Gene Sharp is the most prominent advocate of this perspective.
Nonviolence can also be more effective than violence for those who do have armies. Many of the points below apply.
Stephen Zunes, “Unarmed insurrections against authoritarian governments in the Third World: a new kind of revolution,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1994, pp. 403-426.
Some pacifists oppose social defence because it perpetuates the idea of the enemy. They believe instead that the goal should be a cooperative society. Supporters of social defence accept that it is impossible (or even undesirable) to eliminate conflict and argue instead that the goal should be to wage conflict using nonviolent rather than violent methods.
Pierre Dubois, Sabotage in Industry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). For numerous examples see Martin Sprouse with Lydia Ely (eds.), Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief and Revenge (San Francisco: Pressure Drop Press, 1992).
The most notable are David F. Noble, Progress without People: In Defense of Luddism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1993) and the radical environmental group Earth First!, for which key books are Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood (eds.), Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching (Tucson, AZ: Ned Ludd Books, 1988, second edition) and Earth First! Direct Action Manual (Eugene, OR: DAM Collective, 1997). See also The Black Cat Sabotage Handbook (Eugene, OR: Graybill, n.d.) and the magazine Processed World.
See for example Per Herngren, Path of Resistance: The Practice of Civil Disobedience (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1993); Liane Ellison Norman, Hammer of Justice: Molly Rush and the Plowshares Eight (Pittsburgh: PPI Books, 1989). I thank Andreas Speck for helpful comments concerning sabotage.
Giliam de Valk in cooperation with Johan Niezing, Research on Civilian-Based Defence (Amsterdam: SISWO, 1993). The background to this book is described in chapter 10.
Johan Galtung, “On the strategy of nonmilitary defense: some proposals and problems,” in Johan Galtung, Peace, War and Defense. Essays in Peace Research, Volume Two (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers, 1976), pp. 378-426, 466-472, quote at pp. 390-391.
R. W. Fogg, “A technical equivalent of war,” in H. Chestnut (ed.), Contributions of Technology to International Conflict Resolution (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1986), pp. 113-120.
Gene Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1980), pp. 403-404.
I thank Ellen Elster for this point. See Berenice Carroll, “Peace research: the cult of power,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 16, No. 4, December 1972, pp. 585-616.
