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Civil Resistance and Irregular Warfare Education

 

Col. Brian Petit, U.S. Army, Retired

 

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A twelve-man Special Forces team from the U.S. Army Special Operation Command

The 2014 Umbrella Movement emerged in Hong Kong as a tool for passive resistance and protest against the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress from the People’s Republic of China, which mandated a prescreened list of candidates for the 2017 election of Hong Kong’s chief executive. The political movement involved tens of thousands of protestors who then became the targets of Hong Kong police harassment and arrest. The movement adopted the umbrella as a symbol of passive resistance because umbrellas were used by protestors as shields against the pepper spray widely used by the police in an attempt to break up protests. (Photo by Pasu Au Yeung, Flickr)

To a soldier, the practice of nonviolent resistance might appear disconnected from the study of armed, violent warfare. Surprisingly, the opposite is true. An education on power, the use of force, and tactics achieving strategy is incomplete without an understanding of nonviolent means to undermine, coerce, or contest a more powerful foe. While civil resistance is not needed in all military curricula, its inclusion in an irregular warfare education is essential.

This article reasons why and recommends how to study nonviolent resistance for irregular warfare practitioners. First, civil resistance is defined and located within irregular warfare. Next, four reasons are given why nonviolent resistance deserves an enduring place in military education and irregular warfare programs. Finally, this article recommends what that education might look like for the military professional.

What Is Civil Resistance?

Civil resistance (used synonymously here with nonviolent resistance) is a “form of collective action that seeks to affect the social, political, or economic status quo without using violence or the threat of violence against people to do so.”1 Civil resistance is a form of confrontation, a mode of conflict, and, when planned properly, a campaign waged by organizations with leadership, training, discipline, and resiliency. Like armed warfare, civil resistance is underpinned by a developed philosophy, a doctrinal framework, and a broad set of tactics that aim to achieve strategy.2 Civil resistance is a form of subversion.3

Civil resistance is undertaken by collective action, absent the use of violence, that confronts, challenges, and confounds an adversary, thereby complicating standard response options. Tactics include boycotts, noncooperation, marches, strikes, sit-ins, emplacement of symbols, protests, hunger strikes, satire, and other subversive acts.4 The immediate goal is to undermine power structures and create dilemmas for governments, occupiers, or other targets. The long-term goal is to arrange these ways and means to achieve strategic ends.

Who Are the Noted Practitioners?

Well-known theorists and practitioners include Russian author Leo Tolstoy; Indian lawyer Mohandas K. Ghandi; Americans Henry David Thoreau, Gene Sharp, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr.; Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands; Serbian activist Srdja Popovic; Hong Kong student Joseph Wong; and Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot.5 These canonical resistors have no common heritage, origin story, or pedigree. They do, however, share a set of practices that have toppled governments and defeated oppressors. On a lower register, such campaigns have won concessions, deterred actions, and exposed abhorrent behaviors to wider audiences, amplifying a narrative and mobilizing minds to act for a cause.

Theorist Gene Sharp (1928–2018) coalesced the works of Gandhi, King, and others, and published The Politics of Nonviolent Action in 1973.6 Sharp’s three-volume work is to civil resistors what Carl von Clausewitz’s On War is to military practitioners: a cohesive theory, a methodological study, a chronicle of campaigns, and set of practices by which to understand and apply nonviolent power.7 Sharp’s crib sheet, “198 methods of nonviolent action,” is the operative playbook for resistors seeking nonviolent tactics.8 Sharp’s menu of tactics is often reduced to singular acts of momentary attention, such as bullhorn blowers, shout-downers, graffiti-taggers, and traffic-stoppers. Such performative acts signal frustration and indignation, hoping to alight like-minded activists but often providing a hazy pathway to effect change. These same tactics, if aligned with a strategic vision, executed by a capable organizational structure, and synchronized with purposeful follow-through, can form an irregular campaign.

Example: The Battle That Wanted to Be a Campaign, Occupy Wall Street

One attempted campaign was Occupy Wall Street, the 2011 sit-in protest that lasted thirty-eight days in Zuccotti Park, New York City.9 The grievance was the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States as symbolized by the wealthiest 1 percent juxtaposed against the remaining 99 percent.10 Occupy gained viral notoriety, caused disruptions, forged a novel cooperative model, and produced revolutionary appeals to remedy this wealth imbalance. In amplifying this grievance and igniting similar protests, Occupy was a success. Strategically, Occupy failed in that it could not forge a cohesive strategy with achievable objectives.11 The movement did not transfer anti-elitist sentiment into an enduring campaign. After thirty-eight days in an increasingly unhygienic and disruptive tent city astride Wall Street, the New York Police Department dismantled the protest in a predawn raid.12 In military terms, Occupy could be described as a battle briefly won, but a war conclusively lost.

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The U.S. Army defines irregular warfare as ‘the overt, clandestine, and covert employment of military and non-military capabilities across multiple domains by state and non-state actors through methods other than military domination of an adversary, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare.’

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Civil Resistance and Irregular Warfare

The civil resistance definition, when placed next to the U.S. Army or the joint force definition of irregular warfare, shows the likeness. The U.S. Army defines irregular warfare as “the overt, clandestine, and covert employment of military and non-military capabilities across multiple domains by state and non-state actors through methods other than military domination of an adversary, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare.”13 The Department of Defense’s irregular warfare definitions, past and present, contain four common components: populations, power, coercion, and nonstandard methods.14 These anchor points of irregular warfare are nearly identical to the accepted pillars of civil resistance.

Civil resistance is a method of irregular warfare. Despite its nonviolent approach, these campaigns are often met with violence, suppression, or repression. Thus, civil resistance sits in that definitional gray area: it does not employ the tactics of violence, but it reliably triggers violent countertactics. No matter the categorization of civil resistance, it is the most frequent, most distributed, and, arguably, the most effective form of asymmetric action.15 Civil resistance often finds opportunities where there is limited political operating space and where controlling authorities regularly use brutal suppression methods.16 Even if the U.S. military is not the developer or deliverer of this type of power, ignoring or misunderstanding this energy has proven fatal to many great powers, iron-fisted governments, and competent security forces.

Why Does Civil Resistance Belong in a Military Education?

The study of civil resistance, often called “people power,” belongs in an irregular warfare education for four reasons. First, nonviolent resistance is an alternative to or complementary of combined arms power. Second, the U.S. relative combat power advantage over a growing number of adversaries is shrinking, thus making unconventional, and less costly approaches, more useful. Third, U.S. allies and partners are building nonviolent forms of power into their state resistance plans. Finally, examining Chinese, Russian, or Iranian countermeasures to civil resistance gives us insights into their psychology, methods, and vulnerabilities. Each is discussed below.

An alternative form of power. One promise of irregular warfare is to deliver nonstandard forms of power against the vulnerabilities of adversaries. In pursuit of this goal, the data on nonviolent resistance is striking. In a comprehensive and ongoing study compiled by Harvard researcher Erica Chenoweth, nonviolent resistance movements with maximalist aims (i.e., overthrow, expel) against governments or occupiers is statistically more successful than armed violence.17 This research should interest military strategists and tactical operators whose primary task is to win with force or the threat of force as one of many means to do so.

Chenoweth’s dataset contains 627 revolutionary campaigns from 1900 to 2019. Over 50 percent of the nonviolent revolutions succeeded, where 26 percent of the violent campaigns achieved their goals.18 Though revolution might not be the aim for readers of this article, weaker powers have consistently and successfully contested stronger powers with nonviolent campaigns.

Notably, nonviolent resistance movements have increased in frequency in the last fifteen years yet show a markedly reduced success rate.19 Chenowith and other researchers point to several trends: challenged governments have co-opted the nonviolence playbook, state “smart repression” tools and strategies are pervasive and technologically advanced, COVID-19 restrictions allowed governments to exert crackdowns in the name of public health and safety, and the “post-truth” era has muddied facts that has reduced the power of nonviolence movements to use truth and justice as a foundation.20

Examples of superpowers and despotic governments yielding to nonviolent movements demonstrate that civil resistance is not a feeble alternative or an inferior method used only when armed violence is infeasible. The historical record suggests that the employment of nonviolent resistance, whether successful or not, is a fixed component of war, irregular warfare, and the ongoing tussle between people and those in power. For these reasons, military planners should be grounded in the fundamentals of civil resistance to understand this power and to locate its impact within enemy and friendly approaches.

The disintegrating combat power advantage of the United States. Second, the United States lacks sufficient military power to contest the growing aggregation of global threats. Two major theater wars or a series of roiling conflicts would rapidly exhaust U.S. military resources. In such a scenario, national leaders and policymakers would seek options to deter, defend, contest, or delay on vulnerable fronts. Among the irregular options could be support to nonviolent disruptors possibly tied to disenfranchised populations, agitated social groups, or third-party spoilers.

The idea that the U.S. Department of Defense would purposefully engage in nonviolent, social-movement type resistance is controversial. Structurally, U.S. national leadership would decree whether the U.S. military, the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, or some other federal agency could (or should) engage in forms of power that could resemble political chicanery. This is warranted. The United States has a checkered history in tinkering with political movements to achieve national security aims.21

One successful example of U.S. support to a nonviolent movement is the covert support to the Polish Solidarity organization in the 1980s. Solidarity (Solidarinosc), a labor organization movement, challenged the communist Polish and Soviet governments with a yearslong wave of strikes, boycotts, marches, and protests.22 Solidarity ultimately cracked the Polish Communist government and stymied an effective Soviet response. The stridently anticommunist Reagan administration was wary of contaminating this authentic Polish movement with “U.S. fingerprints.”23 Thus, the United States opted to provide covert, nonlethal support. It worked. Hidden-hand U.S. monetary support helped keep the movement active, assisted in keeping striking workers solvent, and indirectly supported nonviolent underground activities such as printing presses and radio broadcasts.24 Nonviolence, it can be argued, fueled the tipping point that won the Cold War.

U.S. allies are preparing civil resistance to contest adversaries. Third, a high number of NATO allies have embraced this form of resistance and have formally incorporated it into their national defense strategies.25 This is not conceptual or theoretical; it is an actual campaign pillar. Its form and function are not tightly scripted, and rehearsals can be impractical. In this way, the use of civil resistance is generally not deterministic in war plans. It is instead the task of a trained cadre and informed citizenry to respond to enemy actions and exploit situational vulnerabilities.

This ambiguity of operational employment brings advantages and disadvantages. With no prescripted templates, putative civil resistors are difficult for enemy forces to identify, template, and target. If attacked, civil resistance is a form of power that changes rapidly, adjusts unpredictably, and contorts itself well to new realities. Leaders quickly replace leaders, fronts rapidly open and close, and innovative methods emerge. A disadvantage is that a military plan cannot squarely account for what this power can and might accomplish against a determined foe. With such uncertainty, it is hard to war game or ascribe a value to something so formless. This haziness can lead to nonviolent methods being reduced, dismissed, or simply forgotten.

 

We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people ...

—The “Freedom Charter” of South Africa, 26 June 1955

 
A photograph of young activist Nelson Mandela taken in Umtata, South Africa, in 1937

A photograph of young activist Nelson Mandela taken in Umtata, South Africa, in 1937. (Photographer unknown)

>Nelson Mandela prepares to give a lecture 2 November 2009 at the London School of Economics titled “Africa and Its Position in the World.

Nelson Mandela prepares to give a lecture 2 November 2009 at the London School of Economics titled “Africa and Its Position in the World.” (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Mandela the Disruptor

Nelson Mandela was a lifelong activist against the apartheid government of South Africa, and he was one of the key leaders responsible for the final dismantlement of apartheid and the establishment of South Africa’s first democratically elected government. In contrast to other Black African movement groups espousing the mass expulsion of white South Africans mainly through violence, he embraced the concept of a multiracial front employing a diversity of approaches, including a mixture of organized pacifist resistance, legal challenges to the system from within, organized pressure campaigns involving foreign governments and cultural figures from outside, and at times armed insurgency, a conviction for which he spent twenty-seven years in prison. He was an avid reader who drew his ideas from many sources, including concepts dealing with active resistance against established governments by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and Mao Zedong. In formulating his personal philosophical creed shaping his actions, he stated that “he found [himself] strongly drawn to the idea of a classless society which, to [his] mind, was similar to traditional African culture where life was shared and communal.”1 In May 1994, he became the country’s first black head of state and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election. During his presidency, his government focused on dismantling apartheid and fostering racial reconciliation.

  1. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, Volume I: 1918–1962 (New York: Little, Brown, 1994), 172.

 

Smaller countries such as Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia acknowledge that Russian forces could quickly penetrate their borders and partially occupy their sovereign territories before NATO could muster a full-throated response. Such countries envision violent and nonviolent responses, acting in tandem, to block, disrupt, delay, or defeat advancing Russian formations.26 A Latvian citizen readiness pamphlet instructs on actions to take in the event of an enemy occupation: “If you choose to resist, you have the right to exercise civil disobedience, i.e., non-compliance with the laws passed by the occupation forces.”27 If our most geographically vulnerable allies have this in their defense schemes, it follows that U.S. military practitioners should have a fundamental understanding of this form of power to improve our interoperability.

Insights into our adversaries’ strategies, methods, and vulnerabilities. Finally, civil resistance provides insight into adversaries’ playbooks. Contrary to their stated position, the Russian Federation leadership does not fear NATO invasion; rather, they fear the “color revolutions” that have challenged, disrupted, and toppled autocracies.28 The Georgian Rose Revolution (2003), Ukrainian Orange Revolution (2004), and Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity (“Euromaidan” 2013) are some of the movements that have discomfited Russian autocrats.

Civil resistance reveals much about the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The study of Chinese joint force operations is said to be challenging because China has not engaged in full-spectrum war since 1979.29 However, the PRC has repeatedly combatted nonviolent movements at home and abroad. Thus, valuable observational learning comes from how the PRC contests nonviolent resistance.

Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Gregory Williams, U.S. Army

Spc. Tony Kosgei (right), a civil affairs specialist with Company C, 418th Civil Affairs Battalion, and Master Sgt. Marius Tudorache, a civil-military cooperation (CIMIC) NCO with the 1st CIMIC, Romanian Land Forces, conduct a key leader engagement with role players during Combined Resolve 18 on 4 May 2023 at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center, Hohenfels Training Area, Germany. Combined Resolve 18 broke through systems, processes, and human and linguistic barriers, allowing partners and allies to conduct operations as one team. (Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Gregory Williams, U.S. Army)

The Umbrella Movement of Hong Kong citizens contesting the Chinese takeover is a revealing “action-reaction-counteraction” case. Initiated in 2014 by Hong Kong citizens, umbrellas were used to defend against the use of pepper spray to disperse protestors. The umbrella soon became a symbol of a population resisting unwanted Chinese-imposed laws on Hong Kong.30 The movement, a widely inclusive group of citizens and organizations, reached its zenith on 16 June 2019 when approximately two million of the seven million inhabitants of Hong Kong’s population took to the streets; often, but not always, peacefully.31 Their stated goal was to force China to accept the status quo terms of Hong Kong self-governance and release incarcerated citizens.

The Umbrella Movement demonstrated the ingenuity and brilliance of Hong Kong resistors contesting a totalitarian takeover of Hong Kong’s political, judicial, and commercial sectors. It also showed the strategic patience and tactical acumen of the PRC-aligned Hong Kong leadership at the contact layer of the crisis. Rather than reflexive-response brutality, the PRC absorbed these protests, suitably contained them, and used violence more selectively than past efforts.32 The PRC then followed with a multiyear campaign (ongoing) to restrict, restrain, arrest, and incarcerate the movement’s leading lights.33 The PRC won—or won this round—via a campaign of asphyxiation. They knitted together surveillance, lawfare, information, suppression of political action, the shuttering of independent media outlets, and exhibited tactical patience. Hong Kong showed how China used population and resource control measures to manage restive populations, eradicate dissent, and dodge international scorn.34 For observers, Hong Kong reveals a possible PRC approach to subjugate Taiwan should the PRC achieve political inroads on the island-nation that favors such a strategy.

What Might a Civil Resistance Education Look Like?

If a curriculum merits civil resistance modules, what might that look like? The basics of nonviolent resistance can be taught in a two-hour lesson reinforced by the conceptualizing and modeling of civil resistance. This can be done in conjunction with maneuver-type warfare in tabletop war games or planning exercises. While more time is required for a complete education, professional military education institutions and qualifying courses already face tough challenges on adding or cutting topics central to tactical competency. Thus, the two-hour recommendation is practically minded and feasible for most education institutions, units, or study programs.

In 2018, I piloted the National Resistance Course at the direction of the Joint Special Operations University and in conjunction with Special Operations Command Europe. This five-day course educates how states incorporate the principles of resistance into their defense strategies and structures. I have since delivered this education to over 2,500 students in the United States and eleven countries with roughly 65 percent of those attendees from special operations communities.35 This has led me to two observations on civil resistance.

The first observation is that two hours is sufficient to introduce nonviolent principles, contextualize the meaning for military and civil practitioners, and to provide the basic tools to analyze movements. In exercises, students are required to plan for civil resistance as part of a campaign to become familiar with the principles and to work with the form.36 Students spend roughly four hours out of fifty-two total hours (classroom and homework), or 7 percent of their time, contending with civil resistance. Post course, this education conditions students to be critical observers of any number of nonviolent protests that rise to their attention. In this way, the ability to analyze movements becomes a habit of mind outside of military education and four hours can soon become “four hundred” hours.

My second observation is that the U.S. Army civil affairs and psychological operations communities have embraced civil resistance as a part of their professional competencies. While this article stops short of recommending a proponent for civil resistance, these two branches are the natural and logical focal points for the development of civil resistance education and expertise. There are some pockets of excellence in these communities, but admittedly, civil resistance is still a hit-and-miss proposition in their formal education pathways.

Where to Start?

For military minds, Thomas E. Ricks’s Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968, is an excellent start.37 Ricks, a former war correspondent and military historian, frames the civil rights movement in a military context that overlays terms common to both: small-unit cohesion, deep operations, disciplined cadres, lines of communication, and decisive points. For those in the profession of arms, this book will illuminate the strategy, training, battles, advances, and retreats that are as harrowing as any war chronicle published. Ricks’s analysis comes with the stinging reminder of the injustices and cruelties that compelled such a campaign to develop on U.S. soil.

How to Start a Revolution is a 2011 documentary that profiles Gene Sharp and his work.38 His controversial legacy should not detract from his analysis of the practice of nonviolent resistance. Will Irwin’s How Civil Resistance Works (and Why it Matters to SOF) is an exceptional source for special operations forces.39 For planners, Ivan Marovic’s “The Path of Most Resistance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Planning Nonviolent Campaigns” is an eye-opening look into campaign design.40 Finally, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s research project “Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies” offers a multivolume work on all forms of resistance.41

Conclusion

A military education that includes irregular warfare ought to include the study of civil resistance. Deep expertise may not be required for all military professionals, but an introductory grasp of the theory and practice of nonviolent resistance is crucial in irregular domains. Civil resistance is powerful and omnipresent, whether employed for or against one’s objectives. We know that our adversaries fear it, anyone can access it, our allies train to it, and so soldiers must understand it.

Notes

  1. Erica Chenoweth, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 1–6.
  2. Ibid., 6–28.
  3. Summer D. Agan et al., Science of Resistance (Fort Liberty, NC: U.S. Army Special Operations Command [USASOC], 2019), 6–7, https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/typology-resistance.pdf.
  4. Gene Sharp, The Politics of Non-Violent Action (Boston: Porter Sergeant, 1973), 1–25, https://www.aeinstein.org/on-nonviolent-action.
  5. Thomas Merton, ed., Gandhi on Non-Violence: A Selection from the Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: New Directions, 1964), 3–4; Chenoweth, Civil Resistance, 95–100.
  6. Sharp’s The Politics of Non-Violent Action is a three-volume work.
  7. Joshua Ammons and Christopher J. Coyne, “Gene Sharp: The Clausewitz on Nonviolent Warfare,” The Independent Review 23, no. 1 (Summer 2018): 149–56.
  8. “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” Albert Einstein Institute, accessed 6 September 2024, https://www.aeinstein.org/198-methods-of-nonviolent-action.
  9. Saget Bedel and Archie Tse, “How Occupy Wall Street Turned Zuccotti Park into a Protest Camp,” New York Times (website), 5 October 2011, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/05/nyregion/how-occupy-wall-street-turned-zuccotti-park-into-a-protest-camp.html.
  10. Ezra Klein, “Who Are the 99%?,” Washington Post (website), 4 October 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/who-are-the-99-percent/2011/08/25/gIQAt87jKL_blog.html.
  11. Chris Cillizza, “What Occupy Wall Street Meant (Or Didn’t) to Politics,” Washington Post (website), 13 September 2013.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/09/17/what-occupy-wall-street-meant-or-didnt-to-politics/.
  12. James Barron and Colin Moynihan, “City Reopens Park After Protesters Are Evicted,” New York Times (website), 15 November 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/nyregion/police-begin-clearing-zuccotti-park-of-protesters.html.
  13. Field Manual 3-0, Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office, October 2022), 1-9.
  14. Ibid.; Philip Wasielewski, “The Constant Fight: Intelligence Activities, Irregular Warfare, Political Warfare,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, 20 June 2023, https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/06/the-constant-fight-intelligence-activities-irregular-warfare-and-political-warfare/.
  15. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1–26. Updated statistics on Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) dataset.
  16. David H. Ucko and Thomas A. Marks, Crafting Strategy for Irregular Warfare: A Framework for Analysis and Action (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, July 2020), 34.
  17. Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works, 1–32.
  18. Erica Chenoweth, “Can Nonviolent Resistance Survive Covid-19?,” Journal of Human Rights 21, no. 3 (2022): 304–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2022.2077085.
  19. Ibid., 308–13.
  20. Ibid., 306–15.
  21. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Penguin Random House, 2008), xix–xxii.
  22. Seth G. Jones, A Covert Action: Reagan, the CIA, and the Cold War Struggle in Poland (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 274–97.
  23. Ibid., 128, 139, 157.
  24. Ibid., 127–29, 200–5.
  25. Anna Binnendijk and Marta Kepe, Civil-Resistance in the Baltic States: Historical Precedents and Current Capabilities (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2021), 77–111, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA198-3.html.
  26. Ibid., 76–114.
  27. Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Latvia, 72 Hours: What to Do in Case of a Crisis (Riga, LV: Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Latvia, 2022), 15, https://www.sargs.lv/sites/default/files/2022-04/72hours.pdf.
  28. Samual Charap et al., Russia Grand Strategy: Rhetoric and Reality (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2021), 24–26.
  29. Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 70–79.
  30. Victoria Tin-bor Hui, “Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement: Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Protests and Beyond,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 2 (2015): 111–21, https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2015.0030.
  31. Jin Wu, K. K. Rebecca Lai, and Alan Yuhas, “Six Months of Hong Kong Protests: How Did We Get Here?,” New York Times (website), 18 November 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/world/asia/hong-kong-protests-arc.html.
  32. Ibid.
  33. Kari Lindberg, “Activist Joshua Wong to Plead Guilty in Hong Kong’s Biggest Security Case,” Time (website), 18 August 2022, https://time.com/6206947/joshua-wong-hong-kong-trial/.
  34. Mike Ives, “Hong Kong’s New Security Legislation Took Decades to Pass. Here’s What to Know,” New York Times (website), 19 March 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/world/asia/hong-kong-security-law-article-23-explained.html.
  35. “National Resistance Course,” Joint Special Operations University, accessed 6 September 2024, https://jsou.edu/Courses/Index/334.
  36. Paul J. Tompkins Jr., Jonathon B. Cosgrove, and Erin N. Hahn, Conceptual Typology of Resistance (Fort Liberty, NC: USASOC, 2019), https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/typology-resistance.pdf; Agan et al., Science of Resistance.
  37. Thomas E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), 1–36.
  38. How to Start a Revolution, directed by Ruaridh Arrow (London: TVF International, 2011), 85 min.
  39. Will Irwin and Charles Cleveland, How Civil Resistance Works (And Why It Matters to SOF) (Tampa, FL: Joint Special Operations University Press, 2019), https://jsou.edu/Press/PublicationDashboard/32.
  40. Ivan Marovic, The Path of Most Resistance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Planning Nonviolent Campaigns (Washington, DC: International Center of Nonviolent Conflict, 2018), 1–14, https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/path-most-resistance-step-by-step-guide-planning-nonviolent-campaigns/.
  41. USASOC, Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies, 5 vols. (Fort Liberty, NC: USASOC, 2019), https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html.

 

Col. Brian Petit, U.S. Army, retired, educates, writes, and consults on special operations, irregular warfare, and strategy. A former Special Forces officer, Petit served in the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and Europe. He is an adjunct for the Joint Special Operations University.

 

Army University Press Invites Your Attention

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Army leaders must ensure their units maintain the long-term nonpartisan ethic that has been at the historical core of the profession of arms since the time of George Washington. This chapter by Dr. Heidi A. Urben provides a workshop for leadership at the company and battalion level. A version of “Instilling the Nonpartisan Ethic at the Unit Level” will be included in the forthcoming Army University Press anthology, The Civ-Mil Primer, edited by Col. Todd Schmidt and Dr. Trent Lythgoe. It is available online at https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Books/Browse-Books/iBooks-and-EPUBs/Nonpartisan-Ethic/.

 

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