Liberation by the People, Essay Example

Jack DuVall’s text “Outside View: Liberation by the People” provides a summary of strategies and tactics for people-based liberation movements against oppressive political regimes. Accordingly, the common thread that unites the nine major strategic and tactical considerations in the article is that they are all forms of non-violent resistance. The non-violent nature of the resistance, in other words, determines the strategic and tactical considerations that DuVall develops. An approach that would employ a type of armed resistance would conceivably not require the same considerations, although they would provide a legitimacy to an armed resistance, in so far as DuVall is focused on society-wide liberation movement.

Since the non-violent nature of the resistance determines DuVall’s argument, the strategies and tactics are meant to mitigate the “monopoly on violence” that is held by the state. For this reason, the first consideration is crucial to resistance, since it forms the logic of the resistance movement itself. Grievances, as DuVall identifies, must be legitimately identified. Furthermore, to oppose the monopoly of power held by the oppressive regime, as DuVall notes, resistance ideally must be “horizontally scaled”: the armed superiority held by the regime is counterbalanced by the size of the masses that oppose the regime. In this regard, a key strategic and tactical step in resistance is a connection between the first consideration of legitimate grievances and the horizontal scaling of the movement. In other words, if grievances are legitimate, and, furthermore, if they can be expressed on a mass level, then key apparatuses of force, such as police and army, may be won over, thereby draining the central authority of its monopoly on institutionalized violence which is crucial to maintaining the oppressive regime.