Diversity of tactics is a phenomenon wherein a social movement makes periodic use of force for disruptive or defensive purposes, stepping beyond the limits of nonviolent resistance, but also stopping short of total militarization.Amory Starr, "...'Excepting Barricades Erected to Prevent Us from Peaceably Assembling'..." , Social Movement Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, 61–81, May 2006."Tactical Diversity in Successful Social Movements" , Vancouver Media Co-op, January 14, 2013. It also refers to the theory which asserts this to be the most effective strategy of civil disobedience for social change.Anna Feigenbaum, "Death of a Dichotomy: Tactical Diversity and the Politics of Post-Violence" , Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action, May 2007. Diversity of tactics may promote nonviolent tactics, or armed resistance, or a range of methods in between, depending on the level of repression the political movement is facing. It sometimes claims to advocate for "forms of resistance that maximize respect for life".
Development of concept
The first clear articulation of diversity of tactics appears to have emerged from Malcolm X and other radical leaders in the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s. Shortly after Malcolm announced his departure from the Nation of Islam, he gave a speech entitled "The Black Revolution" where he promoted solidarity between those who practiced armed resistance against racism, and those who practiced nonviolence. He stated:
Our people have made the mistake of confusing the methods with the objectives. As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods or tactics or strategy to reach a common goal.Malcolm X Speaks, George Breitman, ed. (Grove Press, 1994 edition), 46-49.
In March 1964, Gloria Richardson, leader of the Cambridge Maryland chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), took Malcolm X up on his offer to join forces with civil rights organizations. Richardson (who'd recently been honored on stage at the March on Washington) told The Baltimore Afro-American that "Malcolm is being very practical...The federal government has moved into conflict situations only when matters approach the level of insurrection. Self-defense may force Washington to intervene sooner.""Mrs. Richardson OKs Malcolm X" , The Baltimore Afro-American, March 10, 1964.
In the same year, Howard Zinn (then on SNCC's Board of Advisers) published his essay "The Limits of Nonviolence," in the influential civil rights journal Freedomways. In the article, the historian concluded that nonviolent direct action would not be sufficient to break Jim Crow in the South.Howard Zinn "The Limits of Nonviolence" , Freedomways, 1st quarter, 1964. In his 1965 book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, Zinn explained the philosophy that dominated the movement:
The members of SNCC—and indeed the whole civil rights movement—have faced in action that dilemma which confounds man in society: that he cannot always have both peace and justice. To insist on perfect tranquility with an absolute rejection of violence may mean surrendering the right to change an unjust social order. On the other hand, to seek justice at any cost may result in bloodshed so great that its evil overshadows everything else and splatters the goal beyond recognition. The problem is to weigh carefully the alternatives, so as to achieve the maximum of social progress with a minimum of pain. Society has been guilty of much quick and careless weighing in the past...on the other hand, it has permitted the most monstrous injustices which it might have eliminated with a bit of trouble.Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (South End Press, 2002 edition), p. 223.
Zinn's Disobedience and Democracy In 1968, Zinn elaborated further on tactical diversity with his book Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order. The text was published in response to liberal Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, who'd recently written (in his book Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience) that he supported Gandhian forms of direct action, but not tactics that involved resisting arrest; Fortas also rejected campaigns involving the strategic violation of normally just laws, or the destruction of another party's property, or the injury to an oppressive party, including in direct self-defense (All of these tactics were becoming widespread in the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power movement and in the campaign against the Vietnam War).
Zinn produced an extended rebuttal to Fortas’ position; Regarding resisting arrest and judgment, Zinn countered that Gandhi had accepted the bad influence of Plato, who in his Crito dialogue, portrayed Socrates as cheerfully accepting his death sentence on the grounds that the citizen is obligated to abide by the final decision of the government, which is like a master to the people. Zinn points out that these are "the arguments of the Legalist, of the statist, not the libertarian," and notes that Plato disdained democracy. In the face of Plato's concern that sustained defiance of the law could topple the foundations of government, Zinn argues: "When unjust decisions become the rule, then the government and its officials should be toppled."
On the breaking of normally just laws and conventions for the purpose of protest, Zinn notes that some of society's worst problems—"like hunger, or poor housing, or lack of medical care"—are not the result of discrete laws, but of system-wide conditions; therefore targets cannot always be precise: "Our most deep-rooted troubles are not represented by specific laws, but are so woven into the American society that the only way to get at them is to attack the fabric at any vulnerable point."Howard Zinn, Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order (South End Press edition, 2002), pp. 5-6, 28-30, 37.
Zinn rejects the liberal's "easy and righteous dismissal of violence," noting that Henry Thoreau, the popularizer of the term civil disobedience, approved of the armed insurrection of John Brown. Zinn acknowledges that "nonviolence is more desirable than violence as a means" but also posits that:
...in the inevitable tension accompanying the transition from a violent world to a nonviolent one, the choice of means will almost never be pure, and will involve such complexities that the simple distinction between violence and nonviolence does not suffice as a guide...the very acts with which we seek to do good cannot escape the imperfections of the world we are trying to change.
In particular, Zinn rejects moralizing over property destruction as historically ignorant and ethically shortsighted. He contends that in response to the massive violence of the state, the smashing of windows is a mercifully restrained disruption:
The degree of disorder in civil disobedience should not be weighed against a false ‘peace’ presumed to exist in the status quo, but against the real disorder and violence that are part of daily life, overtly expressed internationally in wars, but hidden locally under that facade of ‘order’ which obscures the injustice of contemporary society.
Zinn then addresses the claim that violence does irreparable harm to a movement's cause, countering that history repeatedly shows both the limitations of nonviolence and the efficacy of combative means: "Not until Negro demonstrations resulted in violence did the national government begin to work seriously on civil rights," the historian notes, using the Birmingham riot of 1963 as an example. Peaceful methods "were enough to raise the issue, but not to resolve it."
At the same time, Zinn proposes "a moral code on violence in civil disobedience," which would "consider whether the disorder or violence is controlled or indiscriminate..." This would engender a partially violent, yet predominantly non-lethal insurrection, which would be preferable to the alternative of a fully militarized, bloody civil war. Ultimately, Zinn comes down squarely for diversity of tactics:
Each situation in the world is unique and requires unique combinations of tactics...all the vast range of possible tactics beyond strict nonviolence.*Zinn, Disobedience, pp. 39-41, 121-122, 51-61, 47, 52.
Disobedience and Democracy sold over 70,000 copies (making it Zinn's most popular book prior to A People's History of the United States)Davis D. Joyce, Howard Zinn: A Radical American Vision, 102. and served as "the theoretical buttress to the many acts of civil disobedience committed during those years of the war in Vietnam."Zinn, Disobedience, 1.
Debate around WTO shutdown of 1999 In the years after the end of the Vietnam War, protest in the US came to assume more orderly forms, and was increasingly dominated by the middle-class.Doug McAdam, et al. "There Will Be Fighting in the Streets: The Distorting Lens of Social Movement Theory" , Mobilization: An International Journal 10(1): 1-18. When the anti-nuclear power movement made progress after the partial meltdown of Three Mile Island, a rigorously nonviolent strategy—promoted by Bill Moyer and the Movement for a New Society, and embodied in the Clamshell Alliance—was often credited for the advance, and these methods came to dominate the social justice community.Julie Cristol and T. L. Hill, , Theory in Action, Vol. 4, No. 4, October 2011.Chris Rossdale, "Review of Oppose and Propose: Lessons from a Movement for a New Society" , Peacenews, May 2012. This corresponded with the rise of a highly effective police strategy of crowd control called "negotiated management."McPhail, Clark, David Schweingruber and John McCarthy. 1998. "Policing Protest in the United States: 1960-1995" , pp. 49-69, in della Porta, Donatella and Herbert Reiter (eds), Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Many social scientists have noted the "institutionalization of movements" in this period.Doug McAdam, et al. "There Will Be Fighting in the Streets: The Distorting Lens of Social Movement Theory", Mobilization: An International Journal 10(1): 1-18.
These currents largely constrained disruptive protest until the 1999 demonstrations against the World Trade Organization. In an unprecedented success for post-Vietnam era civil disobedience, the WTO Ministerial Conference opening ceremonies were shut down completely, host city Seattle declared a state of emergency for nearly a week, multilateral trade negotiations between the wealthy and developing nations collapsed, and all of this was done without fatalities. This occurred in the midst of mass rioting which had been set off by militant anarchists (some of them in a black bloc formation), nonviolent civil disobedience organized by various NGOs (including Public Citizen and Global Exchange) and the Seattle Direct Action Network (DAN), and a mass permitted march organized by the AFL-CIO."Day 2- November 30, 1999" , WTO History Project, University of Washington."Seattle Declares Civil Emergency", BBC News, December 1, 1999.John Vidal, "The real battle of Seattle" , The Guardian, December 5, 1999.