Conflict transformation principles and street activism

I use Fisher, Ury, and Patton's Getting to Yes 3rd edition in my Introduction to Conflict Resolution course. Decades ago, when I took my first Conflict Resolution class in the 1980s, they had a skinny 1981 first edition, which gave me new language and organizing principles in my activism (I was a professional community organizer in those years). I began to bring forth a concept I called enlightened self-interest, which helped me and my fellow activists foreground cause, effect, and sustainable gains. We stopped the US Forest Service from spraying pesticides and herbicides, we helped the Anishinaabe regain their treaty rights, we forced Rio Tinto Zinc to mine in the strictest environmentally safe way, we stopped two proposed nuclear waste dumps, and we shut down a US thermonuclear command base in Michigan and Wisconsin. We had so many close relationships that we became a highly functional regional crew really strengthened by evoking that sense of enlightened self-interest, so that we could partner with hunting groups to stop some environmental threat even though people like me had their land posted No Hunting. 

A key phrase re: the 2020 BLM uprising is public opinion and policy change. I have asserted for decades that each decision by the organizers should run through a filtering question, "How will this affect recruitment?" because in nonviolent social movements, size matters. Rioting will turn public opinion against any group, as a fair bit of research documents, so the most functional approach in my experience is to let rioters know that those actions are not part of the campaign, and if they occur in the context of the campaign they will be denounced. 

Failure to do this is failure to win. I'm an old white man so I was there in the summer of 2020 in person a bit but gave up on any nighttime actions as dysregulated dysfunctional failures. It was not my place to try to correct that as an ally, not a leader, but I was unimpressed by local African American politicians, and I was similarly unimpressed by the African American ministers who refused to act as any corrective. Sure enough, local Black politicians were beaten in 2022, the Defund the Police campaign has been completely reversed by a public demanding more cops, and any "victories" were ephemeral at best. 

References

Fisher, Roger; Ury, William; Patton, Bruce (2011). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in. (3^rd ed.). New York, NY: Penguin.