The Meta-Activism Project, a digital activism think tank, has just launched a new resource for nonviolent activists.  The resource, called Civil Resistance 2.0, is a database of technology-assisted nonviolent methods based on the 198 methods of nonviolent resistance compiled by Gene Sharp, the trailblazing scholar of the field, in 1973. Communication tools have become more numerous and more accessible to activists since then, and other technology-based methods, like using airborne drones to track humanitarian crises, have also emerged. The database (use links tinyurl.com/CivRes20 or tinyurl.com/CivilResistance20 to visit or share) is being crowdsourced, which means that scholars and activists can add to and update the list. Please stop by and share your creativity and experiences.

An installation art piece that was set up in Speaker's Corner in Singapore on Human Rights Day in 2011 to represent the 170 who have been executed between 1999 and 2010. There was a blank canvas card for each person and a list of names that are known, with a voice in a little speaker reading out the names.

Execution day is always a Friday in Singapore. As the night sky slowly lightens into day, the inmate is taken from his or her cell and escorted to the gallows. At 6 a.m., the trapdoor opens and the inmate falls through. By the afternoon, the family should have collected the body, or the state will deal with it as it sees fit. And that, as far as Singapore’s authorities are concerned, is that.

In the past, very few people spoke against the death penalty. The message most children received in schools was that it is part and parcel of the tough laws that distinguish Singapore from other dangerous, crime-ridden cities. It was not something to be questioned, or even mentioned much at all. Apart from the sense of it being irrelevant to the average law-abiding citizen’s life, the topic of death is considered inauspicious and therefore not often a subject of conversation in Singapore’s Asian communities. In recent years, though, thanks to the growing influence of the Internet and social media, an increasing number of inmates’ stories are being told, and awareness of the death penalty is slowly rising.

A few keystrokes and a click of the button

When the state-owned newspapers, radio stations and TV channels that dominated the Singaporean media landscape and public gatherings were all subject to censorship, getting the word out about the death penalty in Singapore was difficult. To learn about it, people would have to already have made the decision to seek out more information themselves. Attracting new faces to a movement against it was a huge challenge.

But the proliferation of new media has made it much easier. News, photographs, event notifications and even excerpts of Singapore’s penal code are being shared with the click of a button, reaching a larger audience than activists could possibly have hoped for previously.

Organizations such as the Singapore Anti-Death Penalty Campaign (SADPC) and We Believe in Second Chances — a group that I co-founded — quickly set up social media networks to disseminate information as quickly as possible. “Social media got involved to lend us the publicity that the campaign needs, which is a very good thing as the mainstream media usually block such news out,” says Rachel Zeng from SADPC, in an email interview.

Alternative websites such as The Online Citizen have also contributed to the discourse on the death penalty by featuring articles that shed light not only on legal and philosophical arguments, but also stories of individuals on death row. One such individual — arguably the one who has attracted the most attention to the issue in recent years — is a young Sabahan named Yong Vui Kong.

A boy and the campaign

Arrested in 2007 at the age of 19, Vui Kong was convicted of trafficking 42 grams of heroin into Singapore and sentenced to death under the mandatory death penalty as stipulated in the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Vui Kong’s story is a sad tale of poverty and desperation. As a child he grew up on his grandfather’s plantation, going to school early in the morning and coming home to work late into the night. His mother, a single parent, continues to suffer from clinical depression and relies on medication. He left school and made his way to Kuala Lumpur while in his early teens, where he fell in with gangs that led him towards a life as a drug runner.

At the time of his arrest, Vui Kong was illiterate, unaware that his actions would attract such a harsh punishment. But once in remand — and later on death row — he began to turn to Buddhism, rising early in the morning to meditate and study scriptures. He also started to educate himself, learning to read and write in Mandarin and Malay, and making some headway with English. His family and lawyers have all remarked upon his remarkable transformation and reform.

Vui Kong’s case has since sparked off campaigns for his life in both Singapore and his home country of Malaysia, which also has the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking. Malaysian Chinese media featured his story in newspapers and on the covers of magazines, galvanizing the Malaysian Chinese community into action — especially those in his hometown of Sandakan in Sabah.

Part of the 109,346 signatures delivered to the president of Singapore at Istana in August 2010.

On August 24, 2010, his family, accompanied by Sabah Member of Parliament Datuk Chua Soon Bui, walked to the back gates of Istana (the official residence of the president of the Republic of Singapore) to deliver a petition signed by 109,346 people asking for a second chance for Vui Kong. Images of his family kneeling before the guards at the gate quickly spread through Facebook and Twitter.

Vui Kong’s story of youth, repentance and reform appealed to many, drawing them into the campaign.

“At the age that Vui Kong was caught, I was so much more fortunate than he was. I didn’t have to worry about income, a roof over my head, and I had good education,” says Priscilla Chia, founding member of We Believe in Second Chances. “It made me sympathize with Vui Kong a lot more.”

Vui Kong’s story has also inspired a song written by Singaporean musicians and a play produced by Amnesty International Malaysia.

A boy and the law

While activists appealed to the public to support Vui Kong, his lawyer, M. Ravi — incidentally the only human rights lawyer in Singapore willing to consistently take up death penalty cases, often pro bono, and work with campaigners — took on a series of challenges in court.

“In my opinion, this is a landmark case,” says Rachel Zeng. “In the past, once a convict is sentenced to death and the appeal period was over and clemency denied, the court would never allow anymore challenges or appeals from the defense.”

Singaporean lawyer M. Ravi

In Vui Kong’s case, however, Ravi had managed to win not one, but two stays of execution so as to be able to challenge his client’s sentence on legal grounds. Ravi and Vui Kong returned to court again and again, raising issues such as the constitutionality of the mandatory death penalty, the president’s discretionary powers in granting clemency and prosecutorial discretion.

Every appeal and application made was dismissed by Singapore’s highest court, the Court of Appeal. But with every trip to the Supreme Court, Singaporeans began to learn more about the death penalty and its application. For the first time, many Singaporeans discovered the difference between the death penalty and the mandatory death penalty, which removes discretionary powers from the judges when it comes to sentencing.

We learned that in granting clemency, the president is required to act according to the advice of the very legislators who implemented the mandatory death penalty in the first place. We learned that it is possible to convict and sentence drug mules to death while masterminds have all charges against them dropped.

“People found out from these challenges of the inherent injustices and systemic obstacles stacked against people who are from similar socio-economic background like Vui Kong,” says Ted Tan from ThinkCentre, a local NGO that carries out research on democracy and human rights issues.

Slow progress with a long way to go

Having been involved with the anti-death penalty campaign in Singapore since 2009, Rachel Zeng has seen many changes:

More people are aware of how the mandatory death penalty works. More people have taken an interest in discussing it, whether they are pro or against, on blogs and online forums. People have stepped up to voice out against it, and groups have worked together, and are still working together, on the campaign against the death penalty. Social media has chipped in to help us publicize the campaign.

“[The Vui Kong campaign] has also generated support and awareness of civil society across the causeway [linking Singapore and Malaysia] in a more sustained way than in the past that I can recall,” Ted Tan adds. “But collaboration could be better.”

While Vui Kong’s campaign appears to have made much headway in Malaysia, with the de-facto Law Minister Datuk Seri Nazri Abdul Aziz and the Malaysian Bar Council coming out to voice support for abolition of the death penalty, things are moving along at a slower pace in Singapore.

Even though awareness and discussion has increased over the years, the fact remains that many Singaporeans are still pro-death penalty. After a lifetime of being told by authorities that the death penalty is a necessary “trade-off” for safety and security and the well-being of our children, the task of overturning people’s belief in capital punishment is a thankless uphill battle.

It doesn’t help that different groups are sometimes unable to agree on fundamental stances. Certain groups favor the complete abolition of the death penalty in Singapore, while others are only opposed to the mandatory death penalty. And amidst such discussions, all campaigning is required to be extremely fluid and adaptable as cases sprout up, families approach activists with pleas for help, appeals are dismissed and the clock counts down on inmates’ lives. The demands are heavy on activists who can only volunteer their time, money and energy on top of already-exhausting full-time jobs.

Still, every anti-death penalty campaigner in Singapore understands that things will not change overnight. And so we learn to recognize the little victories, and to stand our ground until the time when Friday mornings bring no more heartbreak.

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.
Paul Mason
Verso Books (2012)

Seasoned activists from many of this country’s 20th century movements gathered for an extraordinary weekend in Birmingham with Narayan Desai — a prominent biographer of Gandhi who spent decades living with him in the ashram before going on to become a leader in Gandhian nonviolence in his own right.

In the midst of such widespread protest I thought it odd that, of the sixty or so participants, more youth were not attracted to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn, nearly firsthand, the spirit, tactics and strategy that was able to liberate India from the British Empire. We enjoyed the privilege of experiencing the spirit of Gandhi from one of the last living practitioners of satyagraha who knew Gandhi intimately. But, I wondered, what is the relevance of their weathered experience for today’s unfolding global revolutions?

The scale and depth of the worldwide protests of the past few years — with 2011, in particular — are unprecedented. Paul Mason, in his new book Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, details the arrival of these global uprisings that are youth driven — and, in many places, prominently nonviolent.

Mason’s journalistic project, which grew out of a blog — “Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere” — that he maintained as economics editor for the BBC, is rooted in the “near collapse of free-market capitalism.” This collapse, combined with “an upswing in technological innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in human consciousness about what freedom means” has led to a crisis and protest around the world.

These “global revolutions” — the crossroads of potential widespread social change — are as much about confronting failing systems as they are about the emergence of new modes of relating and being in the world. The uniqueness of these global revolutions are reported by Mason:

many of the activists I’ve interviewed are hostile to the very idea of a unifying theory, a set of bullet-point demands, a guru or a teleology … For the youth, increasingly, knowledge is drawn, on demand and free, from online articles and commentaries and — often breathless — tweets. And for many, politics has become gestural: it is about refusing to engage with power on power’s own terms; about action, not ideas; about the symbolic control of territory to create islands of utopia.

Allergic to ideology. Technologically fluent. And not interested in traditional politics but militantly political. Considering these essential characteristics of the global revolutions and reflecting on the crowd gathered at the Birmingham retreat it begins to dawn on me that the kind of shift we are in is more than just the kind of social change — best exemplified by the nonviolent campaign — as expected by my elders.

With stunning insight — because he listens — Mason provides an exciting account of how the revolutions and uprisings in Greece, Spain, Cairo, New York and elsewhere unfolded. The book’s journalistic style, even to the point of citing “tweets” by including #hashtags and @followers, reflects one of the first attempts to detail the revolutionary shift made possible by a faltering capitalism, social networking and alienated but educated populations. But Mason is more than just a reporter; he is also a commentator — a guide — through the confusing geography of network theory, revolutionary history and social psychology that corresponds to the new global revolutions.

It is at this intersection between social change and identity that Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere helps me unpack the competing hopes, dreams and criticisms for the Occupy movement: the anthropological understanding of the revolutionary is changing. Thankfully, Mason has recorded for militant occupiers, hopeful revolutionaries and exiled malcontents — young and old — a useful map for understanding the milieu of protest and constructive programs (borrowing the Gandhian term) that embody the contradictions of a postmodern resister to capitalism organizing from an iPhone to bring down a dictator.

At a Gandhian gathering such as it was in Alabama, it may come as no surprise that Occupy was front and center in our conversations. But the frustration, despair and even anger of an elder generation with the nascent movement palpably outweighed the excitement, creativity, freshness — and dare I add success — that many of my generation have found among occupiers.

To be sure, this generation of elders, who cut their teeth in the civil rights, peace, anti-nuclear and Central American solidarity movements, are ardent supporters of the Occupy movement. David Hartsough, co-founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce, called it the best hope for confronting the empire. As I listened to the impassioned cries from a generation who walked with the civil rights movement and successfully shut down nuclear power plants by occupying them grieve over Occupy’s apparent leaderlessness, lack of strategy and wavering commitment to nonviolence, I began to realize why I was one of the few young people in attendance — we are speaking a different language.

One of the most challenging aspects about the Occupy movement, for the establishment left and an aging generation of pacifists, is its stubborn commitment to leaderless structure and its militant emphasis on holding public space, direct defiance of the police, and aversion to make demands.

Setting aside the diffuse nature of the movement — and its burgeoning successes as part of the resistance against home foreclosures — one the main criticisms still tossed at Occupy is that it lacks focus. But what the global revolutions suggest is that the bizarre, pseudo-apolitical lack of focus is part of its method, in addition to being capable of toppling autocratic regimes. Bernard Harcourt coined the term “political disobedience” and Mason observed it in the riotous, anarchistic streets of Greece, the town squares of Spain and the General Assemblies in Zuccotti Park.

Some dismiss the Occupy movement as short-sighted or, as the 99% Spring subtly suggested in their announcement for massive nonviolent direct action training, undisciplined in their revolutionary quest. But oddly enough and rarely recognized, the occupiers in Zuccotti Park, many suspicious of the American dream appealed to by the 99% Spring in the first place, also reflect some of that Gandhian spirit. Their adamant commitment to horizontalism, what Mason calls the “norm for a generation,” affirms process over product and confirms a generation’s hope for alternative political spaces.

In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi wrote that “there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the ends as there is between the seed and the tree. We reap exactly as we sow.” When speaking of means and ends, the exhausting discourse on diversity of tactics comes to mind. And while Mason does a fine job resisting polemics as he documents the different tactics (and their intended and unintended consequences) utilized by the various protest movements around the world — such as the Black Bloc presence at the UK Uncut protests in March 2011 in London — the often over-looked relationship between means and ends has to do with occupations themselves. “The act of taking a space,” writes Mason, “and forming a community within it might be just as important as the objective of the struggle.”

Because the discourse of tactics eschews a steadfast commitment to nonviolence, as Gandhi clearly embraced, and the emphasis to reclaim and hold public space as the commons seems to neglect a concerted struggle for justice or peace, the old guard is having some difficulty recognizing what many youth, poor and working class people instinctively recognize: an individual can be liberated in horizontalism; Mason, citing a British anti-globalization activist, calls it “the most useful method for people with no power.”

When veterans of social movements who are used to being consulted as the experts are upstaged by some unemployed kid from the slums or an inexperienced, living-with-the-parents college graduate whose voices are equally valued in the assembly, a revolution of another sort is taking place. The orators, experts and professionals must take a back seat because the global revolutions embrace skepticism to the ready-made answers that are complicit with hierarchy and profit.

What the elders are wondering is if a self-absorbed generation plugged into Facebook and YouTube, jumping from the latest Black Eyed Peas hit on iTunes to an InterOccupy call or a livestreaming General Assembly, can really be the next Dr. Kings? A brief story from Mason reveals what may be the most challenging aspect for anyone who is less-than-adept with the latest social networking info-technology to realize: the “plugged in” individual is part of a community. Breaking down network theory and its role in protest movements, Mason cites a London student by her Twitter name, @littlemisswilde: “I can be hanging out in the same room as another activist, tweeting, and other people will see us and say: you’re being antisocial. But in fact, we’re being ultra-social.”

For many reasons, it is hard to imagine Gandhi on Twitter. But no one can deny that he, too, was “ultra-social,” especially how his open-ended fasts could mobilize all of India to end outbreaks of violence. The point, one concludes from Mason, is that social networking, leaderless movements and a dislocated or alienated populace don’t need Gandhi-type leaders to inspire revolt or occupy a park. Combine the appropriate #hashtag and networked individuals with a trigger event such as police brutality gone viral or a desperate and courageous self-immolation. Add high youth unemployment and economic anxiety and stir. A revolutionary occupation emerges.

Paul Mason’s work is a must-read for those captivated, either as participant or observer, by the global revolutions that are fundamentally altering how the alienated youth and the poor are understanding and relating to power. So as I meet young people — occupiers and otherwise — who don’t care much for the kind of conversations that I have with my elders about Gandhi’s piety or the finer points of satyagraha, I am still impressed by their commitment to a better world and their willingness to fight for what is right at great personal cost. Maybe the global revolutions are on their way to Gandhi’s liberating practice of nonviolence and truth. Because, as even Gandhi would say, satyagraha is a process — a praxis — more than an ideology. And an elder generation is poised to join in that struggle and offer its wisdom gained from blood shed and experience weathered — but it must do so first and foremost as listeners in the catharsis of the global revolutions that represent the best hope for another lost generation of young people.

In this recent webinar from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, I discuss the role of planning in the Occupy movement, from its early inception until now.

Read more about it and download related resources at ICNC’s website.

Still from "KONY 2012" representing an inverted pyramid of people-power acting on elites.

A student recently asked me about the now-famous online video “KONY 2012.” The man its name refers to, of course, is Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a guerrilla group alleged to have forced more than 60,000 children into fighting in armed conflicts in central Africa. As of this writing, the video has been watched more than 100 million times; its makers hope it will “raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” My student wrote:

Can a nonviolent movement be virtual, or does it require feet on the ground? The concept of “KONY 2012” appears to be about awareness targeted to North American supporters, not the people of Uganda or Congo where Kony calls home. If “KONY 2012” seeks only to raise awareness, but does not result in organized protest or the arrest of Kony, is it still an effective campaign?

I thought it was a great question, coming at the beginning of an online course at the University for Peace (UPEACE) with 30 mid-career students from literally all over the world, and in regard to a phenomenon that is spreading just as far and wide. My response, however, is that the “KONY 2012” video and what it calls for, whatever its ultimate effectiveness, would not qualify as a true nonviolent resistance campaign, movement or mobilization.

First, I would caution against focusing on the novelty of this video’s medium. Online social media are not in themselves generative. Media do not create movements. Rather, campaigns and movements commandeer media for their own needs to communicate and amplify their organizing. As a general rule, nonviolent movements tend to seize the most advanced technologies available. (For more, see Daryn Cambridge’s webinar, “The Digital Duel: Resistance and Repression in an Online World.”)

Nevertheless, the basic premise is sound that a video like this might hasten the efforts of a local struggle. Such transnational activism can speed the process of building awareness, a critical component of any campaign — although neither a video nor the awareness it spreads should be considered a goal in itself. Consider, for instance, the 1985 student-led consumer boycott in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, which helped to launch third-party international sanctions against that country’s apartheid state and corporations. But “KONY 2012” is different from this kind of tertiary sanctions in significant ways.

What distinguishes a nonviolent movement or campaign from the usual institutionalized politics of elections, militaries and law courts? The historian and chronicler of social movements Charles Tilly says that three elements were involved as modern social movements came into view by the latter part of the 18th century in North America and Western Europe:

1. A sustained, focused, and organized public endeavor making collective claims on the officials of the target group;
2. Techniques of political action, such as special-purpose associations, alliances, and coalitions; public sessions; petition drives; solemn marches and processions; rallies and assemblies; demonstrations; vigils; announcements to media; pamphlets, flyers, placards, and pickets putting across clear statements of objectives and goals;
3. What Tilly calls “WUNC” (worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment) on the part of participants and their constituencies.

WUNC is communicated in characteristic modes of expression that local audiences can recognize. Worthiness can be shown in deportment, neatness of dress, attendance of religious leaders, accompaniment of dignitaries or respected figures, and presence of mothers with children. Unity can be seen in chosen logos, headbands, costumes, marching in disciplined ranks, singing and clapping. Numbers show in signatures on petitions or pledges, messages, and filling streets or squares with people. Commitment is visible when people brave bad weather, or if the very old and disabled are in the throng, or in clear-cut resistance to oppression, or when recognizable sacrifices are being made, such as subscriptions and donations.

In contrast to a one-time mass meeting or petition drive, a campaign goes beyond single events. It links the claimants, the objects of the claims and a larger public. Tilly writes, “Not the solo actions of claimants, object(s), or public, but interactions among the three, constitute a social movement.”

The “KONY 2012” video does involve certain elements of a typical nonviolent social movement. It asks for commitment, requests individuals to sign pledges, solicits money and asks viewers to share the video. It has enlisted celebrities, athletes and performers. It uses slogans, pays attention to recruitment, heeds the meaning of numbers and uses state-of-the-art social media technologies. The organizers have been clever and innovative, developing a website through which individuals might track their impact. Those who contribute to its charity receive well-designed kits to facilitate their ongoing involvement, which are said to be free. Its spokespersons make strong demands upon the Ugandan military, the U.S. government and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which they hope will bring Joseph Kony to justice and set an international precedent.

“KONY 2012,” however, does not stand in solidarity or support of an organized movement of Ugandan resistance. In suggesting that people contribute money to the San Diego-based nonprofit that made the video, which advocates a U.S.-assisted military operation to remove Kony, it’s as if Ugandan civilians are incapable of their own solutions.

This is an atrocious conflict. After Yoweri Museveni took power in Uganda in 1986 and became president through military force, some ethnic Acholis rose up, Kony among them. At an early stage, his LRA received some local support in northern Uganda, but as its assets faded, the militia began to rob the local population. The guerrilla group gained strength in 1994 when the government of Sudan began to back it, thus retaliating against the Ugandan capital for supporting Sudanese rebels. By 1996, Uganda’s government was creating secured camps. Village children were called “night commuters,” as they walked miles nightly to the comparative safety of the camps or towns, trying to avoid abduction. Kony’s goal for the LRA was never apparent, beyond the ouster of Museveni and formation of a theocracy based on the Ten Commandments. Meanwhile, local villages have been caught in a terrible crossfire between the Ugandan military and Kony’s LRA, and as many as two million people have been displaced.

The conflict is not cross-border in the usual sense, but it is now a regional phenomenon, further confounding solution. International institutions, courts and agencies of multilateral diplomacy have few relationships to provide handles for enable meaningful involvement. In 2005, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague indicted Kony and other LRA leaders for war crimes, who have eluded capture. Still, it is most unfortunate to imply as the video does that the Ugandans are bystanders in their own struggle. They are, instead, their own best hope.

I am troubled by the whiff of an arrogant underlying assumption that it was not until U.S. Internet technologies came along that ordinary people could alter oppressive conditions. I might feel better if the video pointed out that the United States has conspicuously rejected a role as a state party in the ICC. Or if it mentioned that the United States has never signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a human rights treaty setting out the civil, cultural, health, economic, political and social rights of children.

We find no mention, either, of the exertions of countless individuals and groups working in Uganda through very different means, nor does it leave much room for other promising approaches to this crisis and others like it.

In 1993, for instance, Betty Bigombe, a minister of state working from the prime minister’s office, began face-to-face negotiations in the conflict in Acholiland, in northern Uganda, that arose from Kony’s LRA in 1986. Bigombe, who has recently been writing on the subject with a research fellowship in the United States, has said that the LRA is no longer the problem that it was for Uganda — apart from its responsibility for its egregious crimes in the past. She holds that, now, nearby countries are more affected by the militia’s actions.

At the University of Gulu, a new generation of young peace and conflict instructors at the Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies, have been working with programs to help the formerly abducted and enslaved children. (Watch Rosebelle Kagumire’s response to “KONY 2012.” A Ugandan journalist, blogger and peace builder, she mentions Betty Bigombe — and is also an alumna of UPEACE.)

When I visited neighboring Rwanda in 2003, people there told me that the entire country would profit from basic elementary education in nonviolent struggle, which could have helped the people to refuse cooperation with the 1994 organized mass murders by the genocidaires (genocide perpetrators). At Rwanda’s National University, in southernmost Butare province, its vice rector, Dr. Jean-Bosco Butera (now director of the UPEACE Africa Programme), told me that as long as the governor of Butare traveled throughout the province and into villages urging the people not to cooperate with the orders to kill coming from the capital Kigali, no deaths occurred in Butare — until he was himself murdered.

This brings me to a key point. As yet, comparatively little research and investigation has been done on the potential for applying the technique of nonviolent resistance to situations where the withholding of obedience and cooperation might thwart organized killings and abductions. Yet a 2003 monograph by Gene Sharp and Bruce Jenkins, The Anti-Coup, in my view, holds promise for Africa and elsewhere in its analysis of how noncooperation, which is central to the workings of civil resistance, can be used to block military or political usurpation of power through the withdrawal of obedience to an adversary. Its insights could be applied to populations trying to resist mass killings — such as occurred in Rwanda in 1994 and with Kony’s unspeakable crimes. Post-colonial African countries have seen more than their share of coups d’état by conspiratorial bands of soldiers and groups seizing power.

My proposition is that the root causes of some conflicts and coup-type seizures of control may be more effectively addressed through civil resistance, using nonviolent weapons, than through the kind of military intervention proposed by “KONY 2012.” What would happen, for example, if those that Kony has been terrorizing prepared themselves to bring about paralysis by noncooperation, engage in massive subversion of troops, make defiant roving radio broadcasts, conduct general strikes and economic shutdowns? Not only might Kony’s operations be affected, but others aspiring to replace him would be discouraged.

The question of what kind of help really helps is always nettlesome, but we must never stop posing it. In general, the great powers have proved again and again that they are capable of making a bad situation far worse by clumsy and awkward interventions. Western leaders and legal institutions do not have deep knowledge of African traditions for addressing acute conflicts that might be strengthened. The persistence of the LRA and the Kony outrage should be addressed as much as possible by Ugandans and other Africans in order for it to provide a hedge against future coups d’état and repulsive arrogations of power.

The ability of populations to cope with incendiary guerrilla campaigns deserves concentrated consideration. Sharp and Jenkins’s monograph is a good place to start. I would also like to see more research, study and simulation led by Africans. The history of nonviolent action in Africa is extensive, such as that reflected in a study by Desmond George-Williams of Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. Yet much more work is needed in examining how Africans past and present have successfully resisted and withheld cooperation from those who would seize power by brutal means.

In 2006, these two animated characters, Jingjing and Chacha, appeared on websites in Shenzhen, China, to remind Internet users that they were being monitored.

Just who owns the Internet, and who has the right to control what content is available on it? Is it sovereign territory, or is it free from the confines of antiquated earthbound laws? These questions have engaged Internet activists and scholars for over a decade. And, after the intense debate last month over proposed Internet restrictions in the U.S., announcements from Twitter and Google about enhanced efforts to voluntarily comply with national laws, and ongoing international protest over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, popular interest in Internet regulation appears to be mounting.

To the disappointment of techno-utopians, though, the Internet is very much capable of being regulated, and some governments have been perfectly willing to do so. The most obvious example of this is China’s “Great Firewall,” a vast network of structural, social and legal controls by which it regulates Internet content. Exactly what content is being blocked, however, isn’t always easy to say.

One can intuitively guess that advocating the overthrow of the Communist Party online would be difficult, if not dangerous, to do in China. But is Taiwan a sensitive topic? What about religion and sex? For several months last year, I set out to track what one Chinese Internet company, Sina Weibo—China’s leading Twitter copycat—considered off-limits. Utilizing a computer script and much patience, I was able to uncover roughly a thousand unique banned words. According to that list, I can tell you that Taiwan is mostly fine so long as you’re not discussing Taiwanese independence (台湾独立, 一中一台, etc); all discussion of major religions is allowed except for one, Islam (伊斯兰); and even today, in an age of increasingly open sexuality in China, searching for posts on aphrodisiacs (春药) will return error messages.

Chinese Internet Regulations

Weibo is a general term for microblogging—literally, “tiny blog”—representing a whole host of Twitter-like clones in China. However, Weibo has become synonymous with the largest microblogging site, Sina Weibo. It wasn’t the first, but it is by far the largest and most important such site in China. Aided by China’s banning of Twitter, the site has grown to over 250 million registered users.

However, like all major licensed websites in China, Weibo has numerous restrictions on what sort of content it is allowed to host and distribute. In June 2010, China’s State Council Information Office released a white paper on Internet usage for the country. Though the paper asserts that Chinese users have the right to freedom of expression online, it also enumerates a prohibition against content that is:

endangering state security, divulging state secrets, subverting state power and jeopardizing national unification; damaging state honor and interests; instigating ethnic hatred or discrimination and jeopardizing ethnic unity; jeopardizing state religious policy, propagating heretical or superstitious ideas; spreading rumors, disrupting social order and stability; disseminating obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, brutality and terror or abetting crime; humiliating or slandering others, trespassing on the lawful rights and interests of others; and other contents forbidden by laws and administrative regulations.

This is an incredibly broad array of off-limit topics, and the fact that a phrase like “damaging state honor and interests” is not clearly defined is an intentional feature of the Chinese censorship system, a mechanism coined by Perry Link as “the anaconda in the chandelier.” The vagueness inevitably leads content providers like Sina Weibo to excessively self-censor in order to stay well within the bounds of acceptable discourse. The company—and its users—may have a sort of sixth sense for knowing what may or may not be off-limits, but the fact that there is no officially published blacklist, coupled with the fear of severe punishments, compels them to step even farther back from the imaginary line. As Internet scholar Rebecca MacKinnon noted:

Recent academic research on global Internet censorship has found that in countries where heavy legal liability is imposed on companies, employees tasked with day-to-day censorship jobs have a strong incentive to play it safe and over-censor—even in the case of content whose legality might stand a good chance of holding up in a court of law. Why invite legal hassle when you can just hit “delete”?

Chinese Internet companies are now required to sign the “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for China Internet Industry,” a document that in some ways includes even stricter rules than those listed in the 2010 white paper. Thus, it’s no wonder you have companies censoring topics like Islam, even though the religion is officially sanctioned under Chinese law.

Chinese government officials send weekly updates to media providers on topics that it expects censored. Otherwise, however, the onus is on the content provider to self-censor, a practice that Weibo’s head editor admitted is “a very big headache.” But it works. Bill Clinton may have compared censoring the Internet to nailing jello to the wall, but China appears to have built an effective harness (self-censorship by companies and netizens) to go along with the world’s biggest nail gun (tens of thousands of state-employed Internet monitors, total government control of overseas Internet data connections, and next-generation monitoring hardware developed by corporations like Cisco).

How One Company Censors

When I say “banned” with regards to words on Weibo, I actually mean “blocked.” Users can actually post anything they want to the site, including words which are indeed off-limits. Some other sites, in contrast, employ filters that will deny you the ability to post a message if you use a banned word. Weibo’s censors can then summarily delete inflammatory messages without any notice. Unless the author is very notable or the post is caught up in a roundup, it is likely that posts with banned words might escape the censor’s eye.

For the most part, however, Weibo relies on a different strategy for containing the spread of sensitive content: blocking searches. By blocking a user’s ability to find a term, one isn’t able to look for sensitive content and one doesn’t have to delete or filter posts one at a time. Not only is this method arguably more effective and more flexible, it’s less intrusive. Users facing an error message when posting their own content might feel outraged, but being unable to search for a term would probably just elicit a shrug. And words that are only temporarily sensitive can be added to the blacklist of search terms one day and removed the next without having to permanently delete the content.

When censors decide a certain search term is no longer sensitive, as they did for hundreds of words like 恋足 (foot fetish) and 九一一袭击 (the 9/11 attacks) in late January, the switch is flipped and users can suddenly search for foot fetish posts to their heart’s content—so long as they haven’t been intimidated by the chilling effects of the previous block. I haven’t used the service enough to know how Weibo handles “re-tweets” and sensitive posts from flowing into a follower’s feed, but there are reports that Weibo sometimes will simply “ghost” a post—allowing it to appear online to the author, but not be viewable to anyone else—rather than delete it. Such a tactic demonstrates how concerned Weibo is with maintaining a seamless user experience while also having to comply with content restrictions.

At the moment, Weibo’s search-filtering mechanism is not particularly sophisticated. It checks the search term against a blacklist, and if any part of the search term matches any word on the blacklist, it is blocked.  For example, “Nintendo 64” is blocked because “64,” short for June 4, the day of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, is a banned term. Thus, any search containing “64” will be blocked, even harmless ones like “Nintendo 64,” an issue known as the Scunthorpe Problem.

Over the years, in a series of cat-and-mouse games, Chinese Internet users have developed an extensive series of puns (both visual puns and homophones), slang, acronyms and memes to skirt restrictions and censors. Such creative usages may still be helpful in evading the censor’s eye on Weibo—by using a sort of code it makes one’s post not only less likely to get caught in any search filter but also less likely to even be found by a censor in the first place. Furthermore, Chinese Internet users have seemingly mastered the use of irony as protest, reaching the point where any decidedly pro-government comment online like “Socialism is good” or “I have been represented by my local official” must be assumed to be satirical. Filtering tools like the ones Weibo uses in its search tool certainly can’t recognize such nuances. In some respects, they are “easy” to defeat, thus emphasizing just how important those human monitors employed by Weibo are, who have the ability to delete individual posts and even entire accounts, like what happened to Ai Wei Wei’s.

Blocked on Weibo

Inspired by China Digital Times’ impressive attempts to track banned words across various Chinese online services, I sought to systematically uncover banned words on Weibo. I used 700,000 Chinese Wikipedia titles as my search terms (which include both traditional and simplified titles as well as many colloquial terms) and tested them on Weibo with a computer script. In the end, I came up with several thousand blocked terms, roughly a thousand of which were unique. Of course, some were unsurprising, for instance political terms like 六四 (64) and 反共 (anti-communism); others like 乱伦 (incest), 暴露狂 (exhibitionism), and 吹箫 (blowjob, but literally blowing a flute) straddled a moral gray area; a few like 伊斯兰 (Islam) and 同性爱 (homosexuality) were surpising in their reactionary nature; and finally, a few words like 黄色 (yellow, slang for pornographic) bordered on ridiculous (mercifully, yellow has been unblocked since early February).

In the small sample that I’ve coded so far, the largest share of the blocked words are names of people, the majority of which are Communist Party members—protection from criticism on Weibo being a seeming perk for rising up the ranks—while dissidents and people caught up in scandals or crimes made up the rest of the blocked names. Words related to sex, immorality, religious cults, demonstrations and protests, also comprised a large percentage of the list.

I was aided in all this by the fact that Weibo notes when it has in fact blocked your search. In addition to returning zero results, it helpfully displays an error message. Thus, one is literally aware when search results are blocked, unlike instances on other sites when China’s firewall may leave a user ignorant that his connection and searches are being filtered or degraded (though a handful of searches on Weibo—for example 无界网络, or, as it’s known in English, Ultrasurf, the Falun Gong-designed anti-censorship software—do cause your connection to the site to be intentionally cut for two minutes).

Such “transparency”—a notice posted when content is blocked—is the same kind promoted by Twitter as a check against censorship. And while transparency is generally laudable, it could be argued that a visual reminder that censorship is occurring serves as a form of intimidation, akin to the appearance of the animated police characters Jingjing and Chacha on various Chinese websites in recent years. Such transparency also serves as an effective training mechanism, teaching Internet users about which topics they should be careful of discussing online, thus furthering the goal of decentralizing the censorship and moving the onus for it from the government to the media company to, finally, the individual.

Thus, there are multiple layers of censorship occurring. There is the government mandated blacklist of off-limit topics—what we’d typically consider censorship—but there are two more subtle forms: the self-censorship by content providers, who must make judgment calls on what needs to be censored in order to stay in the government’s good graces, and self-censorship by users, who face the threat of being detained and punished for anti-government posts. Users are at greater risk than ever now that Weibo and other micro-blogs are beginning to require real names during registration. Though the company and government claim that this is merely to hold users accountable for spreading misinformation and malicious rumors, it’s clear that such a measure is designed to head off the type of political commentary that could lead to an online-inspired Jasmine Revolution. Even so, Internet users are clever, and with ever-growing information about how companies and governments censor content online, the mice may never be caught.

I learned a new word today: clicktivism. 

Oh, I’m sorry. Am I the last person on the planet to know this word?

In my defense, I am closer to 40 than 30 and closer to 50 than 20 (if you must know) at this point. I am a classic late adopter. I got my first cellphone in 2003 and have not advanced much beyond rudimentary texting (full words and proper punctuation intact). Tablets and iPhones and all of their paraphernalia make me physically anxious (so small, so fragile, so powerful).

The reason this all comes up is that I did my own bit of clickivism recently. I signed an e-petition asking President Barack Obama to veto a bill sitting on his desk.

House Resolution 347 and Senate Bill 1794 were reconciled and approved on March 1 (with only three dissents), resulting in a bill that now sits on President Obama’s desk awaiting his signature. It’s innocuously called “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011.” Sounds like a public works program, doesn’t it? Is it one of Obama’s shovel-ready projects aimed at getting the unemployed back in the saddle? Not quite.

In essence, the bill places much harsher limitations on when and where protests can happen by allowing law enforcement to charge protesters with federal crimes if they protest on federal grounds, or at any location occupied by someone protected by the Secret Service, or at any location deemed of “national significance.” This could be any place that the Department of Homeland Security decides—for example, the Democratic and Republican conventions, or the upcoming G8 summit (just moved from Chicago to Camp David, just in case Obama kills the bill), or the NATO meetings (still scheduled for the Windy City).

As Russia Today (always happy to declare the U.S. a totalitarian police state), wrote on February 29:

The new legislation allows prosecutors to charge anyone who enters a building without permission or with the intent to disrupt a government function with a federal offense if Secret Service is on the scene. … Covered under the bill is any person protected by the Secret Service. Although such protection isn’t extended to just everybody, making it a federal offense to even accidently disrupt an event attended by a person with such status essentially crushes whatever currently remains of the right to assemble and peacefully protest. Hours after the act passed, presidential candidate Rick Santorum was granted Secret Service protection… In the text of the act, the law is allowed to be used against anyone who knowingly enters or remains in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so, but those grounds are considered any area where someone—[whether] it’s President Obama, Senator Santorum or Governor Romney—will be temporarily visiting, whether or not the public is even made aware. Entering such a facility is thus outlawed, as is disrupting the orderly conduct of “official functions,” engaging in disorderly conduct “within such proximity to” the event or acting violent to anyone, anywhere near the premises.

When it was all said and done, the House voted to accept the Senate version in a 388 to 3 vote (with 42 not participating). Republicans Justin Amash (a 31-year-old Tea Partier and avid Facebooker from Michigan who opposed the National Defense Authorization Act) and Dr. Paul Broun (Georgia) voted against the measure along with Democrat Keith Ellison (Minnesota).

Amash—my new best friend—posted on Facebook after his “no” vote:

The bill expands current law to make it a crime to enter or remain in an area where an official is visiting even if the person does not know it’s illegal to be in that area and has no reason to suspect it’s illegal. (It expands the law by changing “willfully and knowingly” to just “knowingly” with respect to the mental state required to be charged with a crime.) Some government officials may need extraordinary protection to ensure their safety. But criminalizing legitimate First Amendment activity—even if that activity is annoying to those government officials—violates our rights.

The e-petition against the bill has more than 2,000 signatures and is hoping to collect 2,500. I signed it. It took 25 seconds (thanks to Google Chrome autofill). So I guess I’m a clicktivist now.

I hesitate to even waste time defining “clicktivism” for savvy online readers such as yourselves, but here goes: it mushes click (what we do on our computers to choose things. Wait, we all still click, right?) and activism. It has come to denote online activist activities like signing petitions, donating money and spreading the word about a campaign or issue via Twitter, Facebook or other even more mysterious mechanisms. I also like clicktivism’s cousin: slacktivism, which is more or less the same thing but with the pejorative connotation ratcheted up a few notches and made explicit. Slacktivism can also refer to ostentatious and expensive charity trends like the Feed Bag and (Red).

Some computer-based activism is very easy, attractive and in some cases even effective. In Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age, authors Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport discuss how new technologies are “leveraged affordances” (man, I wish I were an academic) that reduce the “costs for creating, organizing, and participating in protest” and “aggregate individual people’ actions into broader collective actions” without all those people having to be in the same place at the same time.

They do not argue that clicktivism should replace in-the-streets agitating, organizing and confronting. Rather, they offer lots of examples of how a well-developed virtual strategy can provide more points of entry into a particular struggle or issue. A group at Notre Dame convened a some bloggers (including yours truly) in December to discuss the book and activism in the Internet age.

One interesting issue that they raise is the cost of activism. Can an act be both easy and transformative? “Some long time activists,” they write, “might dispute characterizing online participants as activists, noting the ease of online participation. … For some, activism might have to be difficult, by definition, and entail confrontation and hardship.”

I hail from the hard knocks school of activism—namely that the harder the witness is, the better. I know that is not absolute, could be full of holes and maybe (just maybe!) stems from my Catholic upbringing, which was so unavoidably and unapologetically steeped in the blood of the martyrs. But there is something to it, right? Our history of social and political change is full of people who have been hurt and killed to bring about that change. Abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights activists, union organizers, Occupiers—these people have gotten their heads (and worse) bashed throughout the ages. We don’t remember the names of Rosa Parks or Elizabeth Cady Stanton because they squeezed a little activism and rabble-rousing in between their office job, their hair appointment and cocktails with the girls. They were no slacktivists.

All over this country right now, people are doing hard work for social and political change. Through the fall and winter, and in the face of concerted opposition and police violence, people tried to hold the political and physical space opened up by Occupy in September. Although it was supported by millions who were involved online (doing everything from donating pizzas, monitoring web streams and spreading the word), it depended most of all on actual people holding actual space.

I would be curious to know how many people have been arrested in the Occupy movement in the last six months. I bet it is a lot, and I bet a lot of people have been arrested multiple times. And, while all that activism and foment and suffering has not resulted in a fundamental reordering of our economy so that the needs of the 99 percent are being met and justice and equality reign, the long term implications of all the experiences, revelations, friendships, insights and commitments forged in the crucible of Occupy are immeasurable and revolutionary. That kind of rich on-the-ground experience is not a click away, and it never will be.

About that anti-protester bill? No word yet if there is a real live street opposition to it. Watch your Flickr (oops, I mean Twitter) feed for news. Click.

Andrew Breitbart at the Americans for Prosperity Defending the American Dream Conference. Photo by Mark Taylor, via Flickr.

Much of my work in nonviolence and nonviolent action revolves around the assumption that the ends never justify the means, and that the way you fight a battle has everything to do with the ultimate result. “Victories” won through violence—whether literal or verbal—are dubious at best, and disastrous at worst. This is because they do nothing to eliminate the underlying cause of the grievance being addressed, and only pile on new hatreds. They expand the divisions between people, rather than close them. This is why Gandhi said that “a victory won through violence is tantamount to defeat—for it is momentary.”

What does this have to do with the recent sudden death of BigGovernment.com’s scorch-and-burn blogger Andrew Breitbart? Everything.

Breitbart made his living by seeking to destroy the lives of other human beings whom he had identified as “traitorous” or “dangerous.” He would be the first to proudly own that. He seemed fine with the dubious morality of his chosen vocation because he clearly felt completely righteous about it. If someone (on the political left of him) said or did something that had the slightest hint of questionable ethics, Breitbart was right there, putting the person under the world’s largest magnifying glass, using character assassination and guilt-by-association to link his target to every political crime and criminal of the past half-century, and beseeching Americans to be vigilant in holding said person “accountable” lest they take down America and our way of life. But the irony is that it was Breitbart and those who mimic his ethically boundary-free approach to political conflict that are the real threats to (what I hope are still) American concepts like dignity, decency and basic civility.

Although Breitbart took several swipes at me personally, calling me a “moron” and “libtard,” amongst other things, and also viciously and publicly tried to derail the career of a dear personal friend who is one of the most deeply compassionate people I have ever known, my distaste for Breitbart was much more general. I know it violates some conventions (perhaps even in my own field of nonviolence) to say this out loud, but I cannot honestly find anything about Breitbart’s public work that made the world a better place. That sad realization has given me serious pause to think about my own legacy and how I engage those with whom I have serious disagreements. In my work on civil resistance, I consistently remind nonviolent actors not to use any tactic or approach that they would not have used against them.

Can I honestly say I have applied that same logic in my own personal dealings? I’m not sure. If I’m being totally truthful, then probably not. That scares me. I don’t want to someday go out like Breitbart, with a dubious legacy that said yes, I had an impact, but at the expense of my own self-respect and perhaps at the expense of human dignity itself.

So perhaps we can make lemonade out of the many lemons Andrew Breitbart left lying around. Maybe there is an important lesson here about raising the level of discourse. About treating people with basic dignity. About civility and its relationship to a healthy society. About entering into a social contract whereby we—specifically those of us engaged in political conflict—agree not to seek the destruction of the life of a human being with whom we have even serious disagreements. Especially if we have serious disagreements.

I extend my sincere condolences to the family of Andrew Breitbart, and especially to his children, and I hope my words don’t add to their suffering in any way. That is not my intent. I respect the fact that if nothing else, Breitbart lived his work out loud, and I have to believe that he would respect an honest remembrance in kind. But Breitbart’s death is also forcing me to remember that our time on this planet is short and that we ought to be pretty careful about how we choose use it, lest we risk being remembered in a way that does not do justice to the better angels of our natures. For that reminder and to the challenge it presents me personally, I extend my gratitude to the late Andrew Breitbart. And I will try to do better.

Discussion about changes to a Syrian street name, via The Highest Monkey.

The opposition in Syria is not waiting for Bashar al-Assad to depart before drawing up new maps of their country. According to a recent Washington Post report, activists have been using a Google crowdsourcing program, Map Maker, to rename major streets, bridges and thoroughfares after their own heroes. The purpose has been to erase the remnants of the Assad family’s 40-year rule and to memorialize nonviolent challengers who have died during the course of Syria’s almost year-long uprising. Stefan Geens, author of the Ogle Earth blog, which tracks Google Maps, told the Post that Syria’s is the first rebellion of which he knows where activists have used online mapping programs to rewrite history.

Syrian human rights organizations believe that more than 7,000 people have been killed since the start of the revolt in March 2011. That this sustained mobilization has remained essentially and remarkably nonviolent makes the Syrian government’s wonton killings all the more wrenching and heartbreaking. The tragedy hit home for me personally, excruciatingly, with the death of Marie Colvin, whom I knew, one of the greatest war reporters of recent history, who was killed on February 22 in Homs. An exemplary journalist for London’s Sunday Times, her mother told television correspondents that Marie viewed her job as an act of bearing witness to the horrific events upon which she reported.

The Syrian movement’s use of online mapping programs is alluring. Yet before we become exhilarated with the creative use of new technologies, we must remember that nonviolent movements usually appropriate the latest, most advanced technologies. The painting over or removal of street signs and name plates, furthermore, is a long-practiced method in the repertoire of nonviolent resistance. Scholar Gene Sharp included this sanction in his famous list of 198 methods of nonviolent action, first published in 1973 (and continually being modified in evolving campaigns). He places removal or replacing of signs in two categories: “symbolic public acts” and “citizens’ noncooperation with government.” The Syrians, at least so far, seem to be engaged in the former. Perhaps the best example of this method as noncooperation, however, occurred after the crushing of the Prague Spring, which began in what was then Czechoslovakia in January 1968.

As I have written elsewhere, the period of liberalization called the Prague Spring ended as the Soviet Union sent 750,000 troops with tanks from five Warsaw Pact countries across the borders into Czechoslovakia on Tuesday, August 20. Sharp recounts in the second volume of his Politics of Nonviolent Action that, three days later, Czechoslovak Radio announced that arrests were imminent. Activists issued an appeal for people to obscure or paint over street signs and number plates, and to make illegible name plates of apartments. Highway directional signs were to be repainted throughout the country. By Thursday evening, many street markers were already obscured, along with directional postings on highways. By midday Friday, Prague was awash with handouts and leaflets urging the removal or repainting of street names and signs denoting significant buildings and factories. Sharp cites Robert Littell’s The Czech Black Book: An Eyewitness, Documented Account of the Invasion of Czechoslovakia for its account of the newspaper Prace reporting, “There was a lightning reaction to this appeal. Prague streets have lost their names!” He also credits Littell for noting that another newspaper, Lidova Demokracie, reported that hundreds of thousands had joined the action:

Prague names and numbers have died out. For the uninvited guests, Prague has become a dead city. Anyone who was not born here, who has not lived here, will find a city of anonymity among a million inhabitants. … [L]et us follow the slogan: The mailman will find you, but evil-doers won’t! Bravo Prague and other cities that followed and follow its example!

Sharp also cites the 1966 Czech film Closely Watched Trains, by Ostre Sledované Vlaky, made well before the Warsaw Pact’s “allied socialist” invasion, which depicted people changing the names of railroad stations during the Nazi occupation in order to confound the invaders. Railroad workers could prevent trains from reaching their destinations until hours or days after the schedule on timetables.

According to Sharp, the removal or alteration of signs and placemarks as a nonviolent method of political noncooperation is “most likely to be effective where the troops or police are quite unfamiliar with the territory, where the country or layout of streets is especially bewildering or complicated, and where the population is unwilling to provide accurate directions.” Indeed, during World War II, Winston Churchill ordered the removal of all street names and sign posts on Britain’s highways so that, in the event of a Nazi invasion, the enemy would have the utmost difficulty finding their way from one town to another and locating specific addresses.

What the Syrians are doing on Map Maker is emblematic, rather than constituting a form of outright noncooperation. In this regard, Sharp notes that in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942, the “Little Wolves” group of young resisters stole the “For Germans Only” signs that were displayed at fine restaurants, movie houses and hotels in Warsaw. They made multiple copies. One night these signs were strung onto hundreds of the capital’s lampposts and trees, locations that the Germans had used as gallows to hang Polish nationalists. Sharp cites Jan Karski’s 1944 war memoir, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World, for its description of how the underground Polish government ordered the Poles to rename most of the country’s thoroughfares and streets. Along with streets newly named after Polish patriots appeared Roosevelt Street and Churchill Boulevard.

We welcome online mapping programs to the ever-growing inventory of nonviolent methods. It may be an even more potent sanction than those using it in Syria are aware.

ACTA, or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, has united hundreds of thousands of people around the world in protest, both on the Internet and in the streets. Across Europe, activists in more than 20 countries called for a day of action on February 11, demanding that this treaty—which would set new international standards for intellectual property controls—not be ratified by the European Parliament.

Although the numbers in the streets on Saturday were larger than some past protests against ACTA, poor weather meant that there were fewer than organizers hoped. 300,000 people were expected to take part throughout Europe, but the total number was probably only a third of that—including just 8,000 people here in Romania. The protests also failed arouse much interest in the media. The next day of action has been scheduled for the 25th of February, which may be enough time for more people to become informed about the issue and for the weather to clear up. Organizers, in any case, are confident that the treaty will not pass, that they will not be forced to give up their virtual freedom.

Those opposed to ACTA believe that its provisions—from further policing people’s behavior on the Internet to banning generic drugs—will have chilling effects on civil society everywhere. It seems to them a high price to pay to protect the profits of the relatively small number of multinational corporations that stand to benefit.

When the negotiations for the treaty took place between 2007 and 2010, furthermore, there was little opportunity for public comment, and its framers were not democratically-elected officials. Zuzana Roithova, who represents the Czech Republic in the European Parliament, went so far as to say back in June, “The European Parliament has had no representation in ACTA negotiations.” A statement from Reporters without Borders added, “It is extremely regrettable that democratic debate has been eliminated from talks that could have a major impact on such a fundamental freedom as free expression.”

Among the Romanian organizers—who include activists, artists, students and computer programmers—the goal has been to create a protest that is above all creative, contrasting the potentially stifling effects of the treaty with the creativity of a culture based in a conception that a society’s intellectual property should be shared. Anti-ACTA parties were organized in Bucharest and Cluj Napoca, at which people drew banners, created plaques and held brainstorming sessions about how to make the protest more interactive. Organizers uploaded photo and videos on a memory stick, strapped it to a carrier pigeon and released it at the start of the protest as a symbolic gesture. After protesting in Bucharest’s main square for about six hours on Saturday, a march headed toward the nearby historic center of the city, where most of the pubs are located, to try to convince as many people as possible to join them.

In places where such protests have taken place, politicians have showed signs of being willing to listen. After protests on January 25 in Poland, Polish leaders announced that they wouldn’t allow the treaty to be signed in their own country’s parliament. Much the same thing has happened in the Czech Republic as well. On this issue, at least, those in power in Europe seem to be willing to respond to popular protests.

Last month, Internet users and companies rallied together to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, two proposed U.S. bills that sought to give media corporations the tools to combat illegal file-sharing but would have potentially had chilling effects on free speech. It was an innovative protest waged almost exclusively online, and American Internet users rightfully celebrated the despised bills’ demises. However, two of the very same companies which pushed hard to maintain a free and open Internet in the U.S. gave indications that they would not do the same for users in the rest of the world.

On January 26, Twitter noted on its blog that, as it expanded overseas into regions with more restrictive Internet policies than our own, it would be willing to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis when requested by legal authorities. This unfortunately-timed announcement, coming on the heels of the anniversary of the start of the Arab Spring protests in Egypt, for which Twitter received much credit for at the time and after, was widely panned. Twitter itself once proudly asserted, “Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely.”

The example that Twitter provided in its post was mild enough—pro-Nazi content would be blocked only in countries where it is forbidden by law like France or Germany but would be displayed in other countries where it is not illegal—the announcement is clearly aimed at assuaging political concerns from wary governments in places like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Thailand. Thailand, one of the more heavily censored countries in the world, even officially came out in support of Twitter’s plan, suggesting that the two might “collaborate” in the future.

Though Twitter got slammed by bloggers for this, the announcement was also a victim of bad timing, coming as a startling contrast to the anti-SOPA, pro-free-speech rhetoric still dominating the front pages of tech sites and in the midst of more unrest in the Middle East. In actuality, Twitter already engages in taking down illegal posts (though the ones the company has publicly revealed to Chilling Effects seem to be mostly regarding minor copyright infringement cases) and is merely following a well-established precedent of multinational corporations, even idealistic Internet companies, bending their values in order to enter foreign markets. This is merely a case of moral equivalence, however, and no amount of transparency and good intentions to the contrary should suffice to make it more than that.

In political terms, once a service like Twitter becomes subject to oversight from every government in the world, it is a crippled one. It may continue to serve well as a way to chat with celebrities and trade viral videos, but it no longer will be a tool for free speech and justice. And unfortunately, because of network effects, even if a more open tool designed specifically for political work were released to fill the gap abandoned by Twitter, it would have a hard time reaching out to non-activists. Those who chat with celebrities will remain happily on Twitter.

Twitter has tried to claim that what it is doing isn’t out-and-out censorship. It promises that the company’s take-downs will be merely reactive, coming only after a valid legal request. There will be no blacklists and Twitter will not have a team of censors invisibly scrubbing its site clean of questionable content the way Chinese Internet companies do. However, it isn’t so far-fetched to think of a day when Twitter will be required by law to pre-emptively sanitize its site. In fact, one of the primary “features” of SOPA would have been a requirement that companies actively monitor against copyright infringement, risking an immediate shutdown for any lapses. As Internet scholar Rebecca MacKinnon noted in a recent anti-SOPA op-ed,

Recent academic research on global Internet censorship has found that in countries where heavy legal liability is imposed on companies, employees tasked with day-to-day censorship jobs have a strong incentive to play it safe and over-censor—even in the case of content whose legality might stand a good chance of holding up in a court of law. Why invite legal hassle when you can just hit “delete”?

One of Twitter’s defenses is that all take-downs will be transparent—a sort of checks-and-balances system that in theory discourages those sorts of non-mandatory deletions. Tweets and users will not simply be disappeared; instead, notices will be posted when content has been restricted, allowing viewers to know that content has been suppressed and giving readers the opportunity to verify the legality of the deletion. Of course, users in other countries might be able to view the sensitive material, but what good is that if the content of the tweet—say an announcement of the date and time of a protest—is banned in the only location for which it has “IRL” value?

Earlier in the month, Google also quietly noted that its Blogger web platform would redirect viewers to country specific domain names, thus allowing for similar country-by-country restrictions. Though neither Google nor Twitter mentioned China in their official announcements—Blogger and Twitter have been banned in China in previous years and each company has for the most part given up trying to compete with entrenched local competitors—the specter of Chinese-style Internet regulation obviously hangs over both of their decisions. Artist and activist Ai Weiwei, who resorted to posting to Twitter after his Sina Weibo account—China’s version of Twitter—was censored and shut down, threatened to quit Twitter if the company began censoring. If Twitter moves toward a Sina Weibo model of social media, should other Internet users committed to the cause of free speech quit as well?

Egyptian protesters participating in a silent stand on June 6, 2011, at Kasr Al Nil bridge. By Zeinab Mohamed, via Flickr.

The starting point for a movement of mass action usually cannot be pinpointed to a single moment or person. This is true of the 2011 Arab Awakening, despite the temptation to credit Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia or Wael Ghonim’s prowess on Facebook in Egypt; such struggles defy simplistic explanations of origin.

“I don’t want to take much credit; the revolution was leaderless,” Wael told 2.8 million listeners on BBC’s Radio 4 recently. Encircled in a tight studio in London’s Portman Place BBC headquarters, along with Paul Mason, economics editor for the BBC program Newsnight, newscaster Andrew Marr had convened the three of us to discuss the topic of “Revolution.” Egypt’s revolution, our conversation made clear, was far from spontaneous. For years, Egyptian activists were sharing knowledge, organizing and learning to think strategically.

Wael is a 31-year-old Google executive in charge of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa who helped to catalyze the movement centered in Tahrir Square last year. On June 8, 2010, he saw a photograph of a young Egyptian who had been, in his words, “horribly tortured.” The visual proof of Khaled Mohamed Said’s atrocious June 6 fatal beating by secret police in Alexandria struck a chord throughout the  country, in part because the 28-year-old was middle class. Weeping over “the state of our nation and the widespread tyranny,” Wael saw the image as representing “a terrible symbol of Egypt’s condition.” He decided to create a page on Facebook called “Kullena Khaled Said,” or “We Are All Khaled Said.” Some 36,000 joined the page on the first day, many writing comments, and thus a conversation began to occur that could not otherwise have taken place under Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

Explaining that he had never been an activist before, Wael wrote in the first person and in colloquial Egyptian dialect, rather than classical Arabic, with “a lack of conspiracy.” He avoided using political phraseology and wrote personally as “an ordinary Egyptian devastated by the brutality inflicted on Kahled Said and motivated to seek justice.”

Wael credits Mohamed Eisa with sending to the page’s email account the idea for the “Silent Stands,” a critically important tactic used in the build-up to what would eventually become a national movement. The concept was that individuals would stand in a human chain for one hour, wearing black and carrying a Qur’an or a Bible for quiet reading. “We wanted to send out a clear message that although we were both sad and angry, we were nevertheless nonviolent,” Wael writes in his new book, Revolution 2.0. Reckoning that they could not be arrested for wearing black, they started their first single-file stand at 5 p.m. on June 18, 2010, calling it “A Silent Stand of Prayer for the Martyr Khaled Said along the Alexandria Corniche.” Purposely designed to circumvent physical confrontation with the security apparatus, Wael writes, “The goal was for members to summon the courage to take positive action to the street.”

The next stand was in Cairo. They carried out this type of vigil five times, with participants turning their backs to the street, sometimes with three or four kilometers of silently praying Egyptians. A thousand people took part in Khaled Said’s public funeral. The April 6 Youth Movement also organized an event to denounce Said’s murder in Cairo, and Wael’s hopes rose.

The April 6 movement had been launched in 2008. Among its Internet-savvy organizers was Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer, who, in March of that year, urged young Egyptians to support the 26,000 textile workers planning to strike on April 6 in the town of Mahalla al-Kobra. For more than a year, workers had been striking across Egypt, protesting high inflation and unemployment, but their actions were not coordinated. When the Mahalla strikes were violently repressed in March, with police killings of strikers, Maher and his allies called a nationwide general strike for April 6. Maher was brutally tortured by the police a few weeks after the strike. “Security forces were in disbelief,” Wael says. “How had opposition youth groups emerged without any political affiliations, Islamist or other?”

Naming themselves after the April 6 action, members of the movement participated in online tutorials with organizers of Otpor! (Resistance!), the Serbian student movement that unified 18 competing political parties and the general population to bring down Slobodan Milošević in 2000. The April 6 movement even sent one of their group, Mohamed Adel, to Belgrade in 2009. Learning from Otpor trainers about how they had organized, and why it was critically important to avoid violence, Mohamed came back talking about “unity, discipline, and planning,” carrying films and teaching aids. The April 6 movement modeled its logo after Otpor’s and adopted Otpor’s organizational approach, in which all were equal, making it harder for authorities to pick off so-called leaders. By 2009, some 76,000 were involved and posting on its Facebook page.

Practical and tangible lessons came into Egypt over a period of years through a variety of channels. The Otpor leaders had formed a network of activists that included experienced veterans from nonviolent struggles in South Africa, the Philippines, Lebanon, Georgia and Ukraine. The Egyptians tapping into Otpor were therefore learning from a global interchange. Scholars Maria Stephan and Stephen Zunes visited Cairo in 2009 to work with liberal academicians and reform-minded civil-society actors. For five years, some Egyptian activists and bloggers had been meeting with people central to nonviolent movements across the world, comparing notes. This is how they met the Serbian veterans.

Seeing Tunisia’s success, the April 6 movement sought to capitalize on Egypt’s annual Police Day—a January 25, 2011, holiday that would commemorate a police revolt suppressed by British colonial authorities. Wael Ghonim used Facebook to marshal support. If 50,000 people were willing to commit to march on the day he posted, the demonstration would be held. More than twice that number signed up. On January 25, the numbers turning out in Alexandria, Cairo, and Suez took police by surprise. April 6 made common cause with Mohamed ElBaradei’s supporters, some liberal and leftist parties, and the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Wael Ghonim tweeted:

Pray for #Egypt. Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die #Jan25.

On January 28, the Day of Rage, Mubarak’s regime blocked the Internet for five days. Egyptians outwitted this measure by relaying through other outlets. A print shop reproduced a 26-page pamphlet for instant circulation. As police used tear gas and water cannon against demonstrators, the pamphlet, “How to Protest Intelligently,” warned people not to disseminate the plan through Facebook or Twitter, because both were monitored by the Interior Ministry. Listing the democracy movement’s demands and calling for tactical unity, it asked for “strategic civil disobedience” in winning over of the police and army “to the side of the people.” It called for disciplined, positive slogans and language. As demonstrations spread across the country, some of the biggest rallies occurred when the Internet was down.

Social media alone are not causative. Nonviolent movements have always appropriated the most advanced technologies available in order to spread their messages. When fighting with the force of ideas, rejecting violence or militarized methods, the reframing of old grievances as wrongs that might now be  corrected requires argumentation and teaching. People must be helped to see that deep-rooted predicaments can be amenable to direct action. Wael agreed when I made this point on the BBC: “We’re trying to give too much credit to social media, because it’s a new thing,” he said.

Indeed, far more important than media, pre-existing conditions or the political culture in the Arab rebellions were two other factors that helped give rise to revolt: 1) The existence of a civic capacity for sustained action and protracted long-term resistance—mosques, churches, labor unions, networks of professional and other organizations, and groups that have gone underground. 2) The sharing of lessons and knowledge from other movements, and the dissemination of historical insights among guiding activist intellectuals. Political thinking affects strategic planning. Both of these forces involve human agency—individual and collective.

On the 17th day of protest in Tahrir Square, the waves of strikes that had been ongoing since 2006 widened. They spread throughout all of Egypt.  After 18 days—January 25 to February 11—Mubarak resigned from the presidency, his legitimacy destroyed.

Egyptians had been organizing themselves long before they would fill Tahrir Square. Enough of them in sufficiently dispersed centers of society had obtained the knowledge and a level of preparedness to build a national mobilization of noncooperation. This included the country’s dispirited civil-society groups. It included young activists, some of  whom had been learning from experience abroad and organizing through online social networks. It included working-class people who had been trying to improve their lot by striking. Ultimately, the refusal of laborers to show up for work in the days just before the Mubarak resignation was the last prop to be pulled away from Mubarak’s regime. Working in diffuse groups, Egyptians knew how to organize, how to withdraw cooperation and how to handle the unexpected. As they confront Mubarak’s successors, they will need this knowledge for their continuing struggle.

Volunteers for InterOccupy.org meet at the Occupied Office in New York City. Photo by the author.

As Occupy camps spread around Southern California in early October, a small group of occupiers located at City Hall in Los Angeles reflected on our experiences setting up a camp and our first assemblies. “It’d be awesome to see what they do in San Diego,” I remember saying, sitting in the comfort of Occupy LA’s People’s Library. “Do you think the cops will even let them put down tents?”

The librarian replied, “We should help them. We should be there so that their first GA isn’t as bad as ours was.” But, as we would soon learn, both the challenges and the potential of coordinating Occupy assemblies would be far greater than that.

I drove to San Diego on October 6th to meet with their General Assembly’s facilitation team as they marched around downtown, eventually settling in Children’s Park. We talked about the idea of having a team of people ready to keep the peace and teach horizontal democracy. Then, a week later, after moving the camp to the Civic Center and doggedly resisting pressure to leave, OSD was given an eviction notice. Occupiers were pepper-sprayed when they decided to defend one lonely tent in the middle of a public space. I raced down to San Diego to help arrange bail funds that night. Curiously, another person, a young man dressed in a Tommy Bahama shirt, also showed up and claimed to be from Occupy Wall Street.

He suggested that remaining members of OSD break off into smaller groups and spread out around the city. He disrupted the General Assembly several times to say that the cops were going to move in soon, but that OWS was sending “1,000 people to OSD to fortify their camp.” I was perplexed, because if this person was really from OWS, he should know how to build consensus rather than cause disruptions. On my way back from San Diego, I stopped at Occupy Long Beach to check in with them. There, one occupier mentioned that his girlfriend at Occupy San Francisco heard 5,000 people were coming from OWS to OSF to prevent eviction. Infiltration was afoot, but I had no direct line to OWS to confirm or deny these rumors.

I went back to OLA dismayed, eager to find someone with a connection to OWS on the ground. I thought about sending an email—but to whom, and how would I know their information was reliable? At that time, most emails that were sent around occupations went unanswered for a variety of reasons, including inability to access computers and Wi-Fi at the camps. Fortunately, the brother of someone at OLA, Jackrabbit, was at OWS. Jackrabbit was patient with my paranoia and assured me that there wasn’t a plan from OWS to send anyone to California. In fact, they don’t even have 5,000 people at OWS. I relayed the info back to San Diego, and the infiltrator’s response was to further divide the General Assembly by stating that OWS was going to denounce OSD as an occupation. He disappeared from OSD the next day and never returned. Crisis averted, with just a simple phone call.

The last week of October, I received notice that the OWS Movement Building Working Group would be hosting a conference call with other occupations on October 24th. The OLA Occupation Communication Committee set up a speakerphone in the media tent at our camp and dialed in. There were over one hundred people on that call and nearly 40 occupations represented. At the end of it, OWS asked for volunteers to help set up the next call—and thus began the early makings of InterOccupy. The first “Call Planning” meeting happened via telephone the following Thursday, when we decided on some protocols for rotating the hosts of the Monday night general call and soliciting agenda items. Occupy Philadelphia led the charge on the second general call, and OLA took up the third—albeit with technical support from OWS when the bomb squad showed up at OLA that night. After much debate, this small call-planning group settled on registering the domain name InterOccupy.org and started a call calendar.

Before the encampments suffered eviction, the calls provided a sense that the movement was much bigger than any one camp. It felt truly global when I heard an occupier say “Goodnight, from Italy” on a call in November. OLA hosted a call for sharing advice on peaceful resistance among occupiers all over the country. By December, InterOccupy was arranging calls for large-scale actions such as the West Coast Port Shut Down—but most of its organizers still had not met one another.

After the evictions, we decided that it would be important to meet in person to improve our services. I bought a plane ticket to NYC in mid-December, as did an occupier from Portland. Occupiers from Philadelphia drove up, while members of OWS arranged places for us to stay. Others from Kalamazoo, Stanford, and Reno called in to the three-day meeting. In a sunny apartment in Manhattan, we established some best practices for getting new voices on the calls, set up a series of subgroups for administration and expanded our call services. InterOccupy evolved from a group of distributed occupiers to an organization intent on providing a platform for truly horizontal communication. Clay Shirky, the New York University professor and author of Here Comes Everybody, attended the meetings, where he talked with us about decentralized communication and described the structure of Occupy as “loosely connected clusters of tightly connected groups” united by “satisfying and effective ties.”

InterOccupy is able to put horizontality at the forefront of its mission to foster coordination across general assemblies and working groups. It’s meant to expand the way rhizomatic plants mature, with growth spreading out, rather than up. Any occupation can ask for a call, and no one agenda is given priority. The content of the calls, therefore, is up to the movement itself, with the goal of aligning strategy and actions, not to efface the autonomy of local assemblies.

Because many of us started out traveling and connecting with other occupations face to face, we knew that the virtual network is strengthened, both emotionally and effectively, by physical encounters with one another. Modeled on the communication networks in the American revolution, Occupy Philly designed a network model called Committees of Correspondence. CoCs are encouraged to spread information about the actions of other occupations, inform local working groups about upcoming calls through InterOccupy and arrange face to face regional meet-ups. This model greatly increased the density of ties between occupations and, in doing, the volume of calls through InterOccupy.

Using this model, Occupy So Cal in Long Beach recently hosted the first regional gathering with 50 occupiers from 10 occupations attending. We discussed how to better facilitate our communication, how to work together towards the proposed May 1st general strike and how to combat corporatism nonviolently. A second meet-up for Occupy So Cal is in the works for February 11, and InterOccupy is helping to coordinate it. Currently, others working with InterOccupy are on an OWS bus tour, spreading the model of CoCs around the northeast.

Because face-to-face communication is as central to this movement as the latest technology, InterOccupy seeks to provide channels that amplify voices and ideas of the Occupy movement, while simultaneously deepening regional networks. As InterOccupy organizer Nate Kleinman says, “We lay the tracks, someone else has to drive the train.”

This article is published in collaboration with the Social Science Research Council’s Possible Futures project. Learn more about Possible Futures here.

Image borrowed from Triple Canopy.

The enigmatic Internet-driven collective Anonymous, thank goodness, has an anthropologist in its midst. For a few years now, Gabriella Coleman has been arduously participant-observing in IRC chat rooms, watching Anonymous turn from a prankster moniker to a herd of vigilantes for global justice. In an extraordinary new essay at Triple Canopy, “Our Weirdness Is Free,” she summarizes what Anonymous is all about this way:

Beyond a foundational commitment to anonymity and the free flow of information, Anonymous has no consistent philosophy or political program. Though Anonymous has increasingly devoted its energies to (and become known for) digital dissent and direct action around various “ops,” it has no definite trajectory. Sometimes coy and playful, sometimes macabre and sinister, often all at once, Anonymous is still animated by a collective will toward mischief—toward “lulz,” a plural bastardization of the portmanteau LOL (laugh out loud). Lulz represent an ethos as much as an objective.

The more I learn about Anonymous, especially in light of the offline, on-the-ground praxis of the Occupy movement, the more I’ve been wondering whether we’re seeing a glimpse of the future for all of us.

Here’s why. Over the past couple of years, as Anons became lulled—pun intended—into politics through their Scientology, Wikileaks, and Arab Spring operations, the lulz ethos has turned into a mode of movement-building. And it’s a movement that appears singularly scary to the powers that be, from globalized corporations to the governments of superpowers, despite (or perhaps because of) the Anons’ apparent disorganization and probably in excess of their actual capacity:

Political operations often come together haphazardly. Often lacking an overarching strategy, Anonymous operates tactically, along the lines proposed by the French Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau. “Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing,’” he writes in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). “Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’ The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.” This approach could easily devolve into unfocused operations that dissipate the group’s collective strength. But acting “on the wing” leverages Anonymous’s fluid structure, giving Anons an advantage, however temporary, over traditional institutions—corporations, states, political parties—that function according to unified plans.

This bears striking resemblance to the activist framework of “diversity of tactics” that has prevailed in the Occupy movement, which emphasizes fostering dexterity and decentralization (as well as, relevantly, permissiveness toward “black blocs” of masked crusaders). But Anonymous’ allergy to unified planning isn’t limited to tactics; it extends to overall strategy and even ultimate purpose. Continues Coleman:

While Anonymous has not put forward any programmatic plan to topple institutions or change unjust laws, it has made evading them seem easy and desirable. To those donning the Guy Fawkes mask associated with Anonymous, this—and not the commercialized, “transparent” social networking of Facebook—is the promise of the Internet, and it entails trading individualism for collectivism.

In fact, Anonymous bespeaks a collective recognition that’s fueling uprisings from Lagos to Bucharest: the kinds of governments we have in place actually have little capacity for addressing the longings we have for freedom and collectivity in a globalizing, digital age. The reason both Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street don’t put forward “any programmatic plan” that existing institutions could follow is that there isn’t one. Or, rather, the movements themselves are their own programmatic plan, parallel institutions unto themselves.

One of the things that amazed me during the first weeks of Occupy Wall Street was that, as the movement spread to occupations all around the country and the world, they were so similar to one another; all took direct democracy as the basic unit of political legitimacy, and prided themselves on a decentralized, horizontal structure, and discouraged credit-taking and self-aggrandizement. How did people all over the U.S. and the world know how to Occupy, and so quickly? Their preparedness can at least partly be attributed to the veterans of the global justice movement of a decade ago who flocked to the occupations. But perhaps even more significant an influence among the younger occupiers was the experience some of them had had with Anonymous and groups like it online.

Coleman explains the resemblances:

The Romanian people have been asleep for quite some time now. After more than 20 years since the end of Communist rule, Romanians have decided to wake up, to wake up and see that the faith they put in their elected officials has not brought them the life they wished for. The current economic crisis, the austerity measures implemented by the government, the corruption among the politicians, the undemocratic way in which laws are implemented by the executive branch, poor living conditions and other interrelated grievances have brought Romanians into the streets.

It started about two weeks ago when the president, Traian Basescu, wanted to remove a highly esteemed medic from his job as an official in the Ministry of Health because he did not support the new healthcare law that was drafted by the president. This official, Raed Arafat, is a Palestinian who came to Romania and built the most advanced ambulance service the country had ever seen. For almost 15 years it has been the pride of the Romania healthcare system. But with the new law, this life-saving service would disappear.

That was the spark which ignited the fire inside the hearts of Romanians. First, 500 people protested after several NGOs and activist groups, like Active Watch Romania and Militia Spirituala, posted a call on Facebook and other social media networks. After just three days, people from around the country started to gather in squares, especially University Square in Bucharest. The number of protesters throughout these two weeks of demonstrations has varied, from the 500 on that first day to more than 20,000 after only a few days.

Nobody seems to have had a concrete plan for what has happened. The important thing was that the crowd was mixed—the elderly, students, activists with different causes and ordinary working people fed up with their living conditions—not just party or syndicate activists. People decided to bear fiercely cold weather in order to show their discontent to those in power.

During these days of protest, some people took to violent tactics. Clashes erupted between the riot police and a group of football fans supporting the protesters, which resulted in injuries among some who had been protesting peacefully. Naturally, the media focused on these incidents, putting the entire protest in a bad light. However, other protesters have managed to turn the mood around, recognizing that nonviolent discipline would be vital to their cause. This kind of understanding isn’t something many Romanians have, though that may be changing.

Most days, the young activists leading the protests in University Square have been instructing the crowd to protest nonviolently, and that is what happened for most of the days. They also surprised the media with tactics meant to show the world that they were not there to fight the riot police: offering flowers, big plastic hearts, tea and free hugs to police officers standing a few feet away from them; blocking traffic around the square while offering hot chocolate to people who got out of their cars and inviting them to participate; making snowmen and putting protest signs in their hands. Most importantly, they showed their determination to hold the line and maintain their presence despite the abuses inflicted by riot police. In recent days, a fierce snow storm struck Eastern Europe, but people, although smaller in number, are still going out into the square and protest.

Already, this wave of protests has brought about results: the healthcare law, which was about to privatize the entire medical system and put thousands of medics out of work, did not pass and will probably not get into parliament any time soon. Raed Arafat has been asked to take up his old post, which he did, and the foreign minister, Theodor Baconschi, was demoted after he called the protesters “maggots.” The Constitutional Court also declared that the law to merge local and parliamentary elections of 2012 was unconstitutional—perhaps after hearing how many of the slogans shouted in University Square were against that law.

Overall, these protests show that a new way of thinking has emerged among the population of Romania. People are tired of the way things are going and have decided to do something about it—largely in a nonviolent manner. Whatever comes of the protests, they seem to be on the way to helping build a stronger civic society for in Romania the future, showing politicians that the people will not be ignored any longer.