ISBN: 978-91-88061-70-6

Nils Petter Gleditsch

PRIO

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Gene Sharp (1928–2018) devoted his life to the study of nonviolent action. His was a household name in the peace movement. He had worked as an assistant editor of Peace News, he had been active (mostly behind the scenes) in the nuclear disarmament and civil disobedience movements in the UK in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and he had written influential pamphlets on the Norwegian teachers’ civil resistance during the German occupation and on the Welsh independence movement. His PhD dissertation, later published in three volumes, chronicled an unprecedented variety of forms and methods of nonviolent action. Yet, he was largely unknown to the wider public and even to many scholars in conflict and peace research. He also became increasingly disillusioned with the peace movement as well as academic peace research; in both cases he felt that they had all the answers without having figured out the right questions. At the end of the Cold War, some of his publications came to the attention of political movements in the Balkans and in the Middle East, and he was widely credited (sometimes too uncritically) with inspiring the Arab Spring and nonviolent resistance in several places. This edited volume contains balanced assessments of his work and his influence by the editor Craig Brown, Michael Randle, Andrew Rigby, Christine Schweitzer, and Brian Martin as well as a long interview conducted in 2009 by Jørgen Johansen and Stellan Vinthagen. Sharp’s classic work on the Norwegian teachers’ resistance is also reprinted in full. The book should be of interest not only to students of nonviolence but to a wider audience of readers interested in conflict and peace.