In a long life of scholarship and dissent, Gene Sharp has been imprisoned and persecuted, but never silenced. His ideas continue to inspire resistance movements across the world.

Gene Sharp is not a typical pacifist. When I used to lecture, I would always get complaints from the pacifists, says the academic, who turns 85 this month. They would say I wasnt pure. They said that what I was proposing was still conflict. Military people often understood him better. A retired US army colonel, Robert Helvey, heard Sharp lecture 20 years ago and persuaded him to visit Burma, where rebels asked Sharp to give them advice.

He wrote a pamphlet. I didnt know Burma well, he recalls. So I had to write generically: if a movement wanted to bring a dictatorship to an end, how would they do it? That pamphlet, From Dictatorship to Democracy (1993), contained the idea for which Sharp is now known all over the world that power is held only by the consent of the people over whom it is exercised, and that consent can be withdrawn. All regimes depend on certain pillars of support and, with a proper strategy, resisters can remove those pillars non-violently.

The book was originally published in English and Burmese. And I thought that was it, Sharp says. But it went on display in a bookshop in Bangkok. From there, nobody knows exactly how it spread. But it did everywhere. Im still amazed. It didnt spread because of propaganda or some sales pitch but because people found it usable, and important.

I had no idea how useful it would be, confirms Srdja Popovic, a leader of Otpor, the movement that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. Others have described the effect of reading Sharps work as mind-blowing, because it showed that what had seemed impossible might not be impossible after all.

For nearly 20 years, From Dictatorship to Democracy circulated clandestinely in as many as 40 countries. It was being printed in Moscow when the FSB (the successor to the KGB) raided the printer. It later went on sale at two independent Russian bookshops both of which, remarkably, soon caught fire.

The British film-maker Ruaridh Arrow first heard about Sharp while covering Ukraines Orange Revolution. He decided to find out more, and the result of his research was a film, How to Start a Revolution, which has been shown in more than 22 countries and became an underground hit with the Occupy movement.

Now Sharps teachings are winning interest from the mainstream, too. From Dictatorship to Democracy finally had its official publication in the UK. The Archbishop of Canterbury invited Sharp to meet bishops from around the world. And the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues asked him to address MPs, peers and senior civil servants at the House of Commons. The room was packed thanks to a crowd of Occupy activists and he received a standing ovation. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and early last month in the Swedish Parliament he was presented with the so-called Alternative Nobel, the Right Livelihood Award.

After a lifetime of lonely academic toil, Sharp is suddenly finding that people all over the world are ready to hear his theory of power and how to seize it. This is a very strange experience, he says. But is the acclaim overblown? The Occupy movement has largely fizzled out and the Arab spring has not been quite the success that people hoped it would be. Is he worried that his reputation will fall again? I dont give a damn about my reputation. The point is that bringing down one regime does not produce political nirvana. You still have tough times ahead. I have always been very clear about that.

But people used to say non-violence cant work. After Tunisia and Egypt, people can no longer deny that non-violent regime change is possible. The old theory of a just war is that there must be no viable alternative. I think thats false now. Its no longer a theological question its an empirical question. He quotes Kenneth Boulding: That which is, is possible. The breakthrough has happened.

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Gene Sharp: The Machiavelli of non-violence

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