Aung San Suu Kyi waves to the crowd in Burma, with her party celebrating a major victory in the by-elections. Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images

The excitement on the streets of Rangoon is palpable, and who can deny their right to celebrate this moment? When I arrived on the Thai-Burma border four years ago, Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest, and over 2,000 political prisoners were behind bars. This week’s by-elections in Burma brings Daw Suu, as she is respectfully called, and 42 other members of her until-recently-banned party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) into the belly of the beast — Burma’s fledgling parliament.

There is real cause to celebrate — not in Burma’s apparent democratic transformation (which, for the record, remains to be seen), but in the very climate of public engagement in politics. The significance here is not the now 5 percent presence of the NLD in an otherwise military-dominated parliament, but the potential for people to move the political conversation from hushed whispers in a teashop corner to the classroom, the streets, and at the ballot box in 2015′s general election.

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Che Gandhi, courtesy Beautiful Trouble and Andy Meconi

When contemplating “The Marriage of Gandhi and Che,” the subtitle of my contribution to the new book Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, I was originally thinking of something frilly with lace — perhaps an off-white gown of appropriate drama. Confronting this challenge of representation, Agit-Pop co-founder Andy Meconi came up with a more iconic image expropriation: the smiling old soul superimposed onto the dashing beret. Two great faces that face great together.

This week’s formal release of the OR Books publication put together under the auspices of Agit-Pop and the Yes Labs (“assembled” rather than edited by Andrew Boyd with Dave Mitchell) is indeed a cause for celebration. Bringing together more than seventy authors in a collection of two-page mini essays, Beautiful Trouble looks at interdependent theories, principles, tactics and case studies. Though largely written by a younger generation of agitators, including Waging Nonviolence’s own Bryan Farrell, Nathan Schneider and Eric Stoner, the book includes pieces by Starhawk, Lisa Fithian, Arun Gupta, Nadine Bloch, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and many others. Accompanied by a growing website of supplemental materials, the toolbox package seeks to put the accumulated wisdom of decades of creative protest into the hands of the next generation of change makers. Written in an engaging style and format and chock-full of photos, cartoons and visuals to incite and inspire, the book is sophisticated enough for antiwar and human rights veterans, while being easily accessible for newcomers.

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In 2009, Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives (before being overthrown in a recent coup), held a cabinet meeting underwater. He sat at a table anchored to the ocean floor, wearing a wetsuit and oxygen tank, and signed a law meant to make the country carbon neutral within a decade.

The Maldives is the lowest-lying nation on the planet, with 400 miles of coastline and one of the world’s most densely populated capitals. It is, according to Rob Nixon, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an “invisible nation of no apparent consequence,” and as sea levels rise due to climate change, it may well be the first nation whose entire population becomes climate refugees. President Nasheed’s underwater meeting was a desperate attempt to catch the world’s attention, to add dramatic urgency to a process that, however disastrous, occurs over a period of decades.

The Maldives are far from alone: 43 island states have announced that, without swift global action against climate change, they face “the end of history.” From far away on a bright spring morning, this statement could easily seem hyperbolic — if it were heard at all. But for those at risk, it’s the frightening truth. And therein lies the challenge.

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• In a march themed with fanciful allusions to Little Red Riding Hood, thousands of protesters swarmed Hong Kong’s streets on Sunday in the first large display of protest since the city’s elite tapped a Beijing ally to become the Chinese territory’s next leader.

• In the Dakotas, members of the proud Lakota Nation began a 48-hour hunger strike on Sunday in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline — and all tar sands pipelines — they say will destroy precious water resources and ancestral lands in the U.S and in Canada.

• Jordanian authorities arrested more than two dozen political activists during protests Saturday critical of King Abdullah II that called for a change of government.

• An estimated 800,000 homeowners in Ireland joined a tax boycott by refusing to pay a new flat-rate $133 property tax by Saturday’s deadline.

• On Saturday, nearly 100 people wore hoodies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin.

• Thousands of Palestinians protested on Friday against Israeli policies of land seizure and control of Jerusalem, leading to clashes with Israeli troops in which a 20-year-old was killed and scores of others were injured.

• Three protesters were arrested Thursday at the UC Board of Regents meeting, when a few dozen activists, some stripped down to swimsuits, called for more transparency in state funding talks and an end to tuition hikes.

• On Thursday, hundreds of Bahrainis staged a sit-in outside the offices of the United Nations in Manama demanding action over the “excessive” use by police of tear gas against protesters.

• Some 50 students at the all-boys Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended Thursday after walking out of classes in protest of absent teachers, inconsistent classroom instruction and other issues.

A child sitting on an army tank in Tahrir Square, with a banner that reads "Egypt is free" on January 29, 2011. By Hossam el-Hamalawy, via Flickr.

Nearly all successful movements need to attract allies in order to win. The U.S. Occupy movement in its first few months attracted widespread sympathy and support in opinion polls; but the function of allies is to translate favorable opinion into active support.

Some movements realize this and craft their messaging and tactics in order to expand their base and win active allies. They avoid what might be called “shrinking messages” that emphasize what happens to them (i.e. the latest police repression), and instead put out “expanding messages” that emphasize how the system oppresses other people — thereby giving reasons for other people to join them. This isn’t easy. What’s more natural than to become self-absorbed, especially when taking punishment? The advice commonly used in the civil rights movement, which took much more punishment than many U.S. movements do, was to “keep your eye on the prize.” When we remember the prize, we know we need to expand beyond our ranks and win allies.

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Memorial in Delhi to Ganhi's Salt March. By Tom Jordan, via Flickr.

What do Native Americans, Costa Ricans, Thai villagers, Hispanic students in U.S. colleges, Indian independence activists and Maasai women have in common? They’ve all organized long marches as part of campaigns for justice. Their campaigns’ very different choices about how to use the tactic raises strategic questions for us today. In some campaigns the long march was used primarily to heighten awareness, while in others it was to gain new allies. Sometimes it was used to launch other kinds of direct action. It has also been used at the end of a campaign, to escalate the pressure (just as a general strike is sometimes used). But what conditions make a long walk a truly effective tactic in a campaign, rather than just a chance to get some good exercise?

For me, that question is personal right now. On April 30, I will begin a 200-mile walk to the Pittsburgh, PA, headquarters of the PNC Bank to challenge its funding of mountaintop removal coal mining. The march is organized by the Philadelphia-based Earth Quaker Action Team as part of its BLAM! campaign: Bank Like Appalachia Matters! For that reason — and with the help of the Global Nonviolent Action Database — I’ve been reviewing the ways in which long marches like this have been used by others, with varying degrees of success. Read the rest of this article »

Robert Bales in August, 2011.

I spent yesterday morning listening to my local NPR station, which was broadcasting a discussion amongst a panel of military veterans who had returned from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The six panelists were male and female, black, white and Latino, and spanned a few generations. I had one of those clichéd “driveway moments” that NPR loves to raise money from — when you sit in your car in your driveway because you can’t stop listening — even though I don’t even have a driveway. They said all sorts of extraordinary things (and I am paraphrasing here because I wasn’t taking notes at the time):

“To put it bluntly, I killed people. That was my job in the Army.”

“I did not fight for the politics or the big picture; I fought for the guy on either side of me.”

“I’m glad I went in. I got to experience different things.”

As I listened, I realized that I have no close friends who are recent veterans.

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• Tens of thousands of students protested on Thursday against a 75 percent tuition hike at universities in Canada’s mostly French-speaking Quebec province, bringing downtown Montreal to a standstill. Since mid-February, nearly 300,000 students have boycotted classes, blocked bridges and held smaller protests around the province.

• More than 1,000 indigenous protesters reached Ecuador’s capital Thursday after a two-week march from the Amazon to oppose plans for large-scale mining on their lands. The protesters were joined by thousands of anti-government protesters in Quito.

• Hundreds of farmers gathered in the Vietnamese capital on Thursday to demand the return of rice fields they say were confiscated by heavily armed police just days after receiving an eviction notice.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in a downtown Brattleboro park on Thursday to call for the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. It was the first day of the plant’s operation after the expiration of its 40-year license. Over 130 protesters were arrested for unlawful trespass as part of a civil disobedience action.

• More than a thousand people rallied in New York City’s Union Square on Wednesday evening with the parents of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager who was shot dead in Florida in late February.

• Portuguese workers halted trains, shut ports and paralyzed most public transport in the capital Lisbon on Thursday to protest austerity measures and labor reforms imposed as a condition of a 78-billion-euro ($103 billion) bailout.

• Three Tibetans who have been on hunger strike outside the UN headquarters for the past month ended their protest Thursday after the UN said investigators would look into events in Tibet.

• Several people were arrested on Tuesday after a rally in a Phoenix intersection to protest immigration policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

• Several hundred Tibetans have protested against Chinese rule in the western province of Qinghai since a monk there set himself on fire earlier this week. The advocacy group Free Tibet has posted what it calls “unprecedented footage” of this highly restricted and restive part of western China.

• Between 5,000 and 7,000 Chilean high school students marched down Santiago’s main avenue on Thursday to demand free quality education and protest the expulsion of about 100 students who joined last year’s protests. Police broke up the march with water canons after a few hundred students crossed a police barrier and tried to march to the education ministry.

• Thousands of union workers gathered across Illinois on Thursday to protest Gov. Pat Quinn’s proposed budget cuts that include mass layoffs and the closure and consolidation of several state facilities, including prisons.

• Hundreds of people gathered in the Rotunda of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday to urge Gov. Gary Herbert to veto a bill that would forbid school districts to teach use of contraceptives.

• Russian opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov started a hunger strike on Thursday after being sentenced to 10 days in jail for disobeying the police following a rally against Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

• Afghans took to the streets on Thursday to demand a U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 civilians be prosecuted in Afghanistan as word spread that the American military moved him out of the country.

• A group of about 75 demonstrators assembled at LOVE Park on Wednesday to support immigrant rights. Two college students were arrested after blocking traffic with banners and refusing to move

• Hundreds of thousands of people in 60 cities across Spain took part Sunday in demonstrations called by the country’s main trade unions to protest the government’s tough new labor reforms and cutbacks.

• Hundreds of students in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday protested against the U.S. and the American soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians in a shooting spree on Sunday.

• Tens of thousands of people joined an opposition rally in Bangladesh’s capital on Monday to demand that a nonpartisan caretaker government oversee the next general election.

• Tens of thousands of people rallied near Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant Sunday demanding an end to nuclear power as the nation marked the first anniversary of a disastrous quake and tsunami.

• Thousands of students at an all-female university in Saudi Arabia boycotted classes on Saturday, protesting against poor services in a rare display of dissent from women in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

• Tens of thousands of pro-union demonstrators descended on the Wisconsin Capitol on  Saturday to voice their anger at Gov. Scott Walker and his conservative agenda, using the anniversary of the passage of his signature collective bargaining law  to rally support for efforts to remove him and five other Republicans from  office.

• Tens of thousands of Bahrainis demonstrated outside the capital Manama on Friday to demand political reforms, a year after the Gulf Arab state crushed an uprising.

• More than 50,000 workers in Italy participated in demonstrations and a nationwide strike on Friday, calling for democracy in the workplace and accusing the government of acting in the interests of the banks and industrial groups.