The revolutionary plan for overthrowing dictatorships: “Not, perhaps, since Machiavelli has a book had such impact in shifting the balance of power” (The Times, London).
In the early 1990s, at a friend’s request, a Massachusetts professor sketched out a blueprint for nonviolent resistance to repressive regimes. It would go on to be translated, photocopied, and handed from one activist to another, traveling from country to country across the globe: from Iran to Venezuela - where both countries consider Gene Sharp to be an enemy of the state - to Serbia, Afghanistan, Vietnam, the former Soviet Union, China, Nepal, and, more recently and notably, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, where it has served as a guiding light of the Arab Spring.
This short, pithy, inspiring, and extraordinarily clear guide to overthrowing a dictatorship by nonviolent means lists 198 specific methods to consider, depending on the circumstances: sit-ins, popular nonobedience, selective strikes, withdrawal of bank deposits, revenue refusal, walkouts, silence, and hunger strikes. From Dictatorship to Democracy is the remarkable work that has made the little-known Sharp into the world’s most effective and sought-after analyst of resistance to authoritarian regimes.
Praise for Gene Sharp
What Sun Tzu and Clausewitz were to war, Sharp… was to nonviolent struggle - strategist, philosopher, guru.
- The New York Times
In June 2007, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez publicly accused Mr. Sharp of stirring unrest in Venezuela… The target of all this intrigue and animosity is eighty years old and slightly stooped. He walks with a cane.
- The Wall Street Journal
The man who changed the world.
- The Boston Globe