1.1 A litany of misconceptions

Today an increasingly high percentage of conflicts are being waged within rather than between states. The most intense conflicts featuring violent repression are those pitting an authoritarian against the population he/she intends to control. The common assumption is that a population living under such tyranny has only two choices: either acquiesce or mount a violent insurrection. History tells us a different story. Since 1900 there have been over 120 significant campaigns of civil resistance and two thirds had their beginnings after 1972 (Reference Karatnycky and AckermanKaratnycky and Ackerman, 2005). This nonviolent history has been hidden in full view. The reason is that there exist several persistent misperceptions about civil resistance held by the general public as well as key elites, including think tank intellectuals, media professionals, and official policymakers.

Civil resistance is often seen as a form of passivism or nonviolence. The basis for passivism and nonviolence is an ethical choice made by individuals; it is not a way to battle tyranny. One may ask, what about Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.? We remember Gandhi not for his religious writing but for what he did in 1930. He left his ashram and walked about 214 miles to Dandi Beach along with thousands of regular people, bent over, picked up a handful of sand, threw it into a pot of boiling water, and made salt (Reference Ackerman and DuVallAckerman and DuVall, 2000). His illegal act of manufacturing salt was echoed by hundreds of millions of Indians and nearly brought down British colonial rule like no other violent resistance had in the past. As for King, one needs only to read his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ or study the work of Reverend James Lawson, his key strategist, to appreciate the centrality of continuous societal disruption as a pathway to change.

Civil resistance is not a new way to prevent or resolve conflicts. It is not a form of negotiation or mediation, but a strategy for winning conflicts that cannot be avoided. Civil resistance, because it maintains nonviolent discipline for strategic reasons, is often erroneously viewed as a form of peacebuilding, especially as peace and tranquility often become interchangeable terms. Bernard Lafayette, one of the leaders of the US civil rights movement, and David Jehnsen point out that the opposite of violence is ‘a seemingly peaceful status quo that tolerates the brutal and sometimes subtle victimization of people…’ (Reference Lafayette and Jehnsen1995: 6). Therefore, there is a difference between positive peace (justice that can be achieved through civil resistance) and negative peace (a state of peacefulness without justice) (Reference Beyerle, Dumont, Hastings, Noma and JeffersonBeyerle, 2013). They deem the latter to be a violation of human rights and dignity. According to Vaclav Havel, this kind of unjust peace must be disturbed by mobilized citizens, as they have themselves the power to produce a more positive, just order (Havel, Power of the Powerless).

One of the reasons ‘people power’ movements have impressive success rates is because high levels of civilian participation can lead to the disruption of the status quo. This triggers a very different dynamic than when the status quo is disrupted by a few armed and athletic young men trying to shoot their way to the top. The civic movements in South Africa against apartheid succeeded with a very different paradigm than Fidel Castro and the violent revolution in Cuba.

Nonviolent conflicts are not spontaneous conflagrations that appear out of nowhere and then disappear without a trace. Successful campaigns are premeditated and occur in stages. This will be no different for the so-called Arab Spring struggles in Egypt and Tunisia, than it was for the conflicts in Chile, Poland, South Africa, and the US Civil Rights movement. The conscious capacity to sequence the nonviolent movements’ tactics into a carefully designed strategy is the major contributor to victory. Why would we assume otherwise, since we expect our military leaders to be impeccable planners?

Nonviolent resistance is not just street protest. It comprises many other tactics. Street protests may be exciting to watch on YouTube but they hardly convey all the tactical possibilities that lead to movement success. For example, the key weapon for Solidarity in Poland was the Gdansk shipyard strike, for the civic groups in South Africa it was the consumer boycott, in the American South, it was a combination of marches, and bus and lunch counter boycotts. A diverse portfolio of tactics is also a key driver of success to curb financial corruption.

Civil resistance has been studied for decades, but only in the last five years has a large amount of historical data been collected. The conclusions rendered from this data are the most authoritative to date and often run counter to conventional wisdom. In their groundbreaking, award-winning book, Why Civil Resistance Works, published by Columbia University Press, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan examined 323 nonviolent and violent campaigns between 1900 and 2006. They found that civil resistance initiatives were more than twice as likely to succeed in achieving their maximalist objectives as compared to violent insurrections. They documented that ‘major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns’ (Reference Chenoweth and Stephan2011).^{Footnote 1}

A 2005 Freedom House study, entitled ‘How Freedom is Won,’ yields two other critical conclusions. Nonviolent resistance was a major source of decisive pressure in 50 of the 67 transitions from authoritarian rule from 1972–2005. Additionally, of the 50 successful transitions that were driven by campaigns of nonviolent resistance, 32 (64%) resulted in higher levels of respect for political rights and civil liberties (Reference Karatnycky and AckermanKaratnycky and Ackerman, 2005). And what is perhaps the most hopeful result is that five years after a failed campaign of civil resistance, the prospect for a democratic transition was still 33%. In contrast, a failed campaign of violent insurrection starts with a 5% possibility of a democratic result and decreases to a 2% probability five years later.

The explanation for the resiliency of people power in contrast to guerilla warfare is the high level of civilian participation in the former. Strikes, boycotts, protests require coordination and compromises, as compared to violent insurrection, which in almost all cases operates with limited or no public engagement. The guerilla who loses is annihilated; the civil resister who loses still has future chances to undermine his or her authoritarian adversary. In fact, virtually every successful civil resistance movement experienced a number of failures, but went on to learn from the mistakes and organize society more effectively against its opponent.

Another widely held assumption is that the prospects for successful civil resistance are constrained by conditions. The data suggests otherwise. A follow-up Freedom House study found that:

Here we are entering the age-old debate in the social sciences between conditions (structure) and skills (agency) heavily favoring the latter. Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Peace Prize winning economist, first made this argument in Reference Schelling and Roberts1969 (351–352). He stated:

1.2 The civil resistance checklist

If skills are paramount, it should be possible to distinguish between capable and poorly managed campaigns of civil resistance. Another way of thinking about the definition of skills is what you would tell civil resistance leaders when they ask how they are doing while in the middle of their high risk conflict. Here is a list of six questions the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict – an international educational foundation advancing research, study, and teaching in the field of civil resistance – would use to assess the performance of nonviolent campaigns.

1. 1. Has the civil resistance campaign united around goals and leaders?

2. 2. Is the civil resistance campaign committed to strict nonviolent discipline?

3. 3. Does the civil resistance campaign have an operational plan for victory?

4. 4. Are the number and diversity of participants confronting the tyrant growing?

5. 5. Is the impact of the tyrants’ repression diminishing towards backfiring?

6. 6. Are defections among the tyrant's key supporters accelerating?

This checklist is most helpful for those battling authoritarian regimes. It provides a structure for decision making and enhances the prospects of success. However, it provides a general framework that can be adapted to other struggle contexts, as will be demonstrated in the final section.

The case studies presented next are neither top-down, institutionalized, nor elite-driven. They illustrate the force of regular people organizing to confront the existing structures of entrenched governance and political and economic power that are key enablers of financial corruption.

2.1 Targeting UK tax dodgers

At the national level, UK UNKUT is ‘a grassroots movement taking action to highlight alternatives to the government's spending cuts,’ (UK UNKUT website, 2013). It encourages individuals, groups, and communities to launch their own nonviolent actions. One of its overarching goals is to clamp down on tax avoidance and tax evasion in the UK, which it asserts would reduce the need to cut drastically from social services. According to a 2011 report by the Tax Justice Network, it is estimated that GBP 69.9 billion is lost annually due to tax evasion (Reference MurphyMurphy, 2011).

UK UNKUT began in 2010, after a media report that the Vodafone telecom company was set to pay approximately GBP 6 billion on UK profits that had been channeled to a company in Luxembourg. However, it was reported that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, suddenly cancelled most of the bill. A senior official in the Revenue and Customs departments described the decision as ‘an unbelievable cave-in,’ (Reference HariHari, 2010). After learning of this, one man, Thom Costello, appealed to people through Twitter to take action. As a result, on October 27, 2010, 70 citizens occupied Vodafone's flagship London store. While some held a sit-in, others protested on the curb and leafleted passersby. The outlet was forced to shut down temporarily. Within three days, via the hashtag #ukunkut, 30 more outlets around the country briefly closed due to similar actions. In the ensuing months and years a movement has emerged. It has been targeting banks and other well-known British retail companies, such as Top Shop, Boots, and Fortnum and Mason, launched a ‘carnival of civil disobedience,’ and joined forces with other civic groups in mass actions (Reference TaylorTaylor, 2011).

According to a Guardian newspaper editorial, the movement put tax justice ‘back on the agenda’ (2010). It said: ‘… give the UK UNKUT demonstrators credit for this: instead of taking cheap shots at [prime minister] David Cameron, they are making a tricky, worthwhile argument about tax.’ In 2011, Robert Field, the head of tax in the law firm serving the Royal Family, announced support for changes to corporate tax laws. He went on record stating: ‘There is clearly a problem with corporate tax avoidance and one which we have seen has taken on a moral dilemma with lobbying groups like UK UNKUT taking a stand’ (Reference PaganoPagano, 2011). While he may have confused lobbyists with grass-roots activists, he hosted a debate attended by the head of HM Revenue and Customs, and over 250 bankers and accountants, and publicly called for ‘a principle-based approach’ that can slash tax avoidance (Reference PaganoPagano, 2011)

With even a cursory examination of UK UNKUT, we can see familiar elements of civil resistance at work. Outrage has been tapped and channeled into nonviolent actions. Regular people participate, becoming citizen-activists in the struggle. The issue of tax evasion is linked to widely-held concerns, in this case, cuts of social services that impact a large part of society. Documentation is provided to back up arguments. The movement seeks to build unity across age, gender, race, and ethnicity. It is employing a variety of nonviolent tactics, such as occupations, sit-ins, protests, leafleting, civil disobedience, fairs, people's assemblies, and nonviolent blockades.

However, it's not clear if the movement is attempting to strategically engage with powerholders, officials, and enablers of illicit financial flows, in order to pull them towards the struggle, shift positions, and empower reformers on the inside. A significant weakness is that UK UNKUT does not appear to make any concrete demands. It calls for an end to tax evasion and subsidies to banks, and general policy changes regarding cuts to social services. Nonetheless, it has had an impact. It raised the issue of tax justice to national prominence. It is mobilizing thousandsof citizens, provoking the attention of enablers, such as lawyers and accountants. It is collecting expert commentary from leading UK and international economists across the ideological spectrum.^{Footnote 3} According to an international anti-corruption expert, UK Prime Minister David Cameron's October 2013 announcement to create a central public registry of corporate beneficialownership information, and his call for other countries to follow suit, was in part due to UK UNKUT's people power. Overall, the movement has activated the dynamics of civil resistance through:

• • disruption of the status quo by exposing corporate tax dodgers and physically shutting down sites of commerce;

• • significant civic participation creating extra-institutional pressure on powerholders;

• • winning people over to the struggle from the public;

• • shifting positions (loyalties) of enablers, for example, tax lawyers;

• • producing defections from the illicit financial flows system.

2.2 An interim victory at the G8

In June 2013, as the heads of state of the G8 countries met in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, regular people found a way to flex their civil resistance muscles.^{Footnote 4} Avaaz.org, the global digital resistance platform, joined forces with ‘The Enough Food for Everyone IF Campaign,’ a coalition of 208 civil society organizations (CSOs), religious organizations, and even celebrities, such as the Senegalese music star, Baaba Maal. They found common cause over financial corruption. For the IF Campaign, tax evasion in Global South countries deprives states of revenues that should be used for development (IF Campaign website, 2013). They delivered 1.4 million messages to Prime Minister Cameron at the summit, the outcome of a six-month grass-roots mobilization involving offline and online actions (IF Campaign, 2013). In the latter realm, one imaginative tactic was posting ‘polite’ messages on the Prime Minister's Facebook site, which is a digital form of occupying a public space. In conjunction with the G8 summit, IF Campaign held an all-day festival in Belfast gathering over 10,000 citizen-activists from across the UK, and conducted humorous stunts, including a flotilla sporting people posing as the G8 leaders.

Photo: Avaaz.org

Avaaz.org complemented these nonviolent actions with two additional tactics. A couple of weeks before the summit, it launched a digital petition demanding that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper shift his opposition to tax dodging. In a call to action, Avaaz.org declared: ‘If thousands of us join together to pressure Harper and his negotiating team we can get them to support a real deal against tax evaders’ (Avaaz.org, 2013). Over 736,000 people digitally signed the petition. It also engaged the private sector, getting 21,000 business people to sign a letter against tax evasion.

How was civil resistance manifested at the 2013 G8? Box 2 provides the clues.

The joint summit campaign was united over a shared grievance (tax dodging) and objective (changing positions of powerholders for a G8 commitment). It also built unity of people, consisting of a coalition of civic organizations and their respective members, regular citizens, public figures, and sectors of society from organized religion to business. The issue of financial corruption was framed in everyday terms rather than as an abstract appeal: ‘… greedy companies and wealthy individuals use tricky schemes to hide away an estimated $1 trillion, depriving governments of tax they need to fix our services and our countries.’ The targets of the campaign were clear. Overall, they were the G8 heads of state in general. In particular, Avaaz focused on the Canadian and German prime ministers, while IF Campaign concentrated on the UK. Avaaz and IF Campaign used a variety of nonviolent tactics, both on-the-ground and online, that not only involved activists but marshaled over two million citizens via digital resistance in a low-risk, simple, mass action. Together, IF Campaign and Avaaz activated the dynamics of civil resistance through:

• • mass civic participation that applied nonviolent pressure on powerholders, illustrating the the power of numbers;

• • engagement with citizens, by winning people over to the struggle from the public and key sectors of society;

• • direct engagement with powerholders, by delivering the signatures of 21,000 business people, and meeting with Prime Minister Cameron, where the letter with 1.4 million signatures and a scrap-book of the six-month IF Campaign were presented (Reference KerrKerr, 2013). A video of interviews with IF Campaigners and bloggers invited to the summit can even be found on his official 10 Downing Street Facebook site;

• • disruption of the status quo through blogging, and stunts one day prior in Belfast, which forced leaders to take notice of citizen demands;

• • shifting positions (loyalties) of powerholders, in this case, G8 leaders who were not favorable to action on illicit financial flows.

The outcomes are encouraging. They generated collective social pressure on G8 powerholders, and political will that helped Prime Minister Cameron push for consensus during the summit. The result was the ‘Lough Erne Declaration.’ While not a paragon of action, it represents a step forward in an ongoing process of change. Avaaz announced an interim success, cleverly framing it as a further call to action: ‘The ‘“Erne Declaration” was short on specifics, but gives us huge leverage in chasing governments to block shady tax schemes.’

3.1 A systemic approach

Corruption and illicit financial flows function within systems. Corruption is not simply the aggregate of individual interactions between a corruptor and a corruptee, willing or unwilling. Nor are illicit financial flows merely a collection of transactions involving a corruptor or criminal on one side, and a receiving entity (legal or illegal) charged to safely protect the ill-gotten gains on the other side. Financial corruption, such as illicit financial flows, function within systems that:

1. 1. Encompass state and non-state beneficiaries – such as despots, heads of state, parliamentarians, officials, oligarchs, multinational corporations, organized crime, paramilitary groups, terrorist groups.

2. 2. Cut across political, economic and social spheres – within a country or territory and across borders.

3. 3. Include legal and illegal activities.

4. 4. Involve complex, intertwined relationships, some obvious and many hidden, with long-standing vested interests that reap benefits – domestically and internationally via professional enablers (lawyers, accountants, wealth advisors), financial institutions, shell company providers, tax havens, and purveyors of costly assets (such as property, licit businesses, luxury goods, art).

Once viewed in a systemic manner, it is much easier to understand why it's so difficult to change policy and practice regarding financial corruption. Political will is essential but not enough, given that vested interests will resist change and actively strive to sustain the venal status quo through various means, from non-compliance and lobbying to harassment and intimidation. Likewise, state, corporate, and financial sector integrity champions can be thwarted, as they are easily outnumbered by these vested interests.

The strategic question for the global financial integrity struggle is how to weaken these logjams of vested interests and undermine the overall systems of financial corruption. There is an abundance of top-down policies, mechanisms, laws, and tools available to achieve these ends.^{Footnote 6} But how to get policymakers and various state, corporate, and professional powerholders on board – when they refuse to listen to respected nongovernmental organizations and scholars, disregard powerful arguments, ignore the data, and turn a blind eye to illicit practices? This is where people power comes into the equation.

3.2 The dynamics of people power to curb corruption and gain financial integrity

Civil resistance adds an essential element to the traditional, top-down anti-corruption equation – bottom-up pressure that arises outside of existing structures of formal power and governance. There are three main dynamics to people power in the corruption and illicit financial flows context:

• • Disrupting – systems of graft and abuse through strategically chosen and sequenced nonviolent tactics. This can entail upending activities, practices, and relationships, thereby making ‘business as usual’ difficult, if not impossible.

• • Applying – nonviolent pressure on corruptors who refuse to change the venal status quo through the power of numbers, namely people raising their collective voice over shared demands.

• • Engaging – the public and powerholders in order to win people over to the struggle; shift positions (loyalties) of decisionmakers; and produce ‘defections.’ that is, individuals and groups within the corrupt system who refuse to go along with it. The engagement dynamic is based on the reality that not everyone is equally loyal, equally corruptible, and equally wedded to the system enabling financial corruption.

Thus, people power brings complementary dimensions to the struggle for financial transparency and integrity. First, mobilized citizens, often together with non-state entities and actors, comprise a social force that can exert pressure on the government and other sectors in society so they respond to civil society demands. Second, civil resistance has a strategic advantage. It consists of extra-institutional pressure to push for change when powerholders are corrupt and/or unaccountable and institutional channels are blocked or ineffective (Reference BeyerleBeyerle, 2011). As well, people power can weaken sources of support for powerholders, policies, entities, and corruption enablers. In the context of illicit financial flows, one could posit shifting support concerning policies and measures, on the part of government leaders, officials, financial institutions, and legal, accounting and wealth management advisors.

Hence, top-down and bottom-up approaches are synergistic. Both are needed to curb illicit financial flows. In this context, people power campaigns and movements have the potential to:

• • Stimulate societal debate among the general public and well as within sectors, such as finance, business, law, accounting, media, organized labour, and organized religion;

• • Create political will to develop, enact, and implement policy and laws and administrative mechanisms to curb illicit financial flows called for by civil society;

• • Empower and protect reformers and integrity champions pursuing accountability and change;

• • Empower and protect honest state and non-state powerholders who are caught in the system, do not want to participate in it, but are outnumbered and may even fear repercussions if they do not go along with the status quo;

• • Disrupt vertical (within an institution) and horizontal (across sectors) corruption linked to financial corruption;

• • Contribute to changing behaviors, practices, and general norms regarding graft, including financial corruption.

3.3 Lessons for the struggle against financial corruption

Among the research findings, the following six are germane to our inquiry into the role of people power in curbing financial corruption.

First and foremost, nonviolent action targeting malfeasance can achieve positive, tangible outcomes. Across countries, societies, contexts, and types of corruption, citizens have demonstrated that they have agency and the capacity to wield power through strategic nonviolent actions that:

• • disrupt systems of graft and abuse;

• • create extra-institutional pressure on powerholders and/or corruptors who refuse to change the venal status quo;

• • engage powerholders in a manner that shifts their positions (i.e. loyalties);

• • support and embolden integrity champions pursuing accountability and reform within the state (i.e. defections from the corrupt system).

Second, these cases reflect the overall findings noted in the first part of our article – skills, planning, strategy, and creative nonviolent tactics can impact and overcome difficult conditions. Nonviolent movements, campaigns, and community civic initiatives targeting corruption were often found in societies plagued by unaccountable governance, state mismanagement, poverty, low levels of literacy, and severe repression, the latter perpetrated by the state, paramilitary groups, or organized crime. As well, they parallel the results of a 10-year, meta-case study analysis emerging from the development and democracy fields. This inquiry into citizenship, participation, and accountability established that citizen engagement:

Third, information combined with action can produce people power. In the broader anti-corruption field, asking questions and requesting documents serve as nonviolent tactics that start disrupting the malfeasant status quo. In the financial corruption context, this can consist of acquiring financial information or supporting research that is disruptive to the status quo. Latter examples include estimates of ill-gotten gains held by authoritarians, and tax evasion efforts by companies, individuals, and officials. However, information on its own may not be enough of a challenge to the corrupt system. More often than not, it needs to be magnified through nonviolent direct actions that produce extra-institutional pressure on state, economic, and financial powerholders.

The fourth pertinent finding is that innovative online tools can create very powerful tactics that alter power relations, pressure powerholders, and yield observable outcomes. The benefits were manifold. These anti-corruption movements and campaigns increased the variety of mass, low-risk, nonviolent actions executed by regular people and fostered a sense of collective identity and ownership of the struggle. They also produced economies of scale in terms of organization, communication, outreach, and citizen participation. However, equally important to note is that it was the skillful combination of both real-world and digital resistance that ultimately produced overwhelming civic pressure on powerholders.

Fifth, civic leaders took graft and abuse out of the realm of the abstract. Corruption was tied to public outrage over powerholder behavior and impunity, or to widely shared and experienced grievances. Moreover, organizers identified tangible goals and clear demands, even when tackling overall systems of endemic graft and abuse.

Sixth, successful movements and campaigns targeting corruption are not formulaic. There is no such thing as ‘one-size-fits-all’ when it comes to civil resistance. Nor are they top-down in the sense that regular people are viewed as subjects at the beck and call of civil society elites. Rather, organized nonviolent mobilizations are characterized by intangible qualities emanating from the grass roots, including:

• • Resonance – of goals and nonviolent tactics to the needs and capacities of regular people. A key lesson for the struggle against financial corruption is that it is essential to avoid abstract appeals against illicit financial flows, as well as legalistic and technical jargon. Not only is the latter unrelated to everyday life, it reinforces the notion that these challenges are best left to experts and professional advocacy groups rather than citizens. In tandem, campaign and movement discourse should stem from the social and cultural realities of citizens, not the language of technocrats.

• • Collective identity and collective ownership – two sides of the same coin that bind citizens to the struggle. The former refers to what sociologist Lee Smithey calls a sense of ‘we-ness’ that comes from shared cognitions and beliefs (Reference Smithey and Bartkowski2013: 32). Successful campaigns and movements targeting corruption cultivated these qualities through their discourse, collective grievances and goals, nonviolent tactics, and symbols.

• • Legitimacy – of the movement or campaign, in the eyes of the public, powerholders, and oppressors, is indispensable for successful people power. It can counter cynicism, corruptor efforts to discredit civic mobilization, impede intimidation, and make attacks backfire. As well, it can weaken the loyalties of powerholders to maintain the status quo, and cumulatively build support from the public as well as from within corrupt systems. Legitimacy arises from unity of people, grievances, and objectives plus credibility of the civic actors plus collective ownership of the struggle.

3.4 Tactics

Box 1 provides a glimpse of creativity, diversity and variations of tactics developed by grass-roots movements and campaigns targeting corruption (listed in Table 1).

Of these tactics, there are a few we would like to highlight given their applicability to the struggle against financial corruption. Boycotts of tax evaders have the potential to disrupt the status quo and concurrently exert pressure on transgressing companies and financial institutions. Borrowing a tactic from the People Power movement against the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, mass withdrawals of money from offending banks can literally deprive them of liquidity. Reverse boycotts could reward companies that do not evade taxes and financial institutions that institute measures to prevent illicit financial flows. In this context, reverse boycotts have the potential of provoking ‘defections’ from the corrupt system. Each firm that embraces tax justice and transparency is, in a sense, a defector. The beauty of the reverse boycott is that the defecting corruptors reap tangible rewards for integrity.