Occupy Wall St., also known as the Occupy Movement or, simply, Occupy, began as a call to action from the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters to “occupy” Wall St. on Sept. 17, 2011. What happened next is the subject of many books — most of which extol the movement — along with newspaper articles, television news segments, and public chatter from all sides of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, it is self-evident that the movement did not achieve its major, although mostly implicit, goals: to abolish corporate-elite governance and restore democracy for the so-called “99 percent.” [1] If this had been achieved, it would have been to the delight of millions of people in the United States and billions around the world, for there is no question that popular opinion was on the side of the movement — at least in the beginning.
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How to Start a Revolution is a film loosely based around the life and work of nonviolence scholar Gene Sharp. It features interviews with Sharp, the staff of the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) which he founded in 1983, and activists who have deployed nonviolent methods to topple dictators. In 85 minutes we travel from Burma through the former Soviet sphere to the Arab Spring, meeting social movement leaders who insist on the importance of Sharp’s work as a component to their struggle. The film emphasizes that while Sharp is not personally responsible for “starting” any revolutions, his strategic approach to nonviolence makes a crucial difference between success and failure.
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Please join Unrest Magazine and the Center for the Study of Narrative and Conflict Resolution (CNCR) for a special film screening of How to Start a Revolution. The film is a documentary about Gene Sharp, author of From Dictatorship to Democracy, whose work has inspired activists all over the world: from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution to Egypt and the Arab Spring to social activists in the United States. The film explores how Sharp’s ideas work in both theory and practice using extended interviews with Sharp, his assistant, his followers, and leaders of revolutionary movements worldwide, as well as user-generated content from around the globe, to reveal the power of nonviolent revolution on the streets.
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The continued persistence of the Occupy movement is likely both heartening and challenging for readers of Unrest. Heartening because many of us, I presume, are sympathetic to the general goals of the movement and the nonviolent tactics generally used, but also challenging for scholars and practitioners in conflict resolution because it is not immediately clear what role practitioners could or should play in the conflict that the movement is addressing. Not every social or political interaction is a conflict and not all conflicts require the attention of a “conflict worker,” to borrow Johan Galtung’s term (1996, 266). In order to justify a conflict analysis and resolution response, we should be able to identify a unique and helpful contribution to be made. It is my contention here that conflict resolution, as currently thought and practiced, is ill-prepared for this kind of contribution.
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