Threat or Opportunity: non-violent protest?

[davidbfpo]

An intriguing FP post, which opens with:

As nonviolent revolutions have swept long-ruling regimes from power in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the rulers of nearby Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, the world's attention has been drawn to the causes -- generations of repressive rule -- and tools -- social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter -- animating the wave of revolt....

The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries, is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists.

Curiously the group hails from Serbia.

Link:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...ion_u?page=0,1

We have touched upon the state's responses in other threads, looked at the media, speculated on the motivation of the protesters, but not the methods used by them.

I would expect some security analysts in the Middle East - at least - are studying a lot more.

How will those who would seek power, maybe hiding their intentions and methods, respond to this model? In particular those who preach violence.

I tried to locate CANVAS website and each visit hit a barrier. So I used the cached edition of:http://www.canvasopedia.org/

Meantime this link is to an Egyptian protest manual (with translation), although some steps on meeting the police I expect were revised: http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...nslated/70388/