Author of the week: Gene Sharp

last updated 8 January 2015

Gene Sharp “hardly seems like a dangerous man,” said Sheryl Gay Stolberg in The New York Times. The 83-year-old founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, a think tank he operates from his East Boston home with the help of two assistants and a golden retriever mix named Sally, seems upon first meeting positively innocuous. But to the world’s dictators, Sharp’s ideas “can be fatal.” Just ask Hosni Mubarak. From Dictatorship to Democracy, a 1993 pamphlet on nonviolent resistance that Sharp wrote for Burmese dissidents, proved a critical influence on the organizers of Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement. For Egypt’s activists, Sharp’s suggestions for “attacking weaknesses of dictators” struck a chord.

In recent days, a Lebanese-born blogger and political scientist has accused Westerners of trying to diminish the Egyptian revolution by making Sharp into a new “Lawrence of Arabia.” For his part, Sharp is quick to deny credit. “The people of Egypt did that—not me,” he says. He was impressed with the protesters’ steadfast ability to remain peaceful, which he attributes to another nonviolent thinker. “That is straight out of Gandhi,” he says. Sharp has just finished a new book, Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle, set to be published in the fall. If it’s typical Sharp, it will promote peaceful methods for pragmatic reasons. “If you fight with violence,” he says, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon,” and you may end up “a brave but dead hero.”