ABSTRACT
Gandhi and King were masters at the art of social change and brilliant nonviolent strategists. They were more practitioners than theorists, though, and neither attempted systematically to analyze and catalogue the most important principles of social action. That task was taken up by others, most notably Gene Sharp, whose Politics of Nonviolent Action remains the classic. Martin Luther King Jr. described power as the ability to achieve purpose the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. Sharp divides the noncooperation category into three subcategories-economic, social, and political-and further subdivides the economic category into strikes and boycotts, as outlined here: Methods of Nonviolent Action. The last stage in the progression toward more forceful action is nonviolent intervention. This category includes actions to create alternative institutions, to replace the power of the adversary with parallel forms of people power.
