Tisovets, a popular ski resort in the Carpathian Mountains, is a tiring four-hour drive in a four-wheel-drive from Lviv. The journey was exceptionally challenging for Ukraine’s newly elected president, Viktor Yushchenko, and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. Meeting there on January 5, 2005, they reviewed the events that led to their elections. The democratic movements that propelled them to power had to overcome obdurate regimes, defeat corrupt individuals, and confound the disbelief of international observers.

“The people of Ukraine and Georgia have demonstrated to the world that freedom and democracy, the will of the people, and free and fair elections are more powerful than any state machine, notwithstanding its strength and severity,” the two presidents announced in a joint statement. This confident assertion would not have surprised President Gloria Arroyo of the Philippines, President Ricardo Lagos of Chile, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, or President Voyjaslav Kostunica of Serbia and Montenegro—whose countries were also transformed by “people power.” Yet the ideas Yushchenko and Saakashvili endorsed in Tisovets still flout the world’s conventional wisdom.

Commentators outside of Ukraine seem unable to believe that ordinary Ukrainians were behind the Orange Revolution. An Oxford professor attributed the victory to US support for Ukrainian opposition groups, coming from businessman George Soros and US agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy. One New York Times article identified the American Bar Association’s training of Ukrainian judges as the key factor. Russian pundits cited the training of young Ukrainian activists conducted by veterans of Otpor, the Serbian student group that helped bring down Slobodan Milosevic.

That outside analysts gravitated to external factors was no doubt vexing to the two men who had spearheaded the Orange and Rose Revolutions. In their Carpathian Declaration, Yushchenko and Saakashvili had an unambiguous response: “We strongly reject the idea that peaceful democratic revolutions can be triggered by artificial techniques or external interference. Quite the contrary, the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine happened despite such political techniques or outside interference.”

So the road to Tisovets was not paved with US money or built with Serbian advisors. It took Ukrainian and Georgian drivers to maneuver the sharp turns and hard terrain that they and their people knew best. Still, the basic knowledge of how to drive had already been conceived, by many people in many countries.

What is People Power?

“People power is a form of consciousness.” “People power is a euphemism for mob rule.” “‘People power’ is about restoring the ‘invisible institution of morality.’” None of these phrases, plucked at random off the Internet, comes close to defining the historical phenomenon of people power. Most references in news coverage are just as errant. The term was coined in the Philippines to describe the outpouring of popular opposition to the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, yet it was a split in his military forces, facilitated by the protests that immobilized Manila, that actually compelled Marcos to resign.

Protest by itself cannot pry a ruler from office because power does not come from a public show; it comes from applying force. When directed strategically by a civilian-based movement, protest is only one of many nonviolent tactics, including strikes, boycotts, blockades, and hundreds of other acts of economic and social disruption that can dissolve the political or military support beneath a ruler. The power in “people power” is best understood as the yield from detonating these nonviolent weapons.

Mohandas Gandhi was the first in the 20th century to discern what ordinary civilians could do—or refrain from doing—to change their country’s course. “Even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled,” he said. If enough people withdraw that cooperation, they will shrink the government’s legitimacy and raise the costs of enforcing its will. The instrument for bringing this about is a self-organized movement, which political scientist Sidney Tarrow describes as having “the power to trigger sequences of collective action” based on a unified frame for common goals. When nonviolent movements of this kind have drained a ruler’s sources of support, the results have changed history:

In 1980, the Solidarity Movement in Poland used industrial strikes to make the Communist regime permit a free trade union. Ten million Poles soon joined. The movement continued underground during martial law, and President Wojciech Jaruzelski eventually asked Solidarity to help negotiate Poland’s first free elections, which it won.

From 1985 to 1990, the United Democratic Front in South Africa used boycotts and strikes to damage apartheid-supporting businesses, eroding their support of the racial system to help make the country ungovernable, in turn forcing the ruling party to negotiate a new political system.

In 1986, after President Marcos stole an election, fueling state-wide anger among Filipinos, a veritable army of his civilian opponents surrounded and protected key military units that had defected, signaling that the president had lost the option of repression. He resigned.

In 1988, following five years of growing protests against the military government of General Augusto Pinochet, Chileans organized a “crusade of civic participation” to win a plebiscite that Pinochet called and that persuaded his fellow junta members to refuse orders to crack down and compelled him to step down.

From 1989 to 1990, in Prague, East Berlin, Sofia, Ulan Bator, and other Soviet-sphere capitals, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens occupied public squares as the world watched on television, forcing these regimes to hold free elections and liberating more than 120 million people from authoritarian control.

In 1996 and 1997, thousands of Serbian students and workers marched in Belgrade to demand that President Slobodan Milosevic accept opposition victories in municipal elections. He finally did so. In 2000, the protesters were joined by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Serbs from all over the country who converged on the capital after Milosevic refused to accept his own electoral defeat. When the dictator’s defenders refused his orders, he had to leave.

The similarities among these civilian-based transitions to democracy are readily apparent. That they have not caught the attention of many policy makers or pundits is due to three misconceptions.

First, nonviolent action is often misread as a form of peacemaking or conflict resolution rather than as a way to wage and win a conflict. When launched, especially against a repressive ruler, nonviolent action is usually dismissed as lacking punch or needing outside patrons. Once civilian-based resistance is seen for what it is, as a way to defeat rather than soften or persuade an opponent, the home-grown strategy and tactics that often produce success can be identified.