What Scott taught

Strategic organising is best described as the crafting of a clear strategy for community mobilization and social change.

Instead of simply "going from action to action" without clear goals, strategic organising addresses immediate community priorities, builds power by mobilising citizens, is framed by core citizen values and challenges structural inequalities. It means:

• organising campaigns with achievable short term goals
• winning the "Battle of the Story" over how our struggles are framed
• using "people power" rather than just influencing power holders

The book Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, edited by global justice and anti-war organizer David Solnit, brought some of these strategy and organising tools to a wider audience.

One of the key chapters in Globalize Liberation, "Strategizing for a Living Revolution" by George Lakey, sets out a 5-stage "strategic framework" for nonviolent social change and analyses the use of nonviolent direct action by Otpor!, the Serbian youth movement which played a key role in toppling Serbian dictator Slobodon Milosovic.

Another key element of strategic organising is the idea of people power. A people power framework analyses the pillars of support on which an unjust institution, policy or system depends and uses noncooperation and intervention to assert movement and community power to remove those pillars.

Drawing in the US tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience, grassroots social movement theory and nonviolent political theory, the People Power Strategy to End the War and Occupation of Iraq identifies the occupation's key pillars of support and sets out strategies for citizens to withdraw their support from the institutions which form these pillars.

> Find out more about strategic organising and people power

"People power is an assertion of real democracy. It can assert the democratic will of communities and movements to change the things that matter when the established so-called democratic channels turn out be little more than public relations for elite rule. Every successful movement in US history, from the workers and civil rights movement to today's farmworker-led Taco Bell boycott, and every dictator toppled in recent history have relied on people power methods."

- David Solnit