The next speaker in our Introducing the Speakers series is a nonviolent resistance expert from Serbia, Srdja Popovic. Srdja was one of the founders and key organisers with the Serbian student nonviolent resistance group Otpor! Their nonviolent campaign to unseat Serbian president Slobodan Milosovic met with success in October 2000 when hundreds of thousands of protestors converged upon and took over the Serbian Parliament, effectively ending Milosevic’s rule. After the revolution Popovic served a term as member of the Serbian National Assembly between 2000-2003.
Following the success of the nonviolent movement in his home country, Srdja began advising people in other countries interested in nonviolent resistance, including Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Burma, Iran, and Venezuela. Together with other ex-Otpor! activists, he founded a non-profit educational institution called the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS). CANVAS has now worked with people from 37 different countries on spreading the knowledge of nonviolent strategies and tactics used by the Serbian pro-democracy movement.
The success of the Arab Spring this year demonstrated just how far “People Power”, or nonviolent struggle, can go. Over the last 35 years, nonviolent struggle has been a more powerful force than military struggle in 67 transitions – including Poland’s in 1989 – and has reached a new peak in the new wave of democratisation we witnessed in the Arab Spring. At TEDxKraków, Srdja will speak about how particularly after the Arab Spring, “People Power” is becoming the new normal form of popular uprising.