Title: How did Gandhi win? - Waging Nonviolence | Waging Nonviolence
Headings: How did Gandhi win?
How did Gandhi win?
Mark Engler
Paul Engler

Content: Most critical are its symbolic properties — how well a demand serves to dramatize for the public the urgent need to remedy an injustice. Like conventional politicians and structure-based organizers, those trying to build protest movements also have strategic goals, and they might seek to address specific grievances as part of their campaigns. But their overall approach is more indirect. These activists are not necessarily focused on reforms that can be feasibly obtained in an existing political context. Instead, momentum-driven movements aim to alter the political climate as a whole, changing perceptions of what is possible and realistic. They do this by shifting public opinion around an issue and activating an ever-expanding base of supporters. At their most ambitious, these movements take things that might be considered politically unimaginable — women’s suffrage, civil rights, the end of a war, the fall of a dictatorial regime, marriage equality for same-sex couples — and turn them into political inevitabilities. Negotiations over specific policy proposals are important, but they come at the endgame of a movement, once public opinion has shifted and power-holders are scrambling to respond to disruptions that activist mobilizations have created. In the early stages, as movements gain steam, the key measure of a demand is not its instrumental practicality, but its capacity to resonate with the public and arouse broad-based sympathy for a cause. In other words, the symbolic trumps the instrumental.