There seem to be some steps missing in the middle here. The current outline seems to be:
Small symbolic acts of resistance
Common knowledge of resistance
???
An actual organization able and ready to take power after the regime collapses, whose rallying cry is “democracy!” rather than some other popular thing
???
An actually democratic government (i.e. not just a dictator/council whose rallying cry is “democracy!”)
???
A stable actually-democratic government (i.e. a majority faction or one-time election winner doesn’t just permanently lock everyone else out of the political process)
… those question marks seem to be in all the places which I’d expect to be hardest—i.e. the places where I’d expect revolutionaries to most often fail.
I’m curious whether there are any cases where those three happened without foreign help.
If you are in a country like Serbia, maybe it’s reasonable to expect that in case you create a power vacccum NATO will make sure that those three happen?
In Blueprint for Revolution, the Serbian author complains about NATO intervention in Serbia because violent outside intervention rallied people toward the local strongman (and because American bombers almost killed his noncombatant mother).
There are two ways to see it. One is to say that the NATO made a strategic mistake. They should have funded resistance organizations but they end up bombing Serbia which was bad for moral.
The other would be to say that NATO intervention is generally a problem. If he argues that, then how does he think those three can work in practice? Does he say anything about that?
Srđa Popović′s book is built around the idea that peoples can and should decide their own fate. He doesn’t have much to say about NATO except that he didn’t like it when NATO bombing his country because it killed people and increased support for the regime.
Funding resistance organizations has an entirely separate problem where it makes the resistance groups look like foreign stooges. Srđa Popović trains resistance organizations worldwide. After his group finishes training people, they shift to a deliberately hands-off approach because they want local movements to be genuinely local.
There seem to be some steps missing in the middle here. The current outline seems to be:
Small symbolic acts of resistance
Common knowledge of resistance
???
An actual organization able and ready to take power after the regime collapses, whose rallying cry is “democracy!” rather than some other popular thing
???
An actually democratic government (i.e. not just a dictator/council whose rallying cry is “democracy!”)
???
A stable actually-democratic government (i.e. a majority faction or one-time election winner doesn’t just permanently lock everyone else out of the political process)
… those question marks seem to be in all the places which I’d expect to be hardest—i.e. the places where I’d expect revolutionaries to most often fail.
I’m curious whether there are any cases where those three happened without foreign help.
If you are in a country like Serbia, maybe it’s reasonable to expect that in case you create a power vacccum NATO will make sure that those three happen?
In Blueprint for Revolution, the Serbian author complains about NATO intervention in Serbia because violent outside intervention rallied people toward the local strongman (and because American bombers almost killed his noncombatant mother).
There are two ways to see it. One is to say that the NATO made a strategic mistake. They should have funded resistance organizations but they end up bombing Serbia which was bad for moral.
The other would be to say that NATO intervention is generally a problem. If he argues that, then how does he think those three can work in practice? Does he say anything about that?
Srđa Popović′s book is built around the idea that peoples can and should decide their own fate. He doesn’t have much to say about NATO except that he didn’t like it when NATO bombing his country because it killed people and increased support for the regime.
Funding resistance organizations has an entirely separate problem where it makes the resistance groups look like foreign stooges. Srđa Popović trains resistance organizations worldwide. After his group finishes training people, they shift to a deliberately hands-off approach because they want local movements to be genuinely local.