Image: Gene Sharp, who died this week aged 90.
I first came across Gene Sharp in 2006. An enthusiastic and internationally minded student activist, I had been considering writing my Politics undergraduate dissertation on voting behaviour in student elections. That was until I found a copy of Sharp’s 1973 work The Politics of Non-Violent Action in the university library.
I opened it, read it, and a new world of possibilities was revealed. Here was a sophisticated theory of how mass movements of civic society can and do dismantle the world’s most authoritarian power structures, beginning with the simple recognition that all elite power is derived from the co-operation of the ruled.
