Just Finished Reading: Small Acts of Resistance – How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson (FP: 2010) [210pp] 

Directly opposing Authoritarian regimes has never exactly been easy. Usually it is difficult at best and, all too often, fatal at worst to stand against it. But what about more indirect approaches? Such opposition is, by its very nature, secretive. The problem for the opposition groups is they can never accurately assess their level of support in the general, largely fearful, population. But if you could make your opposition public without (hopefully!) engaging the hostility of the regime, what then? 

The authors have collected numerous examples of this more subtle opposition and, more importantly, shown that this sort of thing can win. Not in direct confrontation but by undermining and eventually fatally weakening what little legitimacy the authoritarians have. Some of the examples outlined are bizarre and often very, very clever. In one regime people were increasingly getting tired of crude propaganda on their nightly TV news so, individually simply decided to go for a walk during the 7pm news slot. Some would leave their TV’s visibly on the balcony, unplugged and unloved. Others, with a sense of the surreal, would take their TV’s on a walk with them in prams or in wheelbarrows. In response the regime started enforcing a curfew from 7pm. The public response? They shifted their ‘walks’ to the 5pm news slot. In other cases, it was something more simple, more subtle – like wearing an item in the colour of the opposition party like a simple white T-shirt or, in one case I really liked, of behaving in a totally over the top hyper patriotic style which mocked the pronouncements of those in power. In a particularly funny example, the singing of the national anthem at football matches was turned into an act of opposition where a line about tyranny was sung particularly loudly. The government could hardly ban or modify their own national anthem to remove this act of defiance, nor could they ban football matches. They just had to grin and fume in silence. Then, of course, there is the classic response which goes back at least to the ancient Greeks – the sex strike. One African nation began healing the wounds of its civil war after women on both sides of the divide refused their partners sex until they started talking to the opposition. Talks were set up and a settlement was produced in a matter of weeks. 

Although rather thin on the details and context this was an interesting look at examples of (largely) non-confrontational ways of opposing and, eventually, toppling authoritarian regimes across the globe. I was impressed both by the subtilty and cleverness of the ideas tried out against a host of regimes. It takes courage in far too many places to wear a certain colour, to not take part in an approved (AKA compulsory) activity or to stand in a public space holding a photograph of your missing (disappeared) child. But such people and such ‘simple’ actions do bring down tyrants. More power to them. A recommended read for everyone interested in change, freedom and the human spirit to resist.