Technology for nonviolent struggle

Most of the debate about defence policy is built around the assumption that defence means military defence, and usually the capacity for military offence as well. Quite a few supporters of nuclear disarmament want to retain so-called conventional weapons, such as tanks, submarines, aircraft and explosives. In the days of the cold war, a key decision in many countries was whether to be aligned with one of the two blocs led by the superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union), whether instead to become or remain nonaligned, or whether to become neutral (like Switzerland). Many debates were carried out concerning these options. A few governments considered “defensive defence,” in which offensive weapons, such as bombers and long-range missiles, would be eschewed in order to reduce the threat posed to other countries. In the Third World, guerrilla struggles have been waged for decades and have been seen as a model by some revolutionaries in the rich countries.

Although many types of defence systems have been used and proposed, all but one of them ultimately rely on organised violence. For each of these, then, violence thus becomes a key motivator for technological development, as shown by the following table. Only social defence provides a fundamentally different incentive.

Defence system	Role of technologists
Nuclear	Making weapons of war, including nuclear weapons
Conventional, aligned	Making weapons of war
Conventional, nonaligned	Making weapons of war
Armed neutrality	Making weapons of war
Defensive military defence	Making weapons of war (defensive only)
Guerrilla warfare	Making weapons of war (mostly small scale)
Social defence	Making tools for nonviolent struggle

The following chapters focus on technology that can support a social defence system, namely a community defence system based on nonviolent action.

Sabotage

Sabotage includes such things as jamming factory equipment, destroying computer files and putting sand in a vehicle’s fuel tank. There is a long history of sabotage in the workplace, much of it due to workers being bored, alienated or seeking revenge on bosses.[17] There is also some use of sabotage in a more directed fashion to resist repression. For example, some workers in Nazi-occupied Europe slowed down factory production in various subtle ways, trying to hurt the Nazi war effort without being easily identified and consequently punished. There has been some debate among nonviolent activists and scholars about whether sabotage — violence against property — should be considered violent or nonviolent, as well as whether it is a good tactic. Here, though, I want to address a different issue: is sabotage a useful way to push for changes in technologies and the social arrangements associated with them?

A few writers and activists have supported a strategy involving sabotage.[18] This approach has the advantages of encouraging action rather than passivity, of attacking the direct manifestation of oppression without hurting people, and of causing economic harm to the owners of the technology. There are also some severe limitations to this approach. Because most saboteurs do not want to be caught, using sabotage fosters secrecy and individualism and makes groups vulnerable to infiltration. It can alienate potential supporters. Opponents of monkeywrenching routinely claim that it causes danger to life and limb, such as to workers in timber mills at risk due to hidden nails in trees. This rhetoric highlights the importance of not only being nonviolent but of being seen to be nonviolent.

For the purposes here, a key problem is that sabotage is negative: by itself, it offers no picture of a desirable society. The idea of technology for nonviolent struggle, by contrast, is based directly on such a picture.

There are some principled saboteurs, such as the peace activists who hammer missile nose cones, pour blood on military files or damage rail lines used to transport nuclear materials, and who after taking action then fully acknowledge their responsibility and surrender themselves to police.[19] These sorts of actions can be thought of as a form of civil disobedience, with the primary impact occurring through symbolism rather than economic disruption.