How-to manual for democratic revolutions

From today's Boston Globe an interview with Gene Sharp (found via Laura Rozen):

A CURIOUS THING started happening in the formerly Communist world in the year 2000. One after another, hated, repressive governments gave way to mass movements of nonviolent refusal. First there was Serbia, then Georgia, then Ukraine, and now Kyrgyzstan. It was as if a virus were spreading - one that led long abused populaces to wake up to their own power, which they could withhold from authorities to stunning effect.

But it wasn't a virus. Among other things, it was an 88-page booklet by a Boston scholar named Gene Sharp, which has circulated in local translation at the site of every one of these nonviolent democratic revolutions.

Called ''From Dictatorship to Democracy," Sharp's booklet lays out a theory of power that explains the mechanisms of dictatorship and their weaknesses. It also details the nuts and bolts of nonviolent resistance: which tools to use in order to undermine a regime's sources of power, how to sustain discipline in the face of violent response, and the crucial importance of entering such struggle as one would a military campaign, with a strategic plan. Tactics include demonstrations and posters, strikes and sit-ins, boycotts and campaigns of non-cooperation. Some of these techniques work to paralyze the society and thus convince rulers that they cannot govern without budging on the issues at stake - or that they cannot govern at all.