Mark Engler and Paul Engler
Summary
Mark Engler and Paul Engler are American movement theorists and practitioners; co-authors of This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century (2016), and founders of Momentum Community, a movement-building organisation that has worked with the Bernie Sanders campaigns, the post-2011 nonviolent-uprising wave, and contemporary progressive campaigns. Their signature contribution is the momentum model — the synthesis of structure-based community organising (Alinsky, Ganz, IAF) with mass-mobilisation dynamics (Sharp, the post-2011 wave).
Key idea in this wiki
- The synthesis is the bridge between the wiki’s organizing pillar (relational, structure-tests-driven) and its escalation / tactics pillar (mass-mobilisation spikes); the momentum-model concept page is the wiki’s primary distillation of this contribution [source: momentum-community].
- The distributed-organizing page echoes the same insight: durable organising infrastructure plus punctuated mass action is more powerful than either alone.
- The Englers’ Momentum Alignment Chart (a fillable worksheet) is the practitioner-level operationalisation of the model — the wiki treats the chart as the working tool a campaign uses to align its strategy, structure, narrative, and tactics [source: momentum-community].
- This Is an Uprising (2016) is the canonical statement of the synthesis: it argues that effective contemporary nonviolent uprisings combine structure-based organising with mass-mobilisation dynamics and names the four alignment questions — strategy↔structure, strategy↔narrative, tactics↔all three — that the Momentum Alignment Chart operationalises [source: this-is-an-uprising].
- The Englers’ Movement Ideology essay is the long-form theoretical underpinning that grounds the alignment discipline in movement theory.
Why campaigners read them
Campaigners read Mark and Paul Engler because This Is an Uprising (2016) is the bridge between two traditions the practitioner canon treated as separate: structure-based organising of saul-alinsky, marshall-ganz, fred-ross, and the IAF lineage; and mass-mobilisation of gene-sharp and the post-2011 wave [source: this-is-an-uprising]. The synthesis: durable organising infrastructure plus punctuated mass action is more powerful than either alone. The Momentum Alignment Chart is the practitioner-level operationalisation [source: momentum-community].
Related
- momentum-model
- organizing
- escalation
- tactics
- distributed-organizing
- structure-tests
- mass-meeting
- thinkers/saul-alinsky
- thinkers/jane-mcalevey
- thinkers/marshall-ganz
- thinkers/gene-sharp
- thinkers/srdja-popovic
Learn more
- On Wikipedia → Nonviolent resistance — CC BY-SA 4.0 (no dedicated Wikipedia article for the Englers as a pair; their work is referenced under this general topic)
Open Questions
- The momentum model is empirically under-tested outside the US progressive context; the practitioner canon would benefit from comparative studies in non-US contexts.
Sources & verification
- [this-is-an-uprising](sourcing target — source page pending) — primary work, link-only
- [momentum-community](sourcing target — source page pending) — primary reference