Activism Project

“Watch out Qadafi, Asad, Abdullah. We are coming for you.” – Reza Aslan, Associate Professor, University of California, Riverside

This Thursday, Sherif Mansour, the Senior Program Officer for Freedom House’s Middle East North Africa programs, will be giving what looks to be a very interesting and informative webinar, hosted by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), on the nonviolent uprising that brought down Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak last week. According to the announcement:

The Egyptian nonviolent uprising was a surprise for many. The world’s attention was primarily focused on the last two weeks. But the struggle for overthrowing Mubarak started over seven years before. Major transformations inside the pro-democracy movement from online activism to street organization mainly happened over the past three years. The breakthrough only happened in the past six months. This webinar will examine some of the major turning points, the organizational tactics that were employed by Egyptian activists, and show some of the early and recent manifestations of these tactics on the ground. The webinar will also highlight important logistical and moral support for the demonstrators during the uprising, and highlight some of the lessons learned and some of the critical points which can be utilized by other nonviolent struggles in the Middle East.

The webinar will run from 12-1pm EST. To reserve your place, click here. And if that time doesn’t work for you, ICNC will post the video of the presentation on their website afterward.

Gene Stoltzfus, founding director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, surely would have been excited about the overwhelmingly nonviolent people power movements spreading throughout the Middle East today. “Good nonviolence awakens energy,” he liked to say, and the massive demonstrations calling for freedom, justice and economic reform have indeed energized people around the world—many of whom likewise have been involved in longtime nonviolent campaigns that have inspired each other.

Some Waging Nonviolence readers are lucky enough to have met Gene, as he spoke and traveled widely during and after his 1988 – 2004 tenure with CPT.  Since his death last March, his spouse, Dorothy Friesen, has been collaborating with friends and family to compile many of Gene’s writings and experiences into a book called, “Create Space for Peace: 40 Years of Peacemaking.”  The book is due out next month, and can be ordered through the website Create Space for Peace, which was just recently launched to describe the book and Gene’s significant contribution to nonviolence theory and practice.

The book is aptly named. I first met Gene when he traveled through Texas on a speaking tour in 2005, and he talked about nonviolence as a sacred space that is opened when violence is pushed back, a space where something new can happen. Peacemaking involves engagement with all sides in a conflict, he said. “When you talk with your adversary, you are establishing the possibility for change.”

Those who knew Gene may be familiar with his Mennonite background, his five years of alternative service as a civilian in Vietnam in the 1960s and his commitment to the peace team approach. In recent years, he had woven together reflections and ideas that emerged from his peacebuilding experiences by writing a regular blog called Peace Probe.  Gene’s warmth, sincerity and good nature came through as abundantly in his writing as it did in person, and he expressed thoughtfully both the profound joys and human pain he witnessed and felt during the course of his life work.

Gene was a vibrant man who was deeply optimistic about the future of nonviolence. He knew how it could grow because he had seen it planted. I’m looking forward to reading the book that his loved ones have created, and I like imagining what he might have been writing now about the renewable energy that bubbled up in Egypt, enlivening the world.