Gene Sharp - Interview on War (1987)

Speaker 1: What are the main functions of the war system, and how can this help us find a solution to the problem of war?

Gene Sharp: Well, war has obviously served a variety of functions in societies, probably varying with the particular society and point in history. Sometimes war is used to attack other countries. Sometimes military might is used to hold down other countries in oppression. There may be a number of economic and psychological functions of war. One function of war that seems to me to be extremely important and perhaps indispensable is that of providing some kind of security for the country which might be attacked. People believe, and I think correctly, that if you're strong enough so that you're able to repel an attack upon you, you're less likely to be attacked than if you were weak. So war has served, war as a capacity rather than actual waging of war, has served a function of deterrence. It's also served a function of providing a means by which people believed they would be defending themselves, repelling the attack. Now whether war has actually served that function well, whether the price that we have paid for it is a price that's worth paying for it. Those are different questions. But it would mean that if war has been the main means of providing defense and security in other ways, and if those are good purposes, then we probably cannot get rid of war except by recognizing that and providing some other way to serve that function.

Speaker 1: For centuries the standard view has been that power is the ability to dominate an opponent. The arms race is showing us that such a conception is no longer viable. What alternative conceptions of power should we consider and how do notions of defense and security need to be rethought?

Gene Sharp: Power as I see it is not a capacity for domination but a capacity to get something done. And it is not something which derives from violence and the capacity to wage war, but the total ability which has been mobilized from the cooperation of the society's population and institutions to accomplish something. The totality of the influences that can be brought to bear to accomplish an objective including the objective of countering the actions of a hostile group or state. War has been waged by the utilization of violent means of combat and destruction, but power in politics and in international relations is something much broader than that. and it has elements of moral influence or authority. It has the capacity to wield sanctions or punishments. It has the capacity to mobilize organizations and institutions and populations to accomplish something. Now, if you look at a particular government in that context, the head of state personally has no power in the sense that that one single person could not accomplish much except for the legitimacy or moral authority which are given to a person in that position. except for the cooperation of the bureaucracy, except for the obedience of the population, the control of the economic system, the use of police troops, for example. All of those are sources of power outside of the person of the ruler of that society. And hence, that kind of cooperation can be restricted due to non-cooperation of the population or the institutions of society, or the non-cooperation and defiance can be more extensive and the power sources actually can be severed, which means that the power of that government or that individual is dissolved and a new structure of society can be constructed.

Speaker 1: Why do you feel that world government is not a viable alternative for peace?

Gene Sharp: Well, it seems like that's one of those nice either dreams in the sky if you like the idea or nightmares if you don't. If you have a sufficient world agreement and harmony that the establishment and functioning peacefully of a world government would be possible, you probably wouldn't need it. because you wouldn't need the capacity to control from on top, to repress. It has to be remembered that a system of world government, like any domestic government, would have to have some means of enforcing its will. If you look at the kind of world in which we have, with all kinds of conflicts and all kinds of inequalities and problems on a world scale, and the ability of relatively small groups to launch guerrilla struggles or to launch terrorist attacks. And potentially in the future, relatively small parts of the world society could develop even nuclear weapons. That a world government, if it's going to function with the capacity to enforce its will or to attempt so is going to have to become extremely repressive, that able to crush any separatist movement or any opposition movement in any part of the world would have to have either the detailed capacity... Oh, okay.

Speaker 1: You can have a copy of the raw footage. I'll make a mark on that. Oh, and if there is a question that you don't want to answer, that's fine. We'll just defend Gene Sharp and... Okay. What are the main functions of the war system, and how can this help us find a solution to the problem of war?

Gene Sharp: Well, war has obviously served a variety of functions in societies, probably varying with the particular society and point in history. Sometimes war is used to attack other countries. Sometimes military might is used to hold down other countries in oppression. There may be a number of economic and psychological functions of war. But one function of war that seems to me to be extremely important, perhaps indispensable, is that of providing some kind of security for the country which might be attacked. People believe, and I think correctly, that if you're strong enough so that you're able to repel an attack upon you, you're less likely to be attacked than if you were weak. So war has served, war as a capacity rather than actual waging of war, has served a function of deterrence. It's also served a function of providing a means by which people believed they would be defending themselves, repelling the attack. Now whether war has actually served that function well, whether the price that we have paid for it is a price that's worth paying for it, those are different questions. But it would mean that if war has been the main means of providing defense and security in other ways, and if those are good purposes, then we probably cannot get rid of war except by recognizing that and providing some other way to serve that function.

Speaker 1: For centuries, the standard view has been that power is the ability to dominate an opponent. The arms race is showing us that such a conception is no longer viable. What alternative conceptions of power should we consider and how do notions of defense and security need to be rethought?

Gene Sharp: Power as I see it is not a capacity for domination, but a capacity to get something done. And it is not something which derives from violence and a capacity to wage war. But the total ability which has been mobilized from the cooperation of the society's population and institutions to accomplish something the totality of the influences that can be brought to bear to accomplish an objective, including the objective of countering the actions of a hostile group or state. War has been waged by the utilization of violent means of combat and destruction. But power in politics and in international relations is something much broader than that. And it has elements of moral influence or authority. It has the capacity to wield sanctions or punishments. It has the capacity to mobilize organizations and institutions and populations to accomplish something. Now, if you look at a particular government in that context, the head of state personally has no power in the sense that that one single person could not accomplish much except for the legitimacy or moral authority which are given to a person in that position. except for the cooperation of the bureaucracy, except for the obedience of the population, the control of the economic system, the use of police troops, for example, all of those are sources of power outside of the person of the ruler of that society. And hence, that kind of cooperation can be restricted, restricted, do the non-cooperation of the population or the institutions of society or the non-cooperation and defiance can be more extensive and the power sources actually can be severed which means that the power of that government or that individual is dissolved and a new structure of society can be constructed.

Speaker 1: Why do you feel that world government is not a viable alternative for peace?

Gene Sharp: Well, it seems like that's one of those nice either dreams in the sky, if you like the idea, or nightmares if you don't. If you have a sufficient world agreement and harmony that the establishment and functioning peacefully of a world government would be possible, you probably wouldn't need it. because you wouldn't need the capacity to control from on top, to repress. It has to be remembered that a system of world government, like any domestic government, would have to have some means of enforcing its will. If you look at the kind of world in which we have, with all kinds of conflicts and all kinds of inequalities and problems on a world scale, and the ability of relatively small groups to launch guerrilla struggles or to launch terrorist attacks. And potentially in the future, relatively small parts of the world society could develop even nuclear weapons. That a world government, if it's going to function with the capacity to enforce its will or to attempt so is going to have to become extremely repressive, that able to crush any separatist movement or any opposition movement in any part of the world would have to have either the detailed capacity to enforce its political will anywhere in the world on anybody And that's in the context of modern governments becoming increasingly able to become dictatorial in their own right. Or it's going to have to face the situation of waging a world civil war, one part of the world against another part of the world. And that's no improvement on the situation we're in right now. I think we need a much more fundamental solution to the problem.

Speaker 1: What general steps could be taken toward realizing a nonviolent society?

Gene Sharp: I think that a nonviolent society is a goal towards which we can work. It may take us quite a long time to get really close to that goal. There are a number of steps that can be taken. One is to try to develop smaller scale institutions, closer to people, the kinds of institutions which are easier for their members to control. We need also to be eradicating the situations where violence plays a major role in human society. So if we can develop less violent means of police control, for example, or we can remove those aspects of society which depend upon violence for their continued existence, particularly where that is in forms of oppression of people. The apartheid system in South Africa, for example, could not exist except for the police and military capacity of the South African government. But that is simply an obvious example of a general phenomenon. And there would be other cases of major inequities and major inequality and oppression in very, very different parts of the world, which really depend not necessarily, obviously, day by day, but ultimately upon violent repression. Those need to be changed. We also need, very importantly, to develop two other components of the process of change. One is what Gandhi used to call a constructive program of carrying out changes in the society that involve development of independent institutions controlled by their members to serve the members' needs and eradicate injustices whether that be in the form of removing racial and religious prejudices and inequalities of the rights of women or creating forms of education that involve students in thinking for themselves rather than simply memorizing something or on down the line and then finding ways by which The degree to which we rely upon violence as the sanction of society, as the means of punishing people, where some means of control is needed, those violent means can be replaced with non-violent forms of struggle and of sanctions or of maintaining social control. And that would vary from the local community level how we deal with crime and prevent street crime and on down the line clear over to the question of international military capacity.

Speaker 1: The methods of non-violent action include a wide range of techniques and tactics for resisting control and can generally be divided into three groups. Non-violent protest, non-cooperation and intervention. Could you outline these tactics in greater detail and perhaps provide some examples?

Gene Sharp: Nonviolent protest, as the first group of the methods of nonviolent action, includes those forms of behavior which are something more than words, something more than talking, but by which people are symbolically expressing their opinions, such as a vigil, standing day and night in shifts at a government building, for example, as was done in South Africa by the Black Sash movement, the women's movement there, for example. It includes parades and marches, the carrying of flags, of picketing, and I think there are 50-some such specific forms of action which express an opinion. In certain situations where dissent is not tolerated, those relatively mild types of action may cause quite a turmoil. The KGB has been very quick to arrest people in Red Square, for example, as soon as they unfurl a banner, because that's not allowed, even though the unfurling of a banner is a very modest symbolic form of expression. Non-cooperation is more powerful. It's a class of methods by which people withdraw their help. They may practice a variety of forms of social boycotts, for example. There are 20-odd types of economic boycotts, which people refuse to provide services or refuse to buy goods. Labor strikes, which there are also nearly 30, taking great variety of forms from symbolic types, which you stop work for a minute or an hour, To general strikes in which you attempt to shut down the economy of a whole area or a whole country, which obviously wields a great deal of clout if you can do that and maintain it. To political non-cooperation in which people withdraw from some part of the operation of the political system. They may, for example, boycott the operations of a given law only, you see, one specific small part of the whole. They may practice civil disobedience and seek imprisonment. They may non-cooperate with the whole government, for example, the Quisling regime in occupied Norway during the Second World War. arrange and clear over to the mutiny of army troops who may determine they will no longer serve the president or dictator of that society because of terrible things which that ruler has done and so they in effect go and strike or walk out and get lost which is very different from starting a civil war which troops are quite capable of doing But the withdrawal of assistance and then finally you have non-violent intervention in which people do exactly what intervention says, they intervene, they disrupt. They do something which is normally not done or which is forbidden to do. They may do this physically, as by a sit-in movement in lunch counters against segregation in the South several decades ago. Or they may sit in in the offices of some official, making it possible for those offices to function normally. They may intervene psychologically by going on hunger strike, for example. They may set up sufficient alternative institutions that the normal institutions can't function properly. And they may intervene politically by setting up even a parallel government, as happened in the Philippines in February of 1986, when Corazon Aquino was sworn in as president, while Mr. Marcos... had just been sworn in for a new term in the presidential palace and was still occupying the palace. The creation of a whole substitute government, but non-violently. So there is a wide range of methods. I've identified slightly under 200 specific methods, and I know if scholars were to go to work at it, they could probably find another 200 fairly easily.

Speaker 1: These questions, we're sort of skipping around because we're getting to the most important. What is civilian-based defense and how does it offer us an alternative to the institution of war?

Gene Sharp: The civilian-based defense is a policy to provide a substitute system of defending a society, a substitute for war and military action. which I would argue frequently cannot effectively defend a society in the sense of protect it. Because war is so destructive of human life and of our cities and our whole societies that that isn't defense. You can destroy with military means effectively. It's much harder to get military means to be able to defend you. And so we look in another direction at the historical cases where people have improvised another kind of resistance. The objective is to prepare the institutions of the society and the populations of a society with the skills of resistance and non-cooperation so that they can block the attacker's will. They can prevent the creation and establishment of a puppet government, for example. They can prevent an attacker from successfully indoctrinating the population with an alternative ideology. They can prevent the economic exploitation of a society by economic boycotts and labor strikes, for example. they can prevent the establishment of a whole substitute political system by the great variety of forms of political non-cooperation. And they can potentially do something very damaging to the attacker, subvert the loyalty and reliability of the attackers on troops. So the dissension and confusion first spread among the attacking troops. Then they become unreliable in being sent out to shoot down nonviolent protesters. And finally, they throw down their guns, take off their uniforms, and walk out. Now, a society which could do all of those things would have a very effective deterrent capacity if that ability to do those things could be successfully communicated to the attackers before they launched their venture. And if the attack nevertheless came, I would argue could constitute a very effective form of defense as best as possible under these terrible conditions under which we lived.

Speaker 1: What are the main, perhaps you already answered this, what are the main characteristics of civilian-based defense?

Gene Sharp: I think we've probably answered that pretty well.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I'll ask that again. Okay, what are the goals? You've probably answered that one as well. Okay, here's one. What convincing examples of effective civilian-based defense can we take encouragement from?

Gene Sharp: You can't take encouragement from any successful examples of civilian-based defense because we've never had a case of civilian-based defense in the sense of a prepared capacity conducted by a trained population on the basis of advanced planning and on the basis of careful research. Those very important characteristics are all something that are new that we're projecting can be added to the demonstrated capacity of improvised nonviolent struggle movements for defense in the past. There are a variety of those improvised cases, which I call primitive prototypes. Some of my friends think that's belittling them a little bit, that they were something more than that, and perhaps they were. But careful study of Norwegian resistance during the Nazi occupation, for example, demonstrated these forms of resistance really prevented the establishment of the corporative state in Norway, which was Quisling's intent. They were also used to save the lives of many Jews during the Second World War. There were major forms of non-cooperation defiance that were used in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation, with quite mixed results, sometimes complete failures, sometimes with mixed degrees of success. in Denmark also, and in various other countries. Resistance in Eastern Europe since 1953 in a variety of communist-dominated countries was very important, particularly in Czechoslovakia in 68-69, when they held off with improvised resistance full Russian controls for over eight months, when they could not possibly have done that longer than a few days with military resistance. The continuing struggle in Poland now that's into its seventh year, without the ability of either the Polish communist government or the Soviet Union to bring it to a halt, with the continuing demonstrated capacity of Poles to organize and resist, establishing a de facto free press, for example, and even in March of 87, even the legal trade unions threatening strike action again, now against government policies. If we could refine and develop the experience of those historical cases, it would strengthen the capacity to wage prepared civilian-based defense.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much for the idea. Yeah, but I'm always on this side, which is good. Okay. What do you mean by transarmament?

Gene Sharp: Transarmament is the process of changeover from reliance upon a military-based defense to reliance upon a civilian-based defense. In other words, this is not disarmament, and it is not armament as a military buildup. It is the process that, while the military system is in place, which brings comfort to most people, one begins, first of all, the research and the policy studies on civilian-based defense. Then you begin actually to prepare the society and population to conduct that non-violent, non-cooperation in case there is need for it at some point in the future. So that initially the non-violent or civilian-based component might be one to three percent of the total defense posture. As the society gains confidence in the new methods, as a result of the research and policy studies and training itself, then that could be gradually expanded. So it becomes 5%, 8%, 15%. And if the combination of the planning and the training and what they see happening around them in the world, including probably the future successful use of nonviolent struggle in other parts of the world against existing or new injustices, they could then, with greater confidence in the non-violent struggle, expand it to 30%, to 40%, to 50% or more, gradually building up the new capacity. And then the society could decide to keep both military and civilian-based types of defense, or it could decide that all of this hardware left over from military warfare was, in fact... not only antiquated but counterproductive, that it brought greater danger to the society rather than safety, and the society could complete the process of trans-armament, arming across, shifting the technique of defense completely to the civilian forms of struggle.

Speaker 1: A notable feature of civilian-based defense is the shift from a geographical defense to a psychosocial defense. What is the reasoning behind this, and will this provide an adequate deterrent for an attacker?

Gene Sharp: There's a popular misconception that military means can provide defense at the frontier. which is very strange because people really believe that if you have this capacitive wage war, the population will be safe. But that hasn't been true in any war in recent history. Certainly, that was destroyed with the First World War, and some people would argue well before that. that every war that has occurred seemingly has increased the proportion of civilian casualties as compared to military casualties with the changes in military technology. Not since the First World War, and not even then, was it possible to keep the enemy out with the development of airplanes, of long-range artillery that first could shoot 25 or 50 or 100 miles, I mean really long distances, they thought, to attack other cities where the enemy troops had not yet entered, or with the development of tanks to crash through the frontier, and then later on with long-range airplanes and rockets. There is no defense at the frontier. Now, civilian-based defense simply recognizes that reality. That's something you cannot do. And the process of attempting to do it simply brings attacks upon the civilian society, destruction of its cities, and on down the line. So we start by being realist enough to recognize reality. But by focusing on psychological and social and political elements of potential resistance... we are recognizing again part of the reality that attackers do not attack simply for the objective of destroying. They attack to accomplish something. Now, they may want to seize the land to incorporate into their state. They may want to indoctrinate in another ideology to exploit economically, to establish a political system to their liking, and on down the line. Those are objectives for which psychological, social, economic, and political means of defense are directly applicable because you can attack the enemy's objectives, prevent them from being accomplished. And that would lead then to a physical collapse of the occupation forces. Just as the attacker's army is no longer reliable, they either have to withdraw their troops or let them dissolve into the general population. And similarly, if the attempt to exploit the society economically or impose a political system collapse, they need to get their troops out of there to prevent them from falling apart and from bringing this disease of freedom and the know-how of how to struggle for freedom back home to the attackers on society.

Speaker 1: What do you see to people who point out that nonviolent techniques will not defend us against the destructive power of military technology?

Gene Sharp: Well, of course the nonviolent techniques will not defend against the destructive power of military technology. Neither do military methods. That is part of the whole point of the futility of modern military preparations. They cannot protect. They cannot defend. And it does very little good if you hear that the enemy has launched nuclear-armed missiles at you to say you're going to go on hunger strike. That just is not in the cards. But you must do several things, one of which is to reduce the motives for the military attack on you in the first place. to concentrate on how to stop it once it's launched, so much as to how to effect the decision so it will not be launched in the first place. And among the motives for launching a military attack, particularly with rockets, is the fear that you will be attacked yourself, and you're trying to prevent that by a few minutes of supposed safety, by launching a preemptive attack. or that nuclear weapons might be used as an extension of an otherwise conventional war, an escalation into nuclear forms, so that the nuclear element is countered by removing the bases for that. If you're not in the middle of a conventional war in the first place because you're using nonviolent resistance, then you are not likely to be attacked by nuclear weapons. The conventional attack by conventional military forces has as one motive the certain objectives which they think they can gain by success. So one way to counter that is to build up your civilian-based defense capacity to the point that it is so strong and likely to be so successful that you will not be attacked in the first place. because to do so would lead them into a political ambush, so to speak. It would lead to a miserable humiliation of defeat and potentially to undermine their own regime by members of their own society learning how to use non-violent resistance themselves.

Speaker 1: Some people are concerned that nonviolent alternatives would not work in situations where there are dictators, aggressors, and oppressors. What role does research preparation and training play in addressing this concern?

Gene Sharp: Well, the popular view that you could not use nonviolent resistance against dictatorships, aggressors, or oppressors, excuse me, is based upon ignorance. Because those are some of the main cases where nonviolent struggle has been used. And research then becomes extremely important. It's not that these people choose to be ignorant. It is that our history books have not included that information. Because frequently the research has not been done on those cases. People don't know that there was non-violent resistance in Norway by the teachers, for example, in 1942, which won. They don't know that there was a demonstration of hundreds and thousands of women in Berlin in 1943. They got their 1,500 Jewish husbands released and saved from the Gestapo and the gas chambers. They don't know that the dictators of El Salvador and Guatemala had their regimes dissolved in a matter of two or three weeks each by this kind of resistance. And similarly, on down the line, a whole variety of other historical cases people don't know. So it's important, first of all, to do that historical research, to publish it, and it must be quality historical research, which considers all the special circumstances and reasons why it happened and if they succeeded or if they failed, why, and reveal that information to the public. then the analyses of the nature of dictatorships needs to be launched very thoroughly, not only to focus on what makes dictatorships strong, but what makes them weak. What are the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of dictatorships? Most of our people haven't bothered to read Aristotle and in his The Politics, in which he argues that even in his time, dictatorships constituted the type of government which lasted the smallest amount of time in human history, not the longest, because they contained weaknesses which led to their breakdown and disintegration. Now, with the tools of modern political analysts and researchers, we could locate the weaknesses of the dictatorship of Allende, for example, in Chile, or of any communist regime or any fascist regime or any military dictatorship. try to identify those and learn how to concentrate resistance on those vulnerable points. And through then the study of how to use that resistance, we could give people the plans and the confidence that they could triumph and face those dictatorships with confidence because they knew they had the capacity to strike at the heart of their power by taking that power back into the people in society from which it did come.

Speaker 1: How do proponents of civilian-based defense respond to the idea that people are, by their very nature, evil?

Gene Sharp: Well, you can accept that view if you like, and therefore determine that it is extremely important not to prevent any small group of evil people from gaining dictatorial control over human societies, by training the rest of the population in how to resist control by any evil small elite. On the other hand, if you don't wish to accept that full theory, We recognize that human beings are capable of doing evil things, but they also have been capable of doing good things, and that human nature, if there is such a thing, provides great flexibility of responses, and recognize that to use nonviolent struggle, people do not have to be saints, they do not have to be loving and forgiving, they can just use their innate capacity to be stubborn and cussed, and to determine that nobody's going to boss them around, and we're not to do that effectively politically.

Speaker 1: How would changes toward increased use of nonviolent alternatives come about in our society? What should be our attitude to people who remain convinced that only violent and military means have a chance for success?

Gene Sharp: The increasing interest and acceptance in nonviolent forms of struggle will have a variety of sources in the society. One way this is going to spread is by people doing it and producing successes. Now, they won't always succeed, but in many cases they do succeed. And if they can learn, sometimes by doing, sometimes by observing, that nonviolent struggle can produce success, they're going to be much more likely to be sympathetic to participating in that when their time comes. On the other hand, some people will be impressed by the academic studies, scholarly research, policy analyses. And for the people who are convinced that nonviolent forms of struggle are inadequate, that military means constitute the real form of struggle, I think we ought to have considerable sympathy with them, because that has been the predominant thrust of our Western societies for centuries. And they have simply accepted the cultural pattern in believing that. And one is impressed from time to time at how those people can change if they look candidly at the limitations of modern war to achieve political objectives. And if they observe what is happening in other parts of the world, such as Poland, for example. And also in March of 87, there were demonstrations of hundreds or thousands of people in Budapest demanding their freedom. that this kind of struggle is growing, that it keeps recurring in all kinds of places where theoretically it should be impossible. And if that reality can be correctly perceived, then more and more people will be willing not to accept it quickly, but to say, yes, that should be researched. You see, yes, we should examine if it could be used by our allies, perhaps not us, but perhaps by our allies. Or perhaps it worked in that situation, but it wouldn't work in the other. Well, considering what is involved here, those are big steps. They're steps within the capacity of people to take, but they also begin to move us away from the confidence that only military means are capable of waging effective struggle against determined hostile opponents.

Speaker 1: What does nonviolence in general, or civilian-based defense in particular, offer us in the way of a nuclear deterrent?

Gene Sharp: Nonviolent struggle does not offer a nuclear deterrent. It does not offer an exact counterpart of a nuclear deterrent. Nuclear deterrence is based upon the capacity to annihilate one's enemy. And that is a reciprocal relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States or between any other two nuclear powers. Nonviolent struggle does not offer that equivalent, but it goes back to the concept of what was deterrence before nuclear weapons developed. First of all, nonviolent struggle for national defense, the civilian-based defense capacity, as the main policy, removes the predominant motives for launching a nuclear attack. At the same time, it provides a defense capacity which, if used, could dissolve international aggression as well as internal takeovers. But then that defense capacity which is prepared becomes the deterrent capacity. So as the days before nuclear weapons, deterrence becomes based not on the ability to annihilate, but on the ability to defend. And since you cannot do that by military means anymore without destroying the society, it enables you to have the chance of doing this by civilian-based means.

Speaker 1: Can a distinction be made between violence and conflict?

Gene Sharp: Oh yes, the distinction between violence and conflict is crucial. because violence is simply one means of conducting conflict, of waging struggles. Conflict is a much, much broader phenomenon, which includes violence, but includes all kinds of other methods which are used. Violence is a means of waging conflict. Conflict exists when people want mutually incompatible objectives. People cannot believe two contradictory ideologies at the same time, for example. We cannot both have exclusive ownership of a given piece of geography at the same time. We cannot both be the sole dictator or legitimate government representative in the same country at the same time. and people who want contradictory objectives are in a state of conflict. But you can conduct the conflict in a great variety of different ways, and this opens the possibility of other nonviolent ways of conducting extreme conflicts. Some conflicts are very mild, and you can solve those problems if you wanted a room painted white and I wanted one painted red. Well, we can say for two months it will be white and two months it will be red, or we'll make it pink, or we'll make two walls white and two walls red, and there's no big deal, you see. But if I want to indoctrinate your children in fascist ideology, and you want to raise them up in religious democratic beliefs, we have a serious problem, because we can't compromise well on that. And in those situations, we need means of fighting.

Speaker 1: How is authority and or power determined by the degree of cooperation one hopes to elicit from an individual group or institution?

Gene Sharp: Would you repeat that?

Speaker 1: How is authority and or power determined by the degree of cooperation one hopes to elicit from an individual group or institution?

Gene Sharp: I'll focus that one on power, if that's all right.

Speaker 1: That's fine.

Gene Sharp: Effective power... I would argue, is determined by the degree of cooperation you can gain from the members of a society. It is demonstrated For example, in a working situation, if people refuse to work and go on strike, or if the soldiers in the army walk out, or if in the United States we're having constitutional crises frequently, if the president is regarded as illegitimate because of the illegal things his government has done, then the moral authority which has given him effective political power is dissolved. That even can happen with dictatorships.

Speaker 1: Current lifestyle, a change being if we switch to civilian-based defense?

Gene Sharp: Well, there would be a number of effects, one of which would be that people would need to accept much more responsibility for what happens to their society and in their society. One of the advantages in quotation marks of military means is that you can pay your taxes and hire somebody else to do all of the hard work. And as long as war isn't waged on your own home territory, that is relatively satisfactory, some people think. Civilian-based defense doesn't work that way. It would mean that people would need to have preparations and training in how they could participate themselves in the defense of their society if it were attacked. Not that you hope it to be attacked, Not that experience in actually waging that defense is necessarily required, but you have to participate in the preparations precisely so you won't be attacked. So you'll be strong enough that you will have a deterrent effect upon those who might like to take over your society with an internal coup d'etat, with a foreign engineered coup d'etat, which happens frequently, or an actual invasion of the society. that would be one of the main characteristics. Also, it would probably mean that we would have to raise a number of questions about the operation of our society. To be effective defenders against repressive regimes, you have to have the ability to act with a great deal of autonomy, to think for yourselves, to be able to take initiative, not simply to carry out orders. And that means that our schools will have to examine not just how can our children memorize certain facts, but how can they learn to think for themselves and make their own decisions. How can someone who never has made a major decision in his or her own life are at work, for example, become an effective resistor when the political police are after him, you see, and the leaders are all gone, and that person is one of several people left to take a resistance action, you see, that we may need to vitalize and democratize our normal social lives and the institutions of our society, which is not at all bad. It might be a little traumatic for some, but very exhilarating and stimulating for others. The degree to which we can make our own societies vital working democracies. in the best sense of the term, would also help to make them the most likely to be successfully defended without running the risk of destroying the society by the means that we chose to defend ourselves.

Speaker 1: Do you think that there is an analogy between the abolition of slavery and the abolition of war? Does the case against the institution of slavery teach us anything about the case against the institution of war?

Gene Sharp: Oh, that's an interesting one. But there are people who do make the analogy, saying that just as slavery was abolished, so we can abolish war, presumably in about the same way. And that case might be made in England. I'm not sure if slavery was ever legal in Canada, but if so, it was certainly abolished without a civil war. But in the United States, that kind of analogy is really risky because slavery wasn't abolished by some wonderful educational program. Slavery was abolished by the Civil War, although that probably was not the objective of the Civil War when they started off. And I think there are fundamental differences which make that kind of analogy extremely dangerous for peace groups to accept. For example, to slavery you had an alternative economic system. That was part of the conflict in the United States between the economic system based on slavery and the budding capitalist factory economies and so forth of the northern states. So you didn't have a choice of having a system of slavery or no economic system. You had an alternative. And it seems to me that unless one recognizes the role which military means play in people's minds and in past history as being either genuinely used for defending their societies or people believe they are used for defending their societies when there's some ulterior motive, then we won't get rid of war and simply denouncing it as immoral and teaching people they should be peaceful will not lead to peace because it ignores the fundamentally deep-seated conflicts which exist in the world and ignores the acute question of what do you do if despite your peaceful intentions you are attacked. And it's for facing those real situations or those which are expected to arise in the future that people choose military means. I think only if we develop a viable substitute system of defense will we be capable of abolishing war.

Speaker 1: Thank you.