Scholar who provided underpinnings to international peace movement
Gene Sharp, a scholar and onetime conscientious objector who wrote penetratingly about civil disobedience, was often called “the Machiavelli of nonviolence” and who became an influential backstage figure in international peace movements from Serbia to Egypt, died Jan. 28 at his home in Boston. He was 90.
The death was confirmed by Jamila Raqib, executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution, a Bostonbased nonprofit Mr. Sharp founded in 1983 to advance “the study and use of strategic nonviolent action in conflicts throughout the world.” The cause was not disclosed.
From his academic perches at Harvard and elsewhere and his prolific writing about the peace movement’s dynamics, theories and strategies, Mr. Sharp helped provide the intellectual energy accessed by activists confronting dictators and strongmen around the world. His books, including the three-volume “The Politics of Nonviolent Action” (1973), were translated into dozens of languages.
Mr. Sharp, who was inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other proponents of civil disobedience, saw himself as a pragmatist who advised specific actions such as “sick-ins,” mockery of authoritarian rulers and declining to use officially sanctioned currency. He disliked being called a pacifist or a “peace researcher,” telling Progressive magazine such descriptions were “quite naive” and that conflict was often preordained and necessary.
That did not mean engaging in conventional warfare and other violent tactics. “Why should you choose to fight with your enemy’s best weapons?” he told National Public Radio. “That doesn’t make sense at all. Nonviolent struggle is a kind of peoplepower. You have a much greater chance of succeeding by you choosing the means that they’re not equipped to deal with effectively.”
He wrote of nonviolence as an “alternative weapons system” and described it a “means of combat, as in war. It involves the matching of forces and the waging of ‘battles,’ it requires wise strategy and tactics, employs numerous ‘weapons’ and demands of its ‘soldiers’ courage, discipline and sacrifice.”
Among those taking to heart his teachings were Yugoslav students in 1998 and their Serbian group Otpor (Resistance). With no tanks, bombs or guns, but well armed with 5,000 copies of Mr. Sharp’s 1993 volume “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” they found moral support and a road map for their cause.
Slobodan Milosevic, the so-called Butcher of the Balkans, had managed to cling to power despite NATO bombing of Serbia and other efforts to dislodge him from power. Violent attacks by outside forces only empowered Milosevic’s repressive leadership and justified a crackdown on opposition movements like Otpor. It was only after Milosevic tried to cling to power after he lost an election in September 2000 that Otpor saw its moment — with displays of civil disobedience and mockery that were creditedwith helping topple him.
Milosevic was removed from office that October and the following April was arrested on charges of genocide and war crimes. He died before a verdict was reached. In two years of organized resistance, no Otpor member was killed.
Some peace activists saw the hand of Mr. Sharp’s writings in uprisings from Burma to Ukraine and resistance struggles from Latin America to Africa. Regimes in Syria, Iran and Venezuela have reportedly accused him of being on the payroll of the CIA and the White House. (He denied any connection to anygovernments.)
His books were said to have had an impact on leaders of the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Mr. Sharp said perhaps the most important lesson embraced by the young activists, whose persistence led to Mr. Mubarak’s resignation, was loss of fear.
Gene Elmer Sharp was born Jan. 21, 1928, in North Baltimore, Ohio, and spent his high school years in Columbus. His father was a traveling Protestant minister, his mother a teacher. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University, he received a master’s degree in sociology from Ohio State in 1951.
He moved to New York andworked as an elevator operator and a guide for a blind social worker. “I wasn’t interested in having a real job,” he told the New York Times in 2012. “I wanted subway fare and food and to research Gandhi.”
He protested his conscription for military service during the Korean War. Arrested and convicted as a conscientious objector, he served more than nine months in the Danbury, Connecticut, federal prison. He passed the time reading.
Aware that physicist Albert Einstein was a pacifist, Mr. Sharp wrote to him at Princeton University for his views on conscientious objection. The scientist wrote to the 25-year-old dissident: “I earnestly admire you for your moral strength and can only hope although I really do not know that I would have acted as you did had I found myself in the same situation.”
Uplifted by the reply, Mr. Sharp, then working on his book “Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power,” persuaded Mr. Einstein to write the foreword. It came out in 1960, five years after Mr. Einstein’s death. In the intervening years, Mr. Sharp worked in the United States for pacifist A.J. Muste and spent a period in Norway, studying the country’s nonviolent resistance movement against a pro-fascist regime during World War II. Some citizens, he noted, put a potato or toothpick on their clothes as a silent protest.
Mr. Sharp received a doctorate in political theory from the University of Oxford in 1968. He taught political science and sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, among other colleges. Among his honors was
2012 Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called
Alternative Nobel. He was the subject of Ruaridh Arrow’s 2011 documentary “How to Start a Revolution.”