How Serbian activists created a Revolution, and what we can learn from it to change things
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Have you ever wondered how to create positive change without using violence?
Today we’re going to dive into the principles behind successful peaceful revolutions.
You can apply these lessons whether you’re trying to rally people to stop dog poop in your street or you have more ambitious goals like stopping the fossil fuel industry or taking down a dictator.
Read time: 25-ish minutes (yes, it’s a long one! If you want the main takeaways, you can head straight to the bottom of the article; I won’t hold it against you, and it might motivate you to come back to read the fascinating examples.)
In his book, “Blueprint for Revolution,” Srdja Popovic explains the steps he took with other ordinary citizens to form a massive non-violent political movement that would topple Slobodan Milosevic’s government, the dictatorship that ruled Serbia from 1989 to 2000.
Here’s a summary of the 10 more interesting ideas anyone can use to think about their “revolution” to make things better, whether you are a non-profit, an entrepreneur trying to change your industry, or a political activist:
1. It can never happen here
When it comes to achieving something big as a “nobody,” it can feel very scary to challenge a violent government that has an army, police, and a party that controls everything and can threaten ourselves and our families.
So it is easier to hide behind the fact that what succeeded in other places won’t work “here.”
This is both true and false. It’s true in the sense that every place is different and that country A’s non-violent movement tactics can’t just be copied and pasted in country B.
But it is wrong in the sense that the principles behind non-violent campaigns from Gandhi to Martin Luther King to the Serbian Revolution are universal.
Every dictator or harmful but profitable industry relies on the narrative of stability. Pinochet claimed that it was “me or chaos.” The cigarette or oil industry also claims that if we regulate them, jobs will be lost and the whole fabric of society will unravel.
But if we look past the propaganda, all dictatorships and monopolies are cut from the same cloth: corruption, nepotism, mismanagement, social injustice, violence, and fear.
So why do we go along with them?
It’s because in dictatorships and monopolies, there aren’t other brands to choose from.
So the next step is finding the elements we need to create an alternative brand that’s both viable, attractive, and desirable.
And here’s where the next ingredients come in:
2. Small victories: Dream Big, Start Small
The key is starting with something small, relevant, but achievable—something that won’t get you killed or badly roughed up.
“Pick battles big enough to matter, but small enough to win.”
To determine the actions you choose to take, you need to understand the opponent you’re facing. Put your strong points against your enemy’s weak points. When you are facing a government, usually the army is their strength. But a critical weakness is their lack of numbers. If civilians tried to attack an army, they’d be taken down. But if they choose to act by peaceful means, governments can’t play their fearsome military.
So you would need a cause. For Gandhi, it was salt.
Before targeting the grand objective of India’s independence, from March 12th to April 5th, 1930, Gandhi first ran a campaign of tax resistance against the British salt monopoly with his Salt March, where he would produce his own salt. He first enrolled seventy-seven followers and announced his intention to walk through the towns and villages of India on a month-long march to the shore while extracting salt and challenging the British to stop them. This inspired more people to follow his example and start resisting the British government.
This didn’t scare the British viceroy, but by the time they got to the ocean, there were twelve thousand Indians motivated by the injustice of the tax, and their desire for salt had joined their ranks. Because salt was a basic need and a simple issue, it gained followers from all walks of life and castes in Gandhi’s movement.
This forced the British to back down and let the Indians have their salt tax-free, showing the British could cave. This gave Gandhi the credibility to deliver on his promises. He could later use this credibility as leverage for bigger and more important issues. Like the independence of India.
Knowing what minor battles you can win and how to get numbers on your side is only half the challenge. The other is ensuring that you can offer your newfound followers something that they can believe in. And for that, you’re going to need to develop your vision for tomorrow.
3. Vision of Tomorrow
If you really want to change the world, you’re going to need a “Vision of Tomorrow.”
In summary, it’s understanding what the world looks like today and presenting the idea of what the world you want to look like tomorrow.
For Otpor!, their vision of tomorrow was very simple and meaningful: they wanted a normal country with cool music. A country open to the world, as it had been under Tito. They wanted to end ethnic conflicts, a return to normalcy, good neighbourly relations, and a functioning democracy.
But how do you come up with these visions of tomorrow that will appeal to your fellow citizens?
You’ll need to understand what kind of country or industry your average citizen wants to live in and enjoy.
If you can’t ask people directly, get other friends to break into groups and do a little role-playing for an hour. If your friends are metropolitan and educated people, they’ll have to play the role of average people. Some people can represent the elders of your community; others can represent the expatriate community; the police and security services; and so on until you represent each major sector of society.
Next, ask each person what is important to the sector of the population they are assigned to represent. For example, a person playing the policeman could say he needs to be respected and be paid on time, and he wants to live in a country that wants order and stability.
Most people in society will take risks and participate in a movement only if the cause is personally important to them, which is why it’s imperative that you know what they care about.
So empathising with people you are against, like the police that’s oppressing you, for example, might seem revolting, but it’s crucial to realise that it’s not enough to fight for rights and freedom. To succeed, you’ll need to listen to what the people actually care about and make sure to incorporate their needs into your vision of tomorrow.
And here’s the challenging part: Through this exercise, when asked to imagine what’s important to their fellow people, no one ever speaks of abstractions like civil rights, freedom of religion, or the right to assemble. Those are big things.
Instead, people talk about little things like respect, dignity, safety for their families, and honest pay for honest work.
And often, well-educated activists or people who want to make change happen don’t realise it’s the mundane things that move people. Well-educated and passionate aspiring revolutionaries focus on lofty quotations from historical leaders and abstract ideas of liberty, forgetting that those they’d like to enrol are tired shopkeepers whose needs and beliefs are a lot more basic.
So focus on how your vision of tomorrow changes the specifics of each sector of your society or industry, and let go of the abstract and lofty jargon.
But having a vision of tomorrow is just the beginning of any peaceful movement. For your campaign to succeed, you’ll need to figure out the pillars of power that maintain the status quo:
4. Pillars of Power
No disproportionate power, whether it's a tyrant or a monopoly, is unstoppable. They all depend on vast sums of money to stay afloat and run their armies or businesses. They all rest on economic pillars. And economic pillars are much easier targets than military bases or presidential palaces.
If you shake them, their power will eventually fall.
This theory focusing on the pillars of power was developed by Dr. Gene Sharp, the father of “nonviolent struggle theory.” Apply enough pressure to one or more pillars, and the whole system will soon collapse.
All dictators and monopolists have a crucial similarity: they depend on people.
They need ordinary citizens and employees to go to work in the morning and make sure that the transports, the media, the manufacturing workers, and their security forces’ pay checks run smoothly.
These people just follow orders and want to do their jobs and go home; even when they wear uniforms and beat on people, they are not necessarily evil beyond redemption. They mostly do it because they are paid and it helps them support their families. So as long as they are paid and everything is smooth, the dictators and monopolies are safe on their thrones.
So the goal for the change maker is to make sure the smooth business as usual stops to make sure the pillars of power are shaken.
And it’s important to acknowledge that these pillars differ from place to place. In small rural villages, the most important pillars may rest with the elders. In urban small towns, this pillar might depend on the doctors, priests, or teachers, and in corporations, it might be the stockholder who invests their money and the business media whose coverage can rise or dip the share price.
So whether you want to take down a dictator or Amazon, the key is understanding who the economic powers and opinion leaders supporting that power are and addressing them.
5. Laughtivism: Create campaigns that ridicule your opponent
Humour is a great tool for activists because it works: it breaks fear and the public image of autocrats, it builds confidence, and it adds the cool factor needed to attract people to a movement. And it has the added benefit of provoking clumsy reactions from your opponent.
The best humorous actions will force autocrats and their security enforcers to undermine the credibility of their regimes, no matter how they respond.
Activists, like good stand-up comedians, just need to practice a few skills that can be learned:
Know your audience. Adapt your jokes to your audience’s sensibilities.
For example, in Poland, TV viewers grew tired of watching the presenters share scripts that were ridiculously rosy and full of lies. But turning their TVs off wouldn’t work. To boycott, they would need to make it public in a subtle way so there wouldn’t be a police backlash.
So they improvised and invited a few friends to take their wheelbarrows and their TV sets for a leisurely stroll to share a laugh together, making it clear no one was watching the official news. This gag soon spread to different Polish towns, as there was no law specifying that citizens couldn’t walk their TV sets in wheelbarrows.Timing is everything. Using the calendar to stage a comedic performance can be a great way to count on everyone’s full and undivided attention. This can be a holiday or a special event.
In 2012, women were banned from accessing football games in Iran. But one afternoon, during an Iran-South Korea match, two women, Fatma Iktasari and Shabnam Kazimi, dressed up to hide their gender and got inside. Once the game had started, they took off their costumes, making it clear that there were women inside the stadium.
This led to a dilemma for the regime: They could arrest the women and look foolish to the worldwide sports audience. Or they could smile and look nice, letting millions of women entertain the same ideas to contest these oppressive laws.
Laughter and fun are the best strategies to create a power shift. And it can only become amplified as the dictators eventually crack down on it.
6. Make oppression backfire
To make it backfire, we first need to understand how oppression works.
Oppression is not some demonic force. Rather, it is almost always a calculated decision. In the hands of authorities everywhere—from dictators to elementary school principals—oppression achieves two immediate results:
It punishes disobedience
It prevents future problems by sending a message to potential troublemakers.
As we’ve already shared before, all oppression relies on fear to be effective.
Fear of punishment
Fear of getting detention
Fear of losing one’s job
Fear of being sent to prison
Fear of embarrassment
Fear of whatever
So the point of oppression and fear isn’t to force you to do something against your will—which is impossible—but rather to make you obey. That’s where they get us.
Dictators succeed because people choose to obey, and while people might choose to obey for many reasons, for the most part they obey out of fear. So if we want people to stop complying with the regime, we have to help them to stop being scared. And one of the scariest things in any society, whether it’s a dictatorship or a democracy, is the great unknown.
That’s why, as kids, we’re afraid of the dark, and that’s the reason that most of us would have cold sweats when walking into the oncologist’s office for the first time.
The best way to overcome the fear of the unknown is to gain knowledge, create plans that soften the fear, and encourage risk-taking by making sure no one is left behind.
From the earliest days of Otpor!, one of the most effective tools the police had against their members was the threat of arrest. Notice that it’s not about arrest but only the threat of arrest.
The threat was much more effective than the thing itself, because before they actually started getting arrested by Milosevic’s police, they didn’t know what jails were like. They first thought jail was the worst kind of hell. But when things got really heated, a lot of Otpor!’s members started getting arrested, and when they got back, they told the others about what it was actually like. They left none of the details out. They wrote down and shared with their fellow revolutionaries every bit of what had happened in jail.
The point was to help others who could be arrested understand every step of what was going to happen to them and endure the worst, but they also devised a Plan B to “leave no man behind” when it happened.
First, they’d be handcuffed so tight that it’d be painful. Men would be put in small cells with thugs and drunk drivers who would be puking all over the cell, and women would be in cells with prostitutes. Then they’d be taken for interrogation, and like in bad shows, there would be a good and a bad cop. They would always ask the same three questions: “Who is Otpor’s leader? How is it organised? Where does the organisation get its funding?” To which Otpor! would tell the detainees to reply, “Otpor! is a leaderless movement. It’s organised in every neighbourhood. It is funded by the Serbian diaspora and ordinary people who want us to live in freedom.”
The whole thing followed a pretty predictable pattern.
Being in prison was still scary, but knowing how it would unfold was way less scary than what they had previously imagined and a lot more empowering.
But the other crucial elements, beyond educating each other and sharing their experience, were four other actions in Plan B:
Covering for each other if the police got one of them.
Having legal documents ready and signed to give power of attorney to lawyers sympathetic to their cause.
Having a phone list in place to notify parents, friends, and loved ones when one of them is arrested.
Pre-making press releases ready to be sent out to the media seconds after an arrest took place with the names of the activists and the address of the jail left blank and waiting to be filled in.
Welcoming back and celebrating those who had been arrested.
Seeing this preparation took away the dictator’s means of oppression and softened the fear by empowering people to take incredible risks because they knew that as soon as they’d be handcuffed, there would be a movement working behind the scenes to set them free.
When people would eventually be set free, they’d be greeted by throngs of adoring fans shouting at the top of their lungs in a roar of applause. This was called the “rockstar reception tactic.” And it worked beautifully. This made being arrested look sexy, even if you looked like a nerd, showing how oppression was making things worse for the regime, where each arrest would cause twenty more people to join the movement.
The trick for activists looking to make oppression backfire lies in identifying situations in which people are using their authority beyond reasonable limits.
With the five ingredients—dreaming big and starting small, a vision of tomorrow, laughtivism, and making oppression backfire—we have a solid foundation for a peaceful movement. But that’s not enough; for a movement to stand united, we also need everyone to work in unity.
7. Unity: What’s the one goal and message?
One of the biggest allies of dictatorships and monopolies is atomization. Dictators, when forced to face democracy, often have a sizeable number of votes and can steal a few more. And they face a splintered opposition that squanders any chance of getting anything accomplished by fighting among themselves.
This bickering does the dictator’s and monopolist’s work for them.
That’s why it’s important to run two campaigns in parallel. One to topple the dictator or monopoly. The second is to unite the fighting political parties or alternatives under a single umbrella.
But unity is a tricky thing. It’s the most important element of a peaceful movement, but also the hardest to achieve for a few reasons:
The nature of oppressive regimes atomises society into tiny fragments through divide and conquer tactics.
Unity depends on building coalitions, and coalitions depend on people’s ability to get together, share their views, and work out their differences. But when this is made illegal, it’s very unlikely that a functioning opposition can organise.The innate tendency, which almost all people share to some degree, leads us to the conviction that we know better than anyone else.
There are many kinds of unity. In Serbia, they had nineteen different opposition parties to work with, and everyone hated the others. In the US or South Africa, white and black people had to forge racial unity. Today, there are courageous activists trying to create religious unity between Muslims and Jews.
So building unity isn’t easy, but the good news is that it’s possible to bring together even the most disparate groups with the right approach, realising that within these strategic unities are smaller tactical unities. To build unity, you first need to understand the nature of compromise.
No one wakes up in the morning wishing to yell, “I don't entirely agree with your views, but in the interest of moving forward, I’m willing to reconsider and amend my own." But going all in with your own ideas is probably a mistake.
The more you diversify your targets and causes, the harder it becomes for the media to know what you’re defending. So there are three unities you have to respect:
Unity of message: Every movement’s vision of tomorrow will contain multitudes of causes. Things like a good educational system that doesn’t brainwash kids with nationalistic rubbish, a free economy that isn’t run by thugs and incompetents, peaceful relations with the neighbours, a robust culture that allows all varieties of art to thrive, and many more aspects that, put together, make a normal and happy life.
But it would be too messy and unfocused to demonstrate all of those things at once. In Serbia, they gathered around the slogan “He’s finished.” This allowed the different interest groups to focus on the dictator, despite all of their other goals.Unity of movement: A group identity is necessary for any movement, whether its aim is to bring down a dictator or to promote organic farming. You could recognise hippies as a movement for love and peace. Ecologists all sort their recycling bins and compost their food.
Unity of organisation: But it’s not just about cultural unity but also administrative unity. Some movements become leaderless, but this leads to different factions vying for power, and without organisational unity, they end up falling apart.
But how is it possible to ensure unity?
The short answer is that you can’t. Humans will always find reasons to fight and split up. Tensions will naturally arise in any community.
On the bright side, you can still learn from the experience of others and work on expanding your line of division. A line of division consists of drawing on a piece of paper and seeing how many people you can include on your side of the page.
During the Egyptian Revolution, there were fears that religious division and violence would derail the protests against the tyranny. To respond to these fears, Christian activists went on to form a protective cordon to protect their fellow Muslim activists when kneeling down for prayer. This gesture was returned by the Muslims when, two days later, it was time for the Christians to pray. These gestures kept both groups unified as a movement to keep working to take down their country’s dictatorship.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Russia experienced a wave of protests against the consolidation of power in the Kremlin. This drew a very cosmopolitan population with whom the ordinary working people living in smaller towns and villages couldn’t relate because nobody had gone out and asked what was important to them.
The lesson here is that it’s crucial to go out and listen to all sorts of different people and figure out what might bring them to join your cause.
Movements are living things, and unless unity is planned for and worked at, it’s never going to materialise on its own. And that’s why it’s important to make your movement relatable to the widest number of people at all times.
So unity is about creating a sense of community, building the elements of a group identity, having a cohesive organisation, and leaving no one behind. But now it’s time to turn all of these principles into concrete action:
8. Planning things in the right order
A mass demonstration, as anyone who has organised a successful campaign will tell you, is the last step, not the first.
You invite everyone to march in the streets when you know you have enough of the masses on your side and you’ve done the preparation to bring your campaign to a showdown.
The demonstration isn’t the spark, but the victory lap of your movement.
So timing is probably the most important ingredient in peaceful activism. People are easily distracted, fickle, and fairly irrational. Start your campaign when they are distracted by something else, and your efforts will be lost. But do it when the hour is right, and you have all the chances to win.
But dictators and monopolists will do everything in their power to make sure there is no good time to resist.
But Gene Sharp, the father of contemporary nonviolent struggles, came up with methods to strategically plan peaceful movements.
Here are some of its elements:
The goose egg: This is what you want—your ultimate target. Before you plan anything, you need to understand what your goose egg is. And this can be hard. In a dictatorship, you can think of it as taking down the dictators. But this is not it. With that goal in mind, once you succeed, other terrible governments can take their place. So the goose egg is probably democracy.
“The captain who does not know where he wants to go will never find a ship to take him there.”
So think of the consequences of reaching this goal, and consider how it evolves 5–10 years later. If you’re satisfied, it’s good. But if it’s not enough, you still need to think a few steps further.Inverse sequence planning: Once you know where you want to go, it’s time to plan how to get there. Start with your imagined goal and work your way back to the present, step by step.
For example, if you’re thinking about your future dream career as a rock star, it’s good to start with a vision of the future. You’re not just seeing your name in the limelight. You’re also seeing the arena in which you’re playing, the members of your band, and the kind of people you’d like to have shouting your name in the audience. Are you looking for screaming kids like Justin Bieber or more normal-looking older people who go to clubs to hear great music? Once you know this, you can safely ignore entire audiences.
Now that you have the vision, you have the information you need to start moving into the tactics to create that vision. Your first step is persuading a few friends who can play better than you to join forces. Then you list all the appropriate clubs, from the biggest to the smallest, and consider what it would take to headline each of them. You find out that you can secure your spot only if you guarantee a certain number of paying fans. So you gather up a number of aspiring musicians and make some sort of cross-attendance pact, promising that everyone shows up at one another’s shows.
You’re still not in rock star territory, but you’re much closer.
9. The demons of violence
People in violent struggles are always trying to knock down pillars by pushing them, but in peaceful campaigns, people are working to pull the pillars (like policemen or journalists) to their sides by converting people to their cause so they can fight together.
And since you’re not frightening anyone with violence, friends and neighbours won’t feel the need to be protected by a strongman, drawing away the legitimacy of dictators and monopolists.
But here are 3 conditions you need to pull off a peaceful campaign:
You need to be likeable to attract the sympathy of the masses.
You need to prevent a violent minority from making your overwhelmingly peaceful movement look bad.
But how do you maintain peaceful discipline in your movement?
Step 1: Make nonviolence your movement’s ideology by teaching the stories of successful nonviolent movements, practicing its applications through training, and using its techniques to gain moral high ground.
Most people have mainly heard of the violent way of solving intractable problems through movies and the news. That’s why it’s so important to learn how Martin Luther King Jr., Mandela, Gandhi, or the peaceful movement of Tahrir Square toppled the dictatorship in Egypt.
Step 2: Train your fellow activists to face provocations from the violence of security forces, taunts, and other demeaning acts from opposing political parties.
In order to do that, civil rights leader Jim Lawson organised workshops in Nashville churches during the 1960s for activists just before they’d occupy the segregated lunch counters in the city. The activists would be prepared by being called names, spit upon, and having gum stuck to their hair so that they would know how to respond to the same provocations in the real world.
Step 3: Defend your movement from provocateurs who will try to crash your party.
There will always be fringe groups who love violent showdowns, and they love massive gatherings, as its a great opportunity for them to cause the maximum amount of chaos.
The trick here is to make a clear distinction between your peaceful movement and these toxic groups, whether you agree or not with whatever platform they claim to be defending. Avoid them at all costs, and in every instance, show that these people are not a part of your world.
These three steps serve to develop your peaceful movement, both internally and externally. Internally, it keeps your movement peaceful, and externally, it demonstrates that you can be a good leader.
10. Finish what you start
We’re almost done, but this is the trickiest part: knowing when to declare victory.
The Egyptian activists declared victory after Mubarak fell, only to see him replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood and then the powerful military that would take back control of the country.
President Kennedy didn’t just promise to send astronauts to the moon; he also promised to bring them back to earth.
As we saw before, nonviolent action has a 42% chance of lasting democracy. But this means there is still a 58% chance of an unhappy conclusion after all these efforts.
That’s why it’s so important to finish what we start. It’s very cool to say you’ve toppled a dictatorship, but it’s a lot less glamorous to take on the task of putting a democracy in its place.
And it can also be dangerous to wait too long to declare victory, as momentum is a tricky thing you shouldn’t squander.
It’s critical to maintain unity in your movement even after you win what appears to be a big victory. Successful movements must have the patience to keep working hard even when the lights and cameras have moved on to the next big story.
You must ensure that whatever changes you bring about are going to be durable and stable. There are some obvious things you should be cautious of:
Proclaiming “game over” too early. Once you topple the dictator, make sure you put a sustainable democracy in place.
Aiming for small victories; and not being rigid on getting to the big victory fast
Not recognising victories when they are handed to you
Atomising your hard-won unity on “family” squabbles and political posturing
Falling in love with the new elites and heroes your movement may bring to prominence. Corruption and new found power can sink the positive change that was so hard to earn.
It’s easy to teach these basic principles and share these peaceful techniques that worked in the past. But the hard part, and the best way to read these principles, is to take them and imagine how they might improve society and how to apply them to the issues you care about.
These can be big things that matter to everybody, like social justice, or things that only affect your neighbourhood. These ideas are useless without someone who is convinced change is possible and committed to making a difference.
The important thing to realise is that everything boils down to community and people.
In Summary:
It can never happen here: If you think, “This can’t happen here," remember that the principles behind dictatorships and monopolies are vulnerable to the same things.
Dream Big, Start Small: What is a small victory you can aim for that will keep you safe and show the current dictatorship or monopoly that it is vulnerable to others?
Vision of Tomorrow: What does the average citizen want for their country? Ask people or role-play the different sectors of your society you’d like to enrol in your movement.
Pillars of power: What are the economic pillars that maintain the current regime? How can you gain their support for your cause to deprive the regime of its support?
Laughtivism: Use humour to ridicule the public image of the dictators or monopolies you’re facing, and use it to attract new members to the movement. Use timely events that get everyone’s attention, and subtly turn unreasonable prohibitions upside down to show their injustice if the dictators crack down on them.
Make oppression backfire: When the dictators use violence and intimidation, make sure you share the knowledge of what happens behind the arrests to prepare people to endure it. Also, prepare a plan B to take care of their families and get everything ready to get people out of jail as fast as possible.
Unity: To avoid dividing your movement into thousands of different messages and causes, what is the main cause you can all agree on? Go back to the common vision of tomorrow and rally behind that.
Planning: Before you plan anything, what is your ultimate goal? Go beyond taking down the dictator or monopoly. What happens after that? Then plan for your goal: What specific steps can you take to achieve that vision?
Prevent violence in your movement: To avoid violence from entering a peaceful movement, teach your members the stories of other successful peaceful movements, train your fellow activists to face and ignore provocations, and make it 100% clear that violent provocateurs don’t belong to your campaign.
Finish what you start: Don’t declare victory too soon. Make sure you didn’t just take down the oppressive power you were after. Ensure you keep going until you’ve set the right democratic power in place so other oppressive alternatives don’t take advantage of your work.