Red Emma’s

“Spontaneous.” “Amorphous.” “Uncontrolled.” “Leaderless.” “Emotional.” Whether it is a rush of resistance to dictatorship across the Middle East, a million people demanding immigrant rights in Los Angeles, a call for elections in a former Soviet republic, an encampment on Wall Street that gives rise to hundreds of tent cities in the US, or an insistent cry that #BlackLivesMatter, the perception is the same: When mass movements erupt, the media portrays them as being as sudden and unmanageable as a viral epidemic. Mark and Paul Engler challenge and redefine the activist stereotype in This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century. Part history of rebellion, part guide map to successful political change, the Englers lay out their revolutionary framework for effective mobilization—what they call momentum-driven organizing—in what Bill McKibben has deemed “a landmark book.” Drawing on discussions with today’s most prominent activists and providing new insights into groundbreaking figures such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Gene Sharp (also known as the “Machiavelli of nonviolence”), and Frances Fox Piven, the Englers show how people with few resources and little conventional influence can engineer the upheavals that will reshape contemporary politics—with the right plan, skill, and carefully conscious effort outlined in This is an Uprising.