Anatomy of a Nonviolent Revolution

A lesson for Americans

“He’s cooked!” Credit: Zaraza, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

It began with a few friends. Though still in college at the time, they were already experienced activists, veterans of a successful movement to reverse election fraud in municipal contests a couple of years before.

Now, they faced a bigger fight. The dictator was poised to run for another term as president. By doing so, he would be circumventing the constitution.

Meeting in a smoke-filled apartment, the friends agreed that the country needed an organized resistance movement—and they resolved to lead it.

Soon enough, they announced its formation and laid out three demands: freedom for their university, an independent media, and new elections.

To wage the struggle, only nonviolent methods would suffice, they concluded. This was not a moral decision but a strategic one. Setting off bombs and shooting at the police would only serve to alienate potential supporters and legitimize the regime’s repression.

They also understood that a movement restricted to students in the capital would never gain nationwide traction. So, as one of their first major actions, they led a march through the provinces. This drew attention to their cause from a diverse cross section of society. It also helped them establish a critical foothold among the dictator’s provincial base.

After more than a year of diligent organizing, they held their founding congress. Attendees hailed from over 70 localities and represented all walks of life—students, laborers, business owners, and pensioners.

With the country in perpetual economic crisis, they had to look elsewhere for funding. To this end, they secured grants from the U.S. government as well as private foundations such as the Open Society Institute.

With foreign aid in hand, the movement could work around the regime’s virtual media monopoly and build a public presence of its own. Its slogan, “He’s cooked!” was soon visible everywhere. So was its logo, a drawing of clenched fist. As one leader recalled, it appeared “on everything—umbrellas, lighters, matchboxes. We branded the revolution.”

Using Repression

Such insolence was bound to draw the dictator’s ire. This was by design, in fact. The regular arrests and beatings the activists endured were not written off as an unfortunate necessity; they were the movement’s best recruitment tool. Ordinary citizens, it turned out, were “appalled by scenes of fresh-faced students being arbitrarily arrested and bundled into police buses,” The Guardian reported.

“We fed on the repression of the regime,” explained one leader. Whenever the authorities rounded up activists, “immediately afterwards we were approached by new people, sometimes even pensioners, prepared to continue with resistance.”

“All power is absurd, and absolute power is absolutely absurd,” an observer noted, describing the movement’s approach. It was a key insight, and one that the activists put to good use. They ridiculed the dictator. They made him look small. They forced him into traps of his own making such that any conceivable response on his part would undermine his credibility.

When news surfaced that the dictator planned to award himself the title of “national hero,” activists began handing out pins to street pedestrians that read, “I’m a national hero.” Their ensuing arrests made the regime look ridiculous.

Such antics were not just about having fun, although they certainly were that. Their larger purpose was strategic: to erode the dictator’s ability to intimidate. The activists’ relentless mockery helped strip away his omnipotent veneer, exposing him for the brittle coward that he was. As one leader explained, fear “disappears far faster than you can recreate it.”

The security forces, while prepared for violent resistance, were clueless when it came to the nonviolent sort. “The movement spread very quickly,” an officer recalled, “and its courage caused panic in the police.”

For the activists, spending a few days in jail went from a source of dread to a badge of honor. “Getting arrested was now the coolest thing you could do for your social life,” a movement leader affirmed.

The Election

In a bid to shore up his flagging support, the dictator announced early presidential elections.

Even in authoritarian regimes, elections still tend to matter. Autocrats need election victories to maintain the appearance of legitimacy. Yet, it defeats the purpose if the contest is an obvious sham with a predetermined winner. Typically, then, the elections are just free enough to leave the outcome uncertain—and this means that the autocrat might lose.

Of course, when they do lose, they seldom go quietly into the night.

And so it was with our dictator. Removing him in the election’s wake would require massive nonviolent resistance, a fact that the movement well understood. But to even get to that point, the opposition had to actually win.

The first task was to unite the country’s feckless and bitterly divided opposition parties. With that in mind, movement representatives convened a conference. Once assembled, they (literally) locked the party leaders in a room until they agreed on a common candidate.

When election day arrived, the opposition was prepared. Armed with an independent data feed connected to every polling station in the country, they were able to announce the result even before the government did. It turned out that the opposition candidate had won—decisively so.

The official results, to precisely no one’s surprise, skewed heavily in the dictator’s favor; it turned out that the government had simply made up its own numbers out of thin air.

The dictator had clearly lost. But he was not about to relinquish power. The question was whether he would get away with it.

When it came to guns and money, the dictator had the advantage. But the resistance had something better: people power.

Protests were called throughout the country. Coal miners went on strike. The resistance would not let up until the dictator was gone.

Wobbly Pillars

At this point, the dictator still had allies. The high court, for its part, issued a convoluted ruling validating his bid to remain in office.

But other supporters were beginning to waver. The head of the national church called on the dictator to concede. State media outlets refused to air government propaganda. In a show of support for striking employees, the manager of a coal mine which powered half the country resigned.

Few of these defectors acted from a sense of moral obligation. Instead, they saw the writing on the wall and wanted to save their skin. Put simply, they had a choice to make. They could stick with the boss and risk facing accountability in the event that he fell. Or they could switch sides while they had the chance and maybe—just maybe—keep their jobs and freedom under the new regime.

The logic was not lost on the dictator’s enforcers—and the resistance knew it. Speaking before throngs of his supporters, the opposition candidate extended an olive branch, proclaiming, “our message to the army and the police is that we are one.”

Cracks in the security apparatus were indeed beginning to show. Many police officers stood aside rather than follow orders to violently disperse the crowds. Others openly declared their refusal to obey.

The Strike

Mass demonstrations are great for broadcasting demands and forging solidarity. But their effects are mostly symbolic. To really destabilize a regime requires methods of noncooperation, especially strikes and boycotts.

To that end, and with the momentum squarely on its side, the opposition called a general strike. Workers stayed home. Schools and businesses closed. Protesters occupied the major highways, rendering them impassable. The country effectively shut down.

Betraying his growing vulnerability, the dictator responded by banning independent media, strikes, and highway closures. Arrest warrants were issued for opposition leaders and strike organizers. The head of the transport union was detained. An assassination list was drawn up that contained the names of 40 regime opponents.

If the goal was to scare off the resisters, it had the opposite effect.

At the dictator’s behest, a top general showed up at the country’s largest mine and threatened the employees to return to work. They laughed in his face. “We can either stay here four more days or four more years. It’s really a very simple choice,” one of them explained.

The next day, a special police unit tried to occupy the mine and expel the striking employees. But the workers refused to budge. Instead, they summoned help from their neighbors. Within hours, over 20,000 area residents descended on the mine. The hapless police, it turned out, were the ones who had to disperse.

The problem, from the dictator’s standpoint, was that fear had vanished. The whole point of having your own security force is to make a brutal example out of a few and thereby intimidate everyone else into submission. Now that nobody was intimidated, what was he going he do? Lock up half the country?

Endgame

A massive demonstration was called for what would turn out to be the regime’s penultimate day. Hundreds of thousands gathered in the capital. Thousands more blocked the roads leading into and out of the city. The objective was to mount a peaceful occupation of the parliament building and the state media outlet.

While the police guarding the parliament appeared imposing at first glance, they proved anything but. In negotiations during the preceding days, the opposition had secured their agreement to stand aside and let the protesters enter.

Over at the state media outlet, the police had not gotten the memo. Officers fired live ammunition into the crowd. This provoked a rare instance of violence by some of the protesters. A short-lived clash followed. A police station was set on fire.

Nevertheless, the dictator’s support continued to crumble. The next morning, the Russian foreign minister informed him that the Kremlin—until now, his key foreign backer—would not intervene on his behalf.

The same day, the high court reversed its earlier decision allowing the dictator to remain in office and instead declared the opposition candidate the rightful winner.

That evening, the army chief of staff, together with the dictator himself, met with the candidate and congratulated him on his victory. Just before midnight, the dictator appeared before the nation in a televised address, explaining that he had “just got official information” that the opposition candidate had won after all.

It was a futile and pathetic attempt to save face—and avoid future criminal prosecution.

In truth, a choice he portrayed as his own had been made for him—by his civil servants, his generals, his soldiers, his security forces, his state media, and other key allies who had once stood as pillars of his regime.

Forcing their hand, in turn, was a popular movement fueled by righteous anger over repression and election fraud.

Far from avoiding repression, the resisters invited it, knowing that they could harness the resulting public outrage to bring pressure to bear on the dictator’s key supporters.

They did so, moreover, without firing a single shot or persuading those supporters of the rightness of their cause. Using only nonviolent resistance, the movement coerced them to defect and, in turn, forced the dictator to step down.

To rid themselves of the ruler, in other words, the people withdrew their consent to be ruled.

From Practice to Theory

The events I just described are not made up. They took place in Serbia. The movement in question was called Otpor! (“Resistance!”). In October 2000, it brought Slobodan Milošević’s thirteen-year dictatorship to a fittingly undignified end.

There is a reason why I withheld their identities until now. The methods that Otpor! employed, and the dynamics they unleashed, are universal. They have been used to spectacular effect in countries rich and poor and on every continent—often under far harsher and more restrictive conditions than those detailed above.

In short, there is nothing special about Serbia, Milošević, or Otpor! As such, there is no reason why a similar movement could not achieve the same result in the United States.

Donald Trump already tried to steal one election. By all indications, he will try again in 2028. Thanks to the personal control he wields over key federal agencies, the military, and his own party, he might well succeed this time.

Neither Congress, the courts, nor the federal government will save us—unless, that is, they are pushed. And only one thing can do the pushing: a nonviolent resistance movement.

Next time, we will dive into the theory of how these movements work. We will also meet its author. That author is not Gandhi; it is a political scientist who, despite his obscurity, is arguably the most important scholar the field has ever produced.

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Sources

Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?” The New York Times, November 26, 2000.

Steven Erlanger, “Student Group Emerges as Major Milosevic Foe,” The New York Times, May 22, 2000.

David Holley, “Student Muckrakers Ready to Bulldoze Corrupt Politicians Yugoslavia,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2000.

Andrew Mueller, “Guerrillas Without Guns,” The Independent, August 13, 2005.

Joshua Paulson, “Removing the Dictator in Serbia—1996-2000,” in Gene Sharp, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20^th Century Practice and 21^st Century Potential (Boston: Porter Sargent, 2005), 315-40.

Eve-Ann Prentice, “Yugoslavia’s Youth Unite,” The Times, September 19, 2000.

Gillian Sandford, “Children of the Revolution,” The World Today 56, nos. 8/9 (August 2000).

Helena Smith, “Otpor: Rage of Innocents,” The Guardian, May 30, 2000.

Alessio Vinci and Jonathan Mann, “Student Movements Past and Present,” CNN International: Insight, May 29, 2000.

Sharon L. Wolchik and Valerie J. Bunce, Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries (New York: Cambridge, 2011), 85-113.

*With the exceptions of Paulson, “Removing…” and Wolchik and Bunce, Defeating…, all sources were accessed through the Factiva database, November 6, 2025.