Few scholars have done as much as Frances Fox Piven to describe how widespread disruptive action can change history, and few have offered more provocative suggestions about the times when movements—instead of crawling forward with incremental demands—can break into full sprint.
Cross-posted from Waging Nonviolence. Although Saul Alinsky, the founding father of modern community organizing in the United States, passed away in 1972, he is still invoked by the right as a dangerous harbinger of looming insurrection. And although his landmark …
Egypt is often held up as a success story of civil resistance. However, as the country has slid back into a repressive and undemocratic state, this success has been called into question. Did nonviolence fail in Egypt?
Few are aware that Martin Luther King, Jr. once applied for a permit to carry a concealed handgun. In his 2011 book Gunfight, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler notes that, after King’s house was bombed in 1956, the clergyman applied in Alabama for …
Environmental advocates face a question that has widespread implications for how we think about legislation, lobbying, mass movements, and social change: what do you do when an issue emerges as one of the most urgent matters of our time and, at the same instant, becomes firmly regarded as a political loser?
