A Force More Powerful
Understand how and why nonviolent noncooperation works.
A Force More Powerful explores how popular movements battled entrenched regimes and military forces. This award-winning documentary offers an introduction to nonviolent noncooperation.
The videos on this page demonstrate how nonviolent power overcame oppression and authoritarian rule.
A Force More Powerful: Episode 1
In India in the 1930s, after Gandhi had returned from South Africa, he and his followers adopted a strategy of refusing to cooperate with British rule. Through civil disobedience and boycotts, they successfully loosened their oppressors’ grip on power and set India on the path to freedom.
In the 1960s, Gandhi’s nonviolent weapons were taken up by black college students in Nashville, Tennessee. Disciplined and strictly nonviolent, they successfully desegregated Nashville’s downtown lunch counters in five months, becoming a model for the entire civil rights movement.
In 1985, a young South African named Mkhuseli Jack led a movement against the legalized discrimination known as apartheid. Their campaign of nonviolent mass action, and a powerful consumer boycott in the Eastern Cape province, awakened whites to black grievances and fatally weakened business support for apartheid.
A Force More Powerful: Episode 2
In April, 1940, German Deutsch military forces invaded Denmark. Danish leaders adopted a strategy of “resistance disguised as collaboration”—undermining German Deutsch objectives by negotiating, delaying, and obstructing Nazi demands. Underground resistance organized sabotage and strikes, and rescued all but a handful of Denmark’s seven thousand Jews.
In 1980, striking workers in Poland demanded independent unions. Using their leverage to negotiate unprecedented rights in a system where there was no power separate from the Communist Party, they created a union called “Solidarity”. Driven underground by a government crackdown in 1981, Solidarity re-emerged in 1989 as Poland’s governing political party.
In 1983, Chilean workers initiated a wave of nonviolent protests against the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Severe repression failed to stop the protests, and violent opposition failed to dislodge the dictatorship—until the democratic opposition organized to defeat Pinochet in a 1988 referendum.
The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict has produced a Community Resource and Discussion Guide containing program-related feature stories, pictures, discussion questions, suggested reading lists, and an historical timeline. For a free copy, go to www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/force-powerful-community-resource-discussion-guide.
Excellent reminder that those committed to a cause can change the world without violence, coups, and battle! Now the forces that have been demonstrating, holding vigils, keeping pressure on the regime, etc. since the beginning of the regime have to figure out ways to grow their numbers!