This Is an Uprising — Mark & Paul Engler
Summary
Mark and Paul Engler’s 2016 book analysing how nonviolent uprisings succeed by combining strategic discipline with the “momentum-driven” organising model — bridging structural-organising and mass-mobilisation traditions.
Body
This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2016) argues that effective contemporary nonviolent uprisings combine two traditions that have been treated as separate: the structure-based community-organising tradition (Alinsky, Ganz, IAF) and the mass-mobilisation tradition (Gene Sharp, nonviolent action campaigns) [source: this-is-an-uprising]. The Englers call the synthesis “momentum-driven organising” — a model that builds durable local infrastructure while also creating the escalation dynamics that move a campaign from marginal to majority-defining [source: this-is-an-uprising].
The book reads the 2011 Occupy, the Arab Spring, and the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement through the lens of their earlier work with Momentum and the book Rules for Revolutionaries (2016). The practical contribution is the Momentum Alignment Chart worksheet — a fillable grid that asks a campaign four questions: Is the strategy aligned with the structure? Is the structure aligned with the strategy? Is the narrative aligned with both? Are the tactics aligned with all three? Campaigns whose answers are inconsistent — strategy that the structure cannot execute, tactics that the narrative cannot justify — are predicted to lose momentum [source: this-is-an-uprising].
The book is paid trade-academic; treat as abstract-only. The Momentum Alignment Chart worksheet is CC-BY-NC-SA and is a separate source page owned by T5 (momentum-alignment-chart, feeds campaign-planning); this book page is the source-side support for the momentum-model concept. The Englers are the founders of Momentum Community [source: this-is-an-uprising]; cross-link to the existing Momentum Community source page.
Use it for
Citing the theoretical bridge between organising and mass-mobilisation; introducing the momentum-driven model to a campaign that is unsure whether it needs structure or disruption; justifying strategic alignment as a discipline.
Related
- boycotts-and-strikes
- campaigns-vs-movements
- citizen-lobbying
- civil-resistance
- coalition-building
- constructive-programme
- dilemma-actions
- escalation
- framing-and-narrative
- incidencia-politica
- methods-of-nonviolent-action
- noncooperation
- nonviolent-direct-action
- pillars-of-support
- power-mapping
- spectrum-of-allies
- structure-tests
- the-campaign-cycle
- the-tactic-star
- theory-of-change
- three-and-a-half-percent-rule
Open Questions
- Confirm which edition is being cited; chapter pagination differs between the 2016 US hardback and the 2017 paperback.
- Cross-link request for the Alignment Chart worksheet queued with T5 via
link_queue.T5.md.