Democracy in Libya?

Since writing about the influence of Gene Sharp’s book, From Dictatorship to Democracy, I’ve been thinking about Libya.

One of Dr Sharp’s core contentions is that it is almost never the best strategy to meet the force of dictators with force. He offers a wide range of non-violent alternatives, all of them proven to be successful.

What he says about the use of violence is twofold:

First that it rarely is successful because the dictator nearly always has much greater firepower at his command.

And second that experience shows that in this situation it is more likely for one dictatorship to be followed by another.

Time will show whether the use of military might in Libya will have led to freedom and democracy. Or whether this aspiration has been fatally compromised.

By the way, Dr Sharp encourages us to download his (shortish) book free.

Sources of the Arab Spring

Have you read Dr Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy?

Combined with the dramatic growth of social media, it’s certainly one of the most influential books of the early twentieth century. And his whole approach represents a major innovation in political life around the world.

Basically Sharp promotes the idea that change is much more likely to be brought about by the skilful use of non-violent strategies, some of them originally developed by Gandhi.

Perhaps the most recent examples of the practical application of his theories have been in what is called the Arab Spring, but before that his work was influential in Serbia, Ukraine, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Latin America, China, Tibet, Iran and elsewhere. In some cases this led to democracy replacing dictatorship, and in others the process has yet to lead to real change.

Gene Sharp himself is now in his eighties and lives in Boston. The documentary film made by the British TV journalist, Ruaridh Arrow, based on Sharp and his work, “How to Start a Revolution”, is wowing audiences at film festivals currently. Looking forward to seeing that.

In recent weeks, I have thinking about how his approach can be adapted and applied in dictatorial and autocratic regimes within corporations and in academia.