Nonviolent uprisings are, at their essence, political campaigns. According to the complex analysis of power that Sharp has painstakingly developed over the years, the success or failure of any peaceful revolt largely depends on the campaign’s ability to weaken the allegiance of civil servants, police and soldiers to the regime; to persuade fence-sitters to join the opposition; and to prevent tyrannical and violent responses to civilian protest from being implemented—or, if implemented, from undermining the nonviolent movement's strategic game plan. “As that know-how becomes available,” he explains, “it’s more likely that people will use it skillfully and not just in terms of inspiration and a surprise victory here and there. And that will contribute to profound change—not because of a sense of inevitability but because people have made new possibilities possible.”

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“Dictatorships in particular have specific characteristics that render them highly vulnerable to skillfully implemented political defiance,” he informed his readers. They have Achilles’ heels such as dependence on the population’s cooperation and ongoing submissiveness; inflexible command-and-control structures; leaders who are surrounded by yes-men predisposed to tell the leader what he wants to hear rather than what is really going on; the likelihood of rivalries between elites, which can be exploited by savvy on-the-ground opponents; and a predisposition to regionalism, whereby power brokers lay claim to their slice of the ill-gotten pie.

Once enough people and organizations within a society (trade unions, religious groups, sports clubs, civil servants, even the police and military) withhold their cooperation from a regime, Sharp wrote, “The dictators’ power will die, slowly or rapidly, from political starvation.” If protesters hue closely to nonviolence, this process will “lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable.”

For Sharp, violence, by contrast, isn’t just morally problematic; it is also a peculiarly ineffective way to take on despots. After all, governments have access to more, and more sophisticated, weapons. Their armies are better trained in using those weapons. And they generally control the infrastructure that allows them to deploy those weapons and armies. To fight dictators with violence, Sharp argues, is to cede to them the choice of weaponry. Nonviolence forces the regime to fight on unfamiliar terrain. It is, in many ways, akin to fabled organizer Marshall Ganz’s idea that David beat Goliath not by outfighting him so much as outfoxing him .

The worse the regime gets, the more steadfast ought the opposition to be in its commitment to nonviolence. The result will be a “severing of power,” a process of political jiujitsu in which the ruler’s actions turn against him and he becomes progressively isolated from the people and institutions whose complicity he needs to keep the administration functioning. Take that complicity away, and the ruler will be exposed as naked, a Wizard of Oz character with the curtains pulled back. At the same time, the more the populace resists, the more they will realize their own innate power and, like Dorothy, discover that they had possessed the means of shaping their own destiny all along.