Game Theory & Nonviolent Resistance

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. ‒ Sun Tzu

It is only natural to actively resist oppression of any kind. Oppression stirs up feelings of hate and anger, and the oppressor’s weapons of choice are almost always threats, coercion, and fear-mongering. Therefore, any attempt at active resistance will always come down to how we respond to anger and fear.

If we allow uncontrolled, full-blown rage to violently erupt onto the surface, it will, in turn, be violently repressed. While violence and armed conflict might ‘work’ some of the time – as they did when a NATO-backed armed uprising overthrew Gaddafi’s regime in Libya – we definitely won’t like how it ends: the uprising led to a free-for-all scramble for power, plunging Libya into a civil war. Consequently, Libyans are poorer, in greater peril, and experience as much or more political repression in parts of the country compared to during Gaddafi’s rule.

As Hardy Merriman and Jack DuVall, Former Presidents of the International Centre on Nonviolent Conflict, argue in their co-authored essay ‘Dissolving Terrorism at Its Roots’, that there are almost no instances in the past hundred years in which violent insurrection has displaced an authoritarian regime and led the way to a sustainable and stable democratic order suggests that armed internal resistance is unlikely to diminish the problem of authoritarian oppression.

Nonviolent resistance, on the other hand, may ‘work’ only sometimes, but it is always for the greater good. It sets you up on a pedestal, a moral high ground. It relies on recognising anger and controlling the impulse to react violently, effectively forcing you to channel these emotions towards more creative and sustainable tactics, strategies, and outcomes. Successful nonviolent resistance also imposes far fewer costs on the society in which it is used. It ushers in decentralised, more accountable governments as well as more durable, internally peaceful democracies that are less likely to regress into civil war.

Concerning civil disobedience as a nonviolent tactic, Dr Martin Luther King Jr observes in his essay ‘A New Sense of Direction’ that ‘To dislocate the function of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot, because it can be longer lasting, costly to society, but not wantonly destructive.’

According to Erica Chenoweth and Marie Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works (2011), campaigns of nonviolent resistance are more than twice as effective as violent uprisings, and they usually take a third of the time. However, the vast potential of nonviolence remains unexplored because of prevalent myths and misconceptions about both what truly constitutes nonviolent action and, consequently, the power and limits of nonviolence and the human capacity for goodness and thus for true nonviolence. For example, it is widely believed that human beings are innately aggressive, that we outwardly present a veneer of civility but inwardly harbour unresolved violence. However, as concluded in the 1986 UNESCO Seville Statement on Violence, humans are not purely aggressive; we have equal capacity for empathy, love, kindness, compassion, and meaningful human connection.

This duality in the human condition – the human capacity for both violence and peace – is also echoed in the Declaration of Human Rights, which states, ‘war is born in the minds of men and women, and it is in the minds of men and women that the defences of peace will have to be constructed.’

Therefore, if peace must be built in the hearts and minds of men and women, nonviolent resistance must also involve not only confronting an oppressive opponent without using violence or the threat of violence but also being nonviolent in our hearts and minds. Thus, true nonviolence means being nonviolent in our speech, harbouring goodwill rather than ill will, and fostering a sense of kinship rather than alienation.

Furthermore, what is sometimes referred to as principled nonviolence in scholarly circles, or what Gandhi called the ‘nonviolence of the strong’, is the power released by the conversion of negative drive or ill will into goodwill. In his address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), King used the example of thousands of black students in the South who took ‘the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the Negro people and filtered them in their own souls and fashioned them in a creative protest’. Thus, effective nonviolence generates power through self-discipline and by converting the impulse to act out of anger, fear, or any other disruptive force into a creative response.

As Peter Ackerman and Hardy Merriman explain in their essay ‘Checklist for Ending Tyranny’, ‘With nonviolent discipline, movements maximise civilian participation, increase the cost of an opponent’s repression, heighten the probability that repression will backfire, and are much more likely to induce defection from an adversary’s key pillars of support.’

Indeed, nonviolent resistance sometimes requires turning the other cheek – as during a 1963 lunch counter sit-in in Mississippi when civil rights activists stoically faced a moment of grotesque violence – but only if the particular play is part of a wider strategy, like sacrificing your queen to win a game of chess.

Unlike a game of chess, however, and like most of life, civil resistance does not have to be zero-sum; there doesn’t always have to be a winner or a loser. Sure, only one side or the other stands to gain when the winner takes all, but cooperating and playing nice guarantees a win for both sides. It makes friends out of foes – friends who might be useful down the road.

Conversely, when cooperation is not possible, lawful resistance becomes about draining the enemy’s will or resources. You win when the other guy bows out.

But this is just a simple one-on-one between two opponents, and reality is not always so neat: decisions are rarely as simple as cooperating or defecting; outcomes or potential payoffs are rarely as simple as getting everything, half of everything, or nothing. Moreover, people have many allies and many detractors; there are always dynamic, extenuating circumstances to factor in, and victory is not always swift. Sometimes, the game goes on and on.

As Avinash Dixit, Professor of Economics at Princeton University, observes, ‘while some aspects such as figuring the true motives of rivals and recognising complex patterns often resist logical analysis, many aspects of strategy can be studied and systematised into a science – game theory.’

Game theory studies interactive decision-making in strategic situations where our preferred outcomes depend not only on our actions but also on others' actions. It shows that we should factor in our opponent's anticipated cooperation or defection when choosing our course of action or strategy. For instance, the protestors at the 1963 lunch counter sit-in in Mississippi anticipated the crackdown of excessive violence by law enforcement officers. They chose to bear the pain of the violence inflicted on them, knowing their strategic nonviolent posture and persistence would eventually bring about desegregation. However, in thinking about the opponent's choices, we should also consider that they are thinking about ours, and so on.

Some game theorists believe tit for tat is the best way around a selfish, non-cooperative opponent(s). This involves, within reason, looking at every competitor as a potential partner or taking on a cooperative, collaborative posture until your opponent defects and tries to get everything for themselves – in other words, being willing to find a positive solution right up until you can’t do so any longer. Then, and only then, should you consider a retaliatory path.

In fact, political scientist Robert Axelrod famously ran a simulation of proposed decision-making strategies in the 1980s, and tit for tat won repeatedly. Although tit for tat never won any one-on-one games, it cooperated with enough other players across all games to consistently end with the highest score overall. Axelrod explains, ‘What accounts for tit for tat’s robust success is its combination of being nice, which prevents it from getting into unnecessary trouble, and its policy of retaliation, which prevents the other side from persisting whenever defection is tried.’

Similarly, tit for tat in civil resistance helps you to survive and come out on top in the long term because you don’t always know how many more interactions you’ll have with your opponent(s), and given that these interactions probably won’t be one-offs without lingering, continued effects, it’s prudent to cooperate in case you end up needing your opponent later on. What makes cooperation possible is that the players might meet again. However, if your opponent tries to defect at any point, it helps to retaliate proportionally. The idea is to avoid being too combative, defecting only in retaliation, and to cooperate with enough other players to come out on top overall.

On the other hand, the ‘game’ might descend into a ‘death spiral’ of escalations if both sides distrust each other and decide to defect in pursuit of their own interests. If an even bigger retaliation follows every defection, the price might be too heavy to bear even if you win.

Benjamin Polak, Provost and Professor at Yale University, uses a game in his classes to visually illustrate the nuances of strategic decision-making. Two players, one on each end, make oscillating moves toward each other. They both hold a wet sponge, and, on each player’s turn, they have to decide whether to throw the sponge and hit the other player or take a step forward. Whoever makes the first shot wins, but if a player misses, the game continues until the second player shoots. As the game progresses, it becomes apparent that winning depends on players’ probabilities, including the players’ shooting abilities, contextual considerations, and many other factors.

As in actual strategic situations, it is possible – and it may be commonly known – that one of the players is a significantly better shot than the other. We therefore assume that each player not only knows their own probabilities of hitting the other player, but they also know the other player’s probability of hitting them. This assumption not only facilitates Polak’s game but closely mirrors real-life situations.

From this game, Polak derives two important ideas that can aid strategic decision-making in real-life strategic situations. Firstly, assuming it’s player 1’s turn now and he knows his opponent is not likely to shoot next turn, perhaps because it’s too far, he should not shoot now because he’ll have a better chance on the next turn at no immediate risk. Even if player 2 tries to make the improbable shot, player 1 should still take a step forward and not shoot now because player 2’s shot is unlikely to land anyway. Thus, player 1 should shoot on his next turn, after the opponent's turn, rather than shoot now. This line of reasoning is known as the dominance strategy: whether the other player does X or not, whether they are rational or not, you should do Y now.

Secondly, if it is player 1’s turn now, and he knows that player 2 is likely to shoot next turn, perhaps because player 2 is close enough, player 1 should then shoot only if his probability of hitting player 2 is greater than the probability of player 2 missing on the next turn.

Polak’s ideas on strategic timing can help us make the critical decision of when to act when engaging in civil resistance. This is particularly useful when participating in situations where the most critical decision is when to do something, not what to do.

Suppose you are a protester mounting a radical call for change and reforms that is increasingly gaining traction with the masses. Since tit for tat is the best way around a selfish, non-cooperative political class, you are, in this case, leading the people in retaliating proportionally to the corruption, lack of accountability, and systemic disenfranchisement of young people perpetuated by the political class. Let's assume you know the enemy is probably planning an ambush or attack on one of your vulnerabilities, and their odds of success or failure are commonly known. Following Polak’s reasoning, if the political elite attacks you but for some reason you know that whatever they do won’t work, then it makes sense to either wait for a better shot or take the shot only if you have a reasonable chance of landing it. Thus, tit for tat not only requires a proportional response, it requires strategic timing as well.

However, for numerous reasons, the enemy’s position and their odds of success could improve. Sooner or later, attempts to silence, discredit, and deter you could actually work, meaning you also have to be aware of when you are most vulnerable to anticipate and pre-empt your assassination, virtual or literal.

Polak argues that it also helps to work the game backwards to find the sweet spot, the best time to act for maximum effect. Backward induction, Polak explains, involves going to the end of the game – or at least to a decisive juncture where any move is likely to be the winning move – and working the game backwards until the present moment to make the best move out of multiple choices.

In Polak’s game, Polak calls the earliest position from which a shot is guaranteed to land on the opponent distance d*. If you could go back one unit in time from d*, you would know that if you didn’t shoot and instead took a step forward, your opponent would definitely make the shot and win on the next turn.

The insight gleaned by going back in time from d* would therefore inform your present move, which would be to shoot now. If you moved two steps back in time, it would be your opponent’s turn now. He would know that if he didn’t shoot, you would shoot and win. Therefore, he would shoot. And so forth. What Polak shows is that you can work out the game all the way from the end to the present moment to determine your opponent’s most likely course of action and thus make the best move out of multiple choices.

Similarly, if you could game out the course of your civil resistance movement and single out a decisive juncture from which either player could win, you could work your way to the present moment to determine your move.

Although one might expect that in a large enough sample, people would make the shot 50% of the time, Polak observes that people actually make the shot on average about 10% of the time. He attributes this phenomenon to the psychological bias of overestimating your own abilities and underestimating the opponent’s abilities, along with the proactive bias of seeking to act, seeking to do something instead of letting things happen to you, especially when you need to plan your moves most carefully.

As a rule of thumb, it makes sense to engage in as few zero-sums as possible. However, as you cooperate and make compromises, you might need the slight edge, leverage, a hedge against your oppressive opponent’s potential irrationality, so that as soon as they try to defect, as soon as they make it about winning or losing, you can retaliate immediately, signalling your unwillingness to countenance malice and bad faith.

Tit for tat.

In other words, be like a sourdough starter – the living, leavening culture composed of wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria maintained in a simple mix of flour and water. The characteristic tangy flavour and pleasantly sour aroma contrast with the rest of the dough, making for a tasty loaf overall. The tang undertones are your zero-sums – it’s you defecting in retaliation to an opponent’s unprovoked action against you. The rest of the dough is you trying to cooperate and make compromises with other players, making for a win overall.

Although tit for tat may not sound exactly like Mahatma Gandhi or Dr Martin Luther King Jr, it is, in some ways, as close to their playbooks as we can get. Firstly, the proportional retaliation aspect of tit for tat does not justify winning at any cost, especially by resorting to violence or physical force to elicit social change. Martin Luther King Jr stirred up righteous trouble to bring about nonviolent solutions to racial injustice and inequality. The point is solely to be pragmatic enough to try ideas that work but not too realpolitik to cross the line of conventional morality.

When you are up against an opponent that uses violence, perhaps because it is baked into the game and a crushing show of force is the way to project strength and punish dissent, as a proponent of nonviolent resistance, you will need courage to willingly take on the suffering embedded in such a situation without inflicting it on your opponent. You will have to exercise Grandmaster-level perspective and precision to dream up smarter alternatives to violence, smarter ways to wage peace rather than war. You will have to be intentional every step of the way, in every move you make, and reach a flow state while also remaining firmly rooted in your core beliefs and convictions. You will need some time too.

For example, King used powerful, moving words, protests, sit-ins, and marches to fight for racial justice, equality, and police reform.

As Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward explain in their work Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, ‘Governmental leaders usually employ punitive measures against disruptors when central institutions are affected or when the disruptors’ cause becomes central to the society as a whole.’

Likewise, King’s boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins in Birmingham, 1963, for example, hurt business owners’ profits and transcended race by galvanising both black and white people behind his cause, thereby making racial equality a pressing issue across the country.

When King’s activities inevitably resulted in his arrest and the crackdown of excessive violence by law enforcement agencies, and when the violent images of children being blasted by high-pressure firehoses, clubbed by police officers, and attacked by police dogs were broadcast to the general population, it triggered international outrage, making it starkly clear who was right and who was wrong.

‘It was at this moment that the power of non-violent protest became manifest. It dramatized the essential meaning and nature of the conflict and, in magnified strokes, made clear who was the evildoer and who was the undeserving and oppressed victim,’ argues Dr King in his essay ‘A New Sense of Direction’.

In his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, King writes, ‘when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters . . . then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.’

He was up against a racist, well-entrenched system kept in place by unjust laws, violence, and impunity. King explained that he used nonviolent direct action to ‘create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue’. He sought to ‘dramatize the issue [such] that it can no longer be ignored’.

It was Gandhi who said, ‘I have learnt the supreme lesson to harness my anger, and anger conserved can be converted into a power that can move the world.’ King echoes these words, asserting, ‘We did not cause outbursts of anger; we controlled anger under discipline for maximum effect.’ Recognising his pain and anger and suppressing the impulse to react hatefully and violently, King responded strategically by using creative tactics to bring about negotiation and change. And it worked! King’s protests eventually resulted in negotiations with the Birmingham’s business leadership; an agreement that would facilitate the removal of ‘Whites Only’ and ‘Blacks Only’ signs in restrooms and drinking fountains; and the desegregation of lunch counters, restrooms, and public facilities.

But King openly challenged a worldview built on racial inequality that was proudly defended by overtly bigoted groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the pro-segregationist White Citizens Council and which benefitted business owners, employers, landlords, and real estate developers through discriminatory hiring and housing practices.

Further exacerbating King’s challenges, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, suspected that communists had infiltrated King’s movement to sow discord in American society and subvert individual American liberty. Despite an investigative report contradicting Hoover’s suspicions, Hoover, in a handwritten response below the memo,  insisted that he ‘could not ignore the memos re King, O’Dell, Levison, Rustin, Hall et al as having only an infinitesimal effect on the efforts to exploit the American Negro [sic] by the communists’.

Thus, the FBI’s desperate efforts to tie Dr King to communism were only a ruse to stop King’s nonviolent movement. ‘The threat of communism became a way in which to undermine black radical movements’, notes Ula Y. Taylor, Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Based only on a loosely defined mandate to investigate threats to national security; King’s association with Stanley Levison, an allegedly concealed member of the Communist Party USA, and Levison’s allegations of King espousing Marxist ideologies, the FBI was approved by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to plant wiretaps and microphone bugs in King’s home, offices, and hotel rooms.

According to internal memos, the FBI admits that ‘these are particularly delicate surveillances with possible repercussions if it ever became known that such surveillance had been instituted on King’.

Two days after King delivered his memorable ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, William Sullivan, Assistant Director of the FBI and head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division, admitted that King ‘stood heads and shoulders over all other black leaders put together’ and therefore was marked as the ‘most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country from the standpoint of communism . . . and national security’.

Although FBI surveillance found no evidence of communist influence on King, Hoover continued to approve covert operations to discredit King’s standing among financial supporters, church leaders, government officials, and the media.

Damningly, the Church Committee, a US Senate Select Committee convened to investigate the FBI’s domestic intelligence operations, concluded that the impact of the FBI’s efforts to discredit the SCLC and King on the civil rights movement ‘is unquestionable’. The committee determined that ‘Rather than trying to discredit the alleged communists it believed were attempting to influence Dr King, the Bureau adopted the curious tactic of trying to discredit the supposed target of Communist Party interest – Dr King himself.’

King’s selection for the Nobel Peace Prize in November 1964 only seems to have strengthened the FBI’s resolve. A threatening letter along with alleged recorded evidence of Dr King’s infidelity, insinuating that Dr King should take his own life before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, was delivered to King’s home. The Church Committee concluded that the letter came from the FBI. He was continuously harassed until his unfortunate assassination on 4 April 1968, while the SCLC and he were still in the planning stages of the Poor People’s Campaign.

Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King saw the poor people’s campaign as the next chapter in the struggle for genuine equality. The campaign aimed to address economic inequalities and was envisioned as the most sustainable, sizeable, and widespread effort of civil disobedience undertaken by any social movement in U.S. history.

If you view King and the FBI as players in a game, it may be argued that King’s position was safest when any FBI action against his person would be inconsequential to his cause at any moment in time. As a rational player, he anticipated that arrest and even death, along with the inevitable crackdown of excessive violence by law enforcement agencies on peaceful protests to perpetuate unjust laws, would ultimately serve his cause. It would thus ‘dramatize the issue [such] that it can no longer be ignored’.

King, in ‘A New Sense of Direction’, argues that if the jails are filled to stop protestors, it would mean that the protester is not ‘avoiding penalties for breaking the law’ but is willing to endure punishment because the society will not be able to ‘endure the stigma of violently and publicly oppressing its minorities to preserve injustices’.

In fact, King describes the Nobel Peace Prize award as a reminder to civil rights workers that ‘the tide of world opinion is in our favor’ and pledged to ‘work even harder to make peace and brotherhood a reality’.

The next rational move after arrests and violent crackdowns failed to suppress King’s nonviolent movement and instead propelled his movement to an unambiguous moral high ground that could not be put down by force was for the FBI to try to discredit Dr King’s reputation as an upright Christian minister and respected civil rights leader. They sought to knock King off his moral pedestal.

Declassified documents detail the FBI’s efforts to discreetly furnish the media with information showing King’s high living and exorbitant spending to ‘cause many Negro supporters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to lose faith in this organisation, its leaders and their endeavours and hence discontinue their support through the contribution of funds’.

‘No holds were barred,’ according to Assistant Director Sullivan’s testimony before the Church Committee. In this way, the FBI could prevent King from becoming a ‘Messiah’ who could unify black nationalists should he ‘abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism’. This led the FBI to bug King’s hotel rooms as he travelled across the country and the threat to release the tapes to the press.

While King may not have anticipated or pre-empted this, the media refused to release the tapes because the evidence was tainted by bias, racism, and ‘dirty tricks’ and failed to meet journalistic standards. The one-in-the-off chance thing, the possible but improbable thing, happened, and his reputation remained unblemished, soaring to even greater heights as his nonviolent direct actions significantly contributed to the progress African Americans made and continue to make towards civil rights, social justice, and racial equality in the United States.

King’s nonviolent approach to the problem of oppression was not without successful precedent. In ‘The Negro and the American Dream’, King’s address at a NAACP rally in Charlotte, King argues, ‘Gandhi challenged the might of the British Empire and won independence for his people using the weapons of truth, noninjury, courage, and soul force.’

When Gandhi traded in his suit and tie for the uniform of the lower classes and sat at a wooden spinning wheel every day, making thread for dhotis, he showed the Indian people that they could spin their own cloth instead of sending their cotton to England to be made into textiles.

Gandhi was symbolically and constructively weaning India off British dependency. His non-violent, defiant actions creatively demonstrated how India’s land and resources were being systematically exploited. His actions were also constructive because they resulted in the acquisition of useful, tangible items such as a dhoti, showcasing what real independence would mean.

Gandhi’s march to the sea to make salt from seawater, going against British colonial law, was likewise a constructive act of civil disobedience against the state’s imposition of a salt tax and its salt monopoly. It was not just a symbolic march from one place to another as a sign of protest, but a concrete act of protest itself.

Gandhi may not have succeeded in reducing the salt tax in his climactic campaign in the spring of 1930. Still, he created a nonviolent moment that pitted the power of nonviolence against the power of violence and propelled his movement to an unambiguous moral high ground that could not be put down by force. Nonviolence prevailed.

Between the state’s crackdown and the arrest of Gandhi and over 60,000 of his followers, the march became a decisive turning point in the course of India’s liberation struggle. It creatively dramatised India’s subjugation so that it could no longer be ignored, making it, as British historian Arnold Toynbee remarks in his foreword to Swami Ghanananda’s Sri Ramakrishna, ‘clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending’. In his tribute essay featured in Radhakrishnan’s edition of Mahatma Gandhi: 100 Years (2009), Toynbee notes that ‘Gandhi made it impossible for the British to go on ruling India, but at the same time he made it possible for us to abdicate without rancour and without dishonour.’

While civil resistance mostly involves unarmed civilians using a variety of nonviolent methods to actively confront an oppressive opponent, if we broaden the aperture just a bit more to include constructive acts of nonviolence, actions that real people benefit from, the potential for civil resistance to create real, sustainable change is much greater.

Gandhi’s philosophical preference for constructive nonviolent action or, as he called it, ‘cooperation with good’, to obstructive measures or ‘noncooperation with evil’, mimics tit for tat’s principles of cooperation and proportional retaliation when defection is tried.

To win the independence of the Indian people, Gandhi engaged in constructive nonviolent actions that creatively demonstrated how India’s land and resources were being systematically exploited, resulting in the acquisition of useful, tangible items such as salt and dhotis for Indians. His nonviolent retaliatory actions thus inspired the Indian people’s collective sense of agency and independence, making the hitherto abstract idea of India’s independence feel overdue and inevitable.

The prisoners’ dilemma further illustrates the benefits of cooperation to ensure the best possible collective outcome. Two prisoners who are friends are each presented with these options: if one prisoner snitches on the other and the other stays silent, the snitch goes free; if they both snitch on each other, they both get five years in jail; and if they both stay silent, they each get a year in jail.

If you care about your friend and trust that he cares for you too, you’d stay silent and hope he stays silent too. The best outcome for you would be spending little time in jail while still keeping your friendship.  On the other hand, if all you cared about was getting the better deal, you’d snitch on him and hope to get no time. Even if he snitched on you, too, you’d both get five-year sentences, so you’d rest assured knowing your friend did not get the better deal.

Considering that each prisoner has a personal incentive to snitch on the other, the rational choice for each prisoner – the Nash equilibrium – becomes to snitch on each other even though they end up worse off than if they had cooperated and stayed silent.

The prisoner’s dilemma illustrates that if enough people are unwilling to simply exist in an uncomfortable equilibrium where everybody looks out only for their own interests as the collective quality of life becomes worse off than if they had just come together and demanded better governance; if enough people stood up for themselves peacefully and creatively and held true to their values, it forces redress of grievances and renders it politically impossible for the oppressor to ignore, repress, or superficially conciliate the people. Thus, it suffices to say that by peacefully and creatively making the oppressors see us, we can ‘dramatize the issue [such] that it can no longer be ignored’. In this way, by peacefully working together to accelerate change, people can move towards more important democratic wins.

The legacies of King and Gandhi, the means they used that were as pure as the ends they sought, and the high standards they set may all seem daunting and infeasible, but following in their footsteps could be much simpler than it sounds. It could be about using your voice or believing in voices that speak earnestly for the people.

Most importantly, resisting oppression not out of hate and anger but out of the deeper beliefs that stopping or removing the oppressors is better for the oppressors themselves than causing pain to others and that oppressors’ happiness doesn’t have to be rooted in the insecurity of the oppressed – this is what gives success to non-violent methods.

In his speech ‘The Negro and the American Dream’, Dr King advises us that ‘we must be sure that our struggle is conducted on the highest level of dignity and discipline’. He reminds agitators ‘not to flirt with retaliatory violence or drink the poisonous wine of hate’ but to use the ‘way of nonviolence’ when taking direct action against oppression. 

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung e.V.

This contribution is part of our dossier
Gen Z: Voices of a Global Generation
The dossier examines youth-led movements and collectives, their strategies and their visions for a just future. It also explores the roots of their discontent and its expression in digital spaces and the arts by bringing together young voices and perspectives from across the globe. The publication presents the diversity of youth-led movements in various formats.