Campaign design, logistics, sequencing

Campaign design, resistance logistics, sequencing

Movements teach you to make plans and then remake them on the go.[1]

--Reverend William Barber II

Young nonviolent resisters in war-torn Serbia started a group, Otpor! (Resistance!) and they held to several strategic perspectives as they organized, trained, did actions (rinse and repeat). In 10 months, they had overthrown the dictator. “Strategy,” they write, “is the conception of how best to act in order to achieve objectives, given limited resources and condition of uncertainty.”[2]Put another way, writes nonviolent theorist Gene Sharp, “Directed action in accordance with a strategic plan enables one to concentrate one’s strengths and actions to move in a determined direction toward the desired goal.”[3]

A movement, writes Reverend Barber, is created in 14 ways: indigenous grassroots organizing, use moral language, commit to nonviolent civil disobedience, lift the voices of everyday people, race is central, broad and multi-faith coalition, seek unlikely allies, build long-term relationships, commit to empirical analysis, coordinate all social media, register and educate voters, gather a strong legal team, fuse culture, move from moment to movement.[4]

This is a complex and daunting list, yet very helpful to bear in mind. This is not a sequential list; the any movement may punctuate many activities with song or art or film or dance to build that fusion culture, just as movements have done throughout history and around the world.[5]

Some campaigns employ an affinity group structure. The advantages of such an organizational option include a deeper level of camaraderie, trust, and an innate inoculation against agents provocateurs.[6]

Affinity groups only operate within all mandated codes of conduct; for example, no independent affinity group actions should occur without express approval from state and national leadership if that is the scope of the campaign. 

Within the context of the larger campaign, affinity groups can bring together tight units of participants who share profound religious or philosophical beliefs (e.g. Sufi, Buddhist, evangelical Christian, anarchist), or who approach their involvement with the campaign from a particular personal or professional identity (e.g., transgender, nurses, hearing impaired, members of a particular union). 

At a mass action, then, an affinity group of Filipinas may stay together and may thus recruit more Filipinas by their group solidarity, comfort and cohesion, while losing no connection to the larger mass effort. Their messaging in-between actions to more folks who share their identity may be a strong recruitment strategy or at least one that generates more sympathy for the overall campaign. 

In the Moral Monday movement quite often a large crowd would gather at the state capitol building and when it came time to offer direct action moral witness, the crowd would part and those who had been through the nonviolence training and were wearing specially colored armbands would walk forward together.[7]They would be arrested, a tactic that showed coordination, organization, and discipline. While there are many possible tactical scenarios, it is important to consider each new idea using the filter of recruitment, and thus image that appeals rather than alienates. Looking chaotic and undisciplined will alienate. Preparation and logistics are important. 

A flow chart for shorter-term campaigns can assist campaign workers to plug into task teams when it’s most helpful, to shift their focus when their skills are needed on a different time-urgent task, and can help organizers to delegate and strategize on a reiterative basis. 

The flow chart may show that, for example, media work does not begin until a benchmark has been achieved, for example, 100 people have signed their commitment to risk arrest at the state capitol. When the media team begins to promote the organizing work at a point where something tangible can be noted, they can work with an image of strength, and within a coalition that can legitimately insist on a seat at the table to negotiate a victory. Protracting a campaign’s actions and spacing them periodically is one way to keep media outlets observing and reporting on your group’s actions.

Many campaigns orient, frame, and identify themselves as ideologically consistent and some simply have a goal and a code of conduct. Both can succeed. "Moral direct action" incorporates acts of witness and inspiration even though no realistic assessment would predict any immediate resultant policy change. This is in fact the history of many successful movements, from the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation[8]to the very first Moral Monday. From a launch of moral authority can come a mass movement. From a launch of shared grievance and cohesive leadership can also come a mass movement.

Sequencing is often aligning assessed incremental goals along the path toward the meta-goal. So, for example, the small but powerful acts of black citizens in the South attempting to register to vote helped prompt the Selma campaign of 1965, which helped lead to the Voting Rights Act that year but Dr. King and the other leadership then organized some 1,500 volunteers to actually register voters in 120 key rural counties in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Florida.[9]Each sequential step was a herculean effort and each was necessary. The first attempts to register black voters dramatized the need for the legislation and only then was the actual goal a possibility—and had the movement failed to take that final step the entire campaign would have been hollow and only symbolic. 

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[1] Barber (p. 111)

[2]Popovic, Srdja; Djinovic, Slobodan; Milivojevic, Andre J.; Merriman, Hardy; Marovic, Ivan (2007). CANVAS core curriculum: A guide to effective nonviolent struggle. Belgrade, Serbia: CANVAS (p. 78).

[3] Sharp, Gene (2003). There are realistic alternatives. Boston, MA: The Albert Einstein Institution (p. 19).

[4] Barber (pp. 127-130)

[5]McAllister, Pam (1988). You can’t kill the spirit.Philadelphia, PA: New Society Press.

[6]Donnelly, Kate (nd). Handbook for nonviolent action. New York, NY: War Resisters League.

[7] Barber (p. 106)

[8] Dekar, Paul R. (2016). Dangerous people: The Fellowship of Reconciliation building a nonviolent world of freedom, justice, and peace. Virginia Beach, VA: Donning. The 1947 Journey of Reconciliation was an integrated bus trip of 16 both black and white civil rights activists meant to challenge segregated buses on federally regulated interstate travel in the South.

[9]Schulke, Flip & McPhee, Penelope (1986). King Remembered. New York, NY: Pocket.