Srdja Popovic Essay

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Srdja Popovic is named among Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers for “Inspiring Arab Springs protestors directly and indirectly.” Popovic is a founder of Otpor, the Serbian Youth Movement that toppled Slobodan Mibsevic. Now at CANVAS, he teaches a new form of protest that is changing the nature of peaceful revolutions. Popovic and his team travel all over the world to teach, training activists from Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon, among others. In his presentation “2011 Bad Year for Bad Guy’s”, Popovic spoke about people power, power in numbers, and the benefit of nonviolent struggles. Popovic spoke heavily on people power. Since 2004 CANVAS has worked with 46 different countries. Popvics statistics showed that there is a 53 percent chance for success during a nonviolent struggle, opposed to the 26 percent possibility of success during a violent revolution. The possibility of achieving democracy and stability during a nonviolent struggle is 42 percent. He raised the question, why are nonviolent struggles so dominant in producing democracies? The answer is the power of numbers. During violent struggles, only a small portion of the population can be recruited. Typically, violent protestors can only recruit young to middle aged adults. These individuals have to be physically capable of fighting if need be, and they have to be healthy. This creates a very limited selection pool and the possibility of a violent revolution obtaining support from majority of the population is very unlikely. The government is also more likely to deem violent protestors as being terrorists and will use national security as a way to end the revolution, using violent force if necessary. On the other hand, anyone can participate in a nonviolent struggle. Popovic elaborated more on nonviolent struggles and their ability to recruit due to the perception of fun with a good cause.

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