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Plan a blockade

You are an organiser preparing a nonviolent blockade — a sit-in at a contested site, a road blockade, a port shutdown, or a supply-chain action. A blockade is a tactic with real legal consequences, real injury risk, and a real public narrative that can either build the campaign or sink it. This path threads you through the five moves that decide whether a blockade lands: the concept page, the risk register, the marshals, de-escalation, and the after-action review. Allow about 25 minutes to read.

This is the path for planning one specific blockade. For the broader direct-action repertoire and the theory of nonviolent action, start with the nonviolent-action 101 path instead.

The journey

  • Blockades — why this next: start with the concept page, not the action. The wiki’s [[blockades]] page is the empirical and legal map: it covers the spectrum from symbolic sit-ins to supply-chain disruption, the precedent set by past blockades, and the four questions you must answer before you commit (target, demand, duration, public framing). Read it before the planning meeting, not after.

  • Risk register — why this next: a blockade is a sequence of small failures stacked into one event. The risk register is the discipline of naming those failures in advance — arrest, injury, public backlash, escalation by counter-protesters, hostile media — and assigning an owner and a mitigation to each. The second meeting is the risk-register meeting; it is the most important one you will hold.

  • Protest marshals — why this next: the marshals are the on-the-day safety net. They make the blockade’s commitment visible — peaceful, accountable, organised — to every other person present: participants, bystanders, police, media. Read the marshals page for the role spec, the de-escalation playbook, and the legal duty-of-care argument that gets buy-in from hesitant allies.

  • De-escalation — why this next: the blockade ends. How it ends is the single biggest determinant of whether the action builds power for the next one or whether it discredits the campaign. The de-escalation page covers the verbal and physical toolkit for winding down a confrontation, the leave-together principle, and the line between principled exit and capitulation.

  • After-action review — why this next: within 72 hours. The AAR is what turns one blockade into a reusable organisational asset. It is also where the legal-defence fund learns who it is defending, where the next organisers get trained, and where the campaign’s public narrative gets locked in before the counter-narrative does.

Wrap-up

With this path complete you have planned a blockade end-to-end, not just imagined one. To see how these moves actually played out in real campaigns — Vietnam-era occupations, anti-roads blockades, community incinerator actions — browse worked case studies. For the broader direct-action arc — theory of nonviolent action, tactical toolkit, escalation logic, and the narrative craft that surrounds it — follow the nonviolent-action 101 path.