Titled 'Campaign Tactics'. Illustration of a loudhailer with different objects floating out of it including icons for a phone, video play, clock and cog. Leaning against the lip of the loudhailer is a target board with an arrow in the centre and there are a few gold coins lying on the ground beneath it.

Campaign Tactics

By ,

Introduction

Learn all about tactics for your campaigns including how to adapt their tone for different events and explore different examples.

This article has been sourced from Daniel Hunter’s book published by 350.org called The Climate Resistance Handbook. Read below or see Chapter 3 on Growth and pages 47 – 60. The images have been added by the Commons Library. Headings and photos have been added by the Commons Library.

Tactics

I love thinking about Tactics. Tactics are actions or events we organise, like marches or strikes or sit-ins. Here, I’ll use the words actions or tactics to mean the same thing.

Some people think that tactics are the building blocks of campaigns. But I don’t believe that’s true. I believe relationships are the building blocks of campaigns.

What tactics do is give an expression to the feelings we carry in those relationships. Tactics carry with them a tone.

  • Are we angry?
  • Are we feeling light-hearted?
  • Are we feeling urgent and serious?

Tactics are really like a kind of broad communication. They communicate with the broader audience — those people on different parts of the spectrum of allies. They are how we move from just thinking or believing something to carrying it out.

They are, therefore, also about power. Tactics are where we show our power and, in that way, try to pressure our opponents into doing the right thing.

Occupy Movement

Yotam Marom is an experienced organiser and was a leader in the Occupy movement, which began with an occupation in New York City’s Wall Street fnancial district. The Occupy movement exposed the dissatisfaction with the current economic system and laid blame squarely on the 1% who own and control the levers of politics and economic systems.

He’s written about some of the shortcomings of that movement, including some important refections on tactics:

“A big part of what made Occupy Wall Street work was the occupation. It created a way to capture our anger and vision, brought people together, and gave people a reason to learn about organizing. It pointed a finger at our opponent, and broke the rules of business as usual.

And it was spreadable — so anyone could become part of the movement, at least in theory. But it was part of our undoing as well.

We were wed to a single tactic, and that made us less flexible. The tactic was hard to maintain, it took enormous energy, and it didn’t always match local contexts.

Our occupation a few blocks away from the bull on Wall street tells a particular story,  but what does an occupation of a parking lot outside a grocery store in Indiana tell?”

Because we had relied on it too strongly, we hadn’t developed any other effective ways to recruit and organize people.

In other words, the tactic became the movement. It lost its meaning to the public, and it also gave our enemy a clear way to take us apart. If the tactic becomes the movement, all you have to do is kill the tactic and the movement goes with it.

Credit: Glenn Halog, CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED

Movements that get too associated with a single tactic lose the ability to improvise. Anyone can get too used to whatever we know. And doing something new is risky. If we do something different, we may not be seen in a positive light, or we may lose some people who liked the old thing we were doing.

But using the same tactics over and over again usually gives us similar (or smaller) results. And change requires shaking things up.

In one group I worked with, we made a vow to never do a march or rally. Why? Because we wanted to stay fresh. We wanted to make sure that our opponents had never seen anything like us before. We wanted to keep them of-balance and never knowing what to expect from us. So we created dozens of new actions (and, in truth, we did a few marches and rallies).

More Tactics Examples

So here are just a few examples of tactics you may not have heard of:

  • The Honk-In
    In Lebanon, citizens honked their horns at members of parliament to tell them, “Your time is over.” The tactic grew until wherever the MPs went they were honked at. Some changed license plates to try to avoid being honked at everywhere.
  • Stripping Naked
    In northern Uganda, there have been ongoing land disputes since the days of colonialism. A rich businessman illegally claimed ownership of land. Protests erupted. Police were called and sided with the businessman. The local community made a roadblock. The police and military soldiers tried to push through. That’s when several elder women stripped naked. This is a powerful cultural curse, a thing of shame to see. On sight, the minister involved in the deal broke into tears and pleaded. Soon after, the community regained title of their land (and some of the soldiers apologised).
  • Picketing Police Houses
    Members of the movement organisation Otpor, in Serbia, were regularly beaten up by police in their quest to kick out the dictator Milosevic. As a tactic to try to move the police to their side, they enlarged photos of injuries made by police. They carried these photos outside the homes of the offending police officers, so their neighbours could see what they were up to. And Otpor even escalated that tactic. They would found the school that the most brutal police officers’ children attended. They go there with signs and ask the schoolchildren, “They’re beating up young people like us, is that okay?” This applied social pressure and resulted in police eventually disobeying orders and hastening the overthrow of dictator Milosevic.
  • Twitter Debate 
    In Kenya, a group fighting the Lamu coal plant hosted a “twitter debate.” At an appointed hour, organisers would propose a topic. Ten their members would debate the issue over twitter. This allowed people from different universities to participate at the same time. It was a chance to see people’s arguments. And it increased members’ knowledge and prepared them to bring new people into the movement.
  • Fracking Magic 
    The campaign against fracking in Brazil escalated. When the government tried to auction some of the land for fracking, the organisers came up with a wild idea. Magicians make impossible things happen. They figured the government officials were pretending to be magicians by saying that you could frack the Amazon rainforest and not destroy the environment. So they decided they would interrupt the auction and do magic tricks and throw magical glitter over the proceedings. (They almost did it — when the government got word of the action and negotiated a settlement. The organisers deemed the agreement a big success.)

Actions have a Tone

All of these actions have a tone.

While the Brazilian anti-fracking activists were being sarcastic and funny, the Ugandan land activists were being very serious. Can you imagine being the Otpor activists staged outside of the houses of police who had beaten you up? This required them to be very brave — and they did it in a very serious, even defiant and angry way.

As you’re developing a tactic, you can pick your tone. This is a way that movements express the feelings of the people.

Take a simple march. It’s a tactic where people go from one place to another place. But the tone can be very different:

  • Water is Life 
    Canadian protestors decided to pressure their newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It was just a few days after he was elected. But they didn’t want to wait around. They wanted to pressure him right away. So over several days, they stood outside his residence, asking him to become a climate champion. On each day, the protests were led by prayers from indigenous leaders. On the third day, the protestors carried water with them. The water came from vulnerable areas where fossil fuel companies wanted to exploit the land.

    Tearful prayers and heart-filled stories of the water echoed as people marched to Trudeau’s residence. The tone was somber.

  • Raise the Heat 
    In Australia, there was a major fight to stop nine new coal plants in the Galilee Basin. With a hostile government and well-connected coal companies, it would be hard to stop. Protestors decided that in order to stop the plants, they would target the banks funding the projects. One of the biggest was CommBank. And during a week of “Raise  the Heat” actions, protestors in the city of Canberra donned black formal clothing and yellow scarves or hats. They brought along percussion instruments for a lively march to the CommBank offices. And they brought a coffin full of fake coal — to symbolise this dead investment.

    a group of protestors standing outside the Commonwealth Bank wearing Commonwealth Bank logo hats and holding a banner. The banner reads 'Week of action: Turn up the heat on Commbank'.They are also holding numbers - $14202 000 000. The numbers are decorated with fire.

    Credit: 350.org Australia

    The action had music and was a mix of serious but also hopeful. The tone was future-oriented and stating the positive vision of a world without coal.

  • Dracula Strategy 
    In France, pressure was mounting to scrap any new fossil fuel projects. Protestors had just waged a multi-year campaign to halt fracking and were ready for more. So activists saw a chance when the fossil fuel companies hosted a major summit on ofshore drilling. All the big fossil fuel companies would be there, like Total, Shell, BP, and Exxon Mobil.350 organiser Nicolas Haeringer describes their strategy as “Les vampires sont tués par lumière,” which means “Vampires are killed by light.” They decided to be highly confrontational to raise the profile of all these vile companies meeting.

    Activists planned sit-ins and major blockades. They added marches to the mix, some building up to attempts to get past police barriers and get into the meetings. In this context, marches were confrontational, even angry. The tone was defiance and anger.

  • The Threatening Thank You  
    I was part of a campaign where our reluctant City Council had done (nearly) everything we asked of them. It was strange, because they were definitely not allies. But they felt our pressure and so gave in to our demands. At the end of the year, we wanted an action to let them know the pressure was still on them. But it wasn’t like they were a hostile target. So what did we do? We created cardboard “Standing with the People” awards. We made one for each City Council member. We marched outside City Hall — then entered City Council during their regular proceedings. We interrupted the meeting by shouting down the head of council. We announced we were giving them awards! We quickly gave each council member their own award, before the police escorted us all out.

    It was a message of encouragement and a threat. The tone was kind, laced with warning.

As you can see, the same tactic can easily have a wide range of tones.  You can pick the tone through the symbols, actions, speakers, and framing of the action. In this way, you can connect to the feeling of the people you are organising — because actions are about expression of what is inside of people.

This is important, because the issue of climate disaster always has feelings of despair somewhere in the mix. People worry that “It’s too late” to save our planet. We need to strike the right tone with where our people are.

A forced tone of hope, for example, can leave people feeling worse. If we say, “We can win!” and never speak to people’s fear that we may not win, we can leave them in worse shape.

The Pacific Climate Warriors have been an inspiration to me on this point. Many of them live on islands that are threatened to go under as the sea levels rise. They have created a phrase: “We are not drowning, we are fighting.” It’s a tone of defiance — one that isn’t accepting being seen as victims.

A group of people from Nukunonu, Tokelau standing in the water holding a banner that reads- We are not drowning. We are fighting!!

Credit: 350.org. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Rather than defaulting to a tone because it’s what you see others do, get in touch with your people and their feelings. Let the tone reflect what’s inside your people.

Adapt Tactics to External Events

Seeing how flexible we can be about tone helps us see that we can adapt tactics to fit our needs. The same tactic can be applied a lot of different ways. When we understand that, it gives us a lot of flexibility — even if we’re a tiny, local group.

I grew up in a small town. I used to believe that the big strategy decisions came from far away. It seemed like the big, urban cities or faraway networks decided what we should be doing (big global days of action or mass mobilisations). But when we learn to adapt tactics, we can be more flexible.

We can match the needs of the local campaigns with what’s happening at the national or global levels. For example, I’m part of a local climate justice organisation, Earth Quaker Action Team. There was a national pledge to try to stop the Keystone XL pipeline — a massive pipeline in the US that would transport up to 700,000 barrels of oil a day!

The pledge was a smart idea: Get people to commit to doing civil disobedience before the plans for the pipeline got approved. National organisers were encouraging people to sign up and mobilising for a big sit-in in Washington, DC.

Our local group wanted to support the efforts. We didn’t want to be left out of an important, exciting national campaign. Plus, we were colleagues and friends with people leading the amazing campaign to stop the Keystone XL. But… we also didn’t want to pause our own local campaign. We were really busy stopping a local bank from investing in mountaintop-removal coal mining. We had recently made some progress on our target. And our campaign had just grown a bunch of new members. We wanted to keep the energy going.

What to do? We needed a way to marry our local action with the national action. And we found it by turning to the Act-Recruit-Train
cycle. We needed to “Train” the new people we had just recruited. So we connected the national campaign’s ask (the pledge to do civil disobedience) to a training for people in our campaign.

We had people publicly sign the pledge, then did a practice civil disobedience action targeting the local office of the Keystone XL target (the US State Department). We swept their offices (to try to clean out the corruption) until police escorted us out of the building. We coupled the action with a long debrief to teach people about the theory of nonviolence and why we were a nonviolent direct action campaign.

It was a win/win.

The national groups got more signatures, more attention, and more people who were skilled in direct action. And our local campaign got a boost from new people who joined just because we were doing something on Keystone and used this moment to build new skills for our newer group members.

There are rarely perfect matches where everything goes smoothly. And sometimes it’s okay to make the decision to not be part of every national action or to drop some actions in your local activities. Those may be the right choices, too!

In Occupy, local groups experimented with changing the location. When Occupy launched in the US, some cities like Mineapolis and Atlanta launched variations. They would occupy homes where the big banks were foreclosing people. The tactic became a practical way to help people keep their homes.

The concept here is important: Make actions yours. Fit them with your local needs and situation.

This is especially important as local climate disasters strike and we need to adapt. Learning this skill helps us organise more successful actions. And that presents its own challenges.

Plan Two Actions Ahead

After a successful action, the most common question I get is: “So what’s the next action?”

As an organiser, I hate not having an answer to this. It’s a wasted opportunity when we have to reply: “We’ll let you know. Look out on Facebook.” How much better to have this answer: “Save next Friday for another action!” (or, at least, “Come to our meeting next week to help us figure it out”).

Because of this, I recommend that groups try to plan two actions ahead of time. That way, when the first happens, the second is already planned.

The power of tactics as part of a strategy really comes into focus when we string them together. Each tactic can build on the other to increase its power.

Actions that are announced far enough ahead of time also give time for our opponents to worry, too. Organiser Saul Alinsky used to say: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”

Casino Campaign Example

Here’s an example of how these work together. Years ago, I worked on an unusually planned campaign. This campaign shows the elements we’ve been talking about — spectrum of allies, recruiting outside your circle, the upside-down triangle. This plan was adapted by several generations of organisers, including Canadian nonviolent strategist Philippe Duhamel. It’s been taken and adapted by other campaigns (maybe yours will use it!).

We had two giant unwanted casinos proposed for our city. The community was locked out at every step. No public input. No engagement. We were expected to roll over and give up.

We wanted more than a rally. We wanted a way to embed our movement’s values in our action.

We decided on our target: the politicians who had approved casinos. And we looked at the pillars of support. The casinos had basically everyone in their corner: city officials, state officials, media, judges, academics… just about everyone with any power. It seemed hopeless. And it was all happening so fast we didn’t have time to process the information. (Sound familiar?)

So we set up a dilemma. We gave a one-month notice that we wanted the release of all the documents that had been kept secret. These documents included site plans, social impact studies, environmental plans, architectural renderings, and economic studies.

“We are asking for all these documents to be made public by December 1 at high noon,” we announced. “If they are not, then we will be forced to get them ourselves, going to the Gaming Control Board headquarters and performing a citizens’ document search to liberate them.”

We created a timeline of actions. And because we were standing for transparency, we made it public for everyone to see.

Here’s a quick review of how our actions went down:

  • October 30 – Trick or Treat: Deliver Ultimatum
    We brought Halloween treats and magnifying glasses to the mayor and City Council. Oh — and we used the mayor’s fax machine (it’s ours, after all!) to fax our demand to the Governor that all documents be made public by December 1 or we would be forced to search for them ourselves. A few press outlets covered us. Only five or six people joined this action (and, to be fair, two of them were my roommates).
  • November 13 – Gaming Board “Public” Hearings
    We tried to avoid responding to the opposition’s timeline too much. Sticking to our timeline made us stronger. But they were holding a big hearing, and we figured people would attend. So we planned an action. We jumped out with magnifying glasses and playfully tried to search all the casino executives and lawyers going into the meeting (“Do you have the documents?” we asked, with our magnifying glasses aloft). Press started to ask us serious questions. And a few allies started to listen when we asked them for their support. Two other people agreed to do the document search with us.
  • November 20 – Delivery of Petitions and Washing Windows for Transparency
    We went to the Gaming Control Board offices… to wash their windows. You know — to help them become more transparent. (We delivered petitions, too.) This was a lot of fun — and around this time, people started to get excited about what we were doing. Our tone was light and playful. And our actions were getting good press coverage. We used the press as a way to pressure our target (we urged reporters to ask them tough questions). And we kept knocking on neighbours’ doors to join us.
    Most had now heard about us and, if they were not supportive, were curious.
  • November 23 – Thanksgiving to Whistleblowers of the World
    We wrote letters of support, encouraging people inside the Gaming Control Board to become whistleblowers. We gave them brown envelopes to send back to us with the documents.Honestly, we barely pulled this of. Te timeline was too quick (just three days after the other action? I would never do it so fast again!). But at least we followed through on our commitment.
  • December 1 End of Ultimatum
    We had stated publicly that if the documents were not made public, then we would be forced to announce our intention to search for them ourselves. But note that on this day, we didn’t do the action. We just had a press conference. We were using time to our advantage — making our opponents more nervous (“What comes next?”). And the time helped our reluctant allies. Tis was the first day any politicians started to endorse our campaign.
  • December 10 – Training in Nonviolent Document Search
    Training is so important! We learn things — and the training was a chance to recruit more people. Tree new people signed up to do the action after seeing the training!
  • December 11 – Nonviolent Document Search
    Our action was our message. We attempted to go up to their offices and liberate the documents.

The dilemma placed our opposition in a double-bind. If the Gaming Control Board kept the documents secret, they confirmed public suspicions that they were hiding something nefarious. If they released the documents, we achieved a win for transparency. Heads we win, tails you lose.

And what happened?

The Gaming Control Board did not want to give us the documents. They called the police, who arrested fourteen of us (we were charged with minor rule-breaking). But in the following days, people came out in support of us. More elected offcials. More union members. Environmentalists began to see the damage these casinos would cause. And timid politicians, like weather vanes, pointed our way.

The campaign for transparency came to a close when the Gaming Control Board released almost every document we asked for. But campaigns don’t end there. Campaigns create new campaigns — and it was a multi-year struggle for us to win, just like it will be for us on climate change.

And in the campaign, you can see how these pieces come together:

– setting a tone (ours was playful),

– adapting tactics to external dates (integrating the hearing with our schedule), and

– planning tactics ahead of time (if we hadn’t, I’m sure we would not have been able to keep going).

One more theory about tactics will help as we find the right tactics for us.

Dilemma Demonstrations

You have probably seen groups block roads or do sit-ins at politicians’ offices. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t — that’s true for any tactic.

But one thing that often is likely to turn of our spectrum of allies is when we get in their way but don’t seem to have a legitimate reason why. We know that our cause is right — but it matters to our campaign how our potential allies see our tactics.

I often think of a time I watched fellow protestors blocking traffic when the Republican Party was visiting my hometown. The protestors wanted to create a disruption. But the people being disrupted were fellow Philadelphians. One shouted from her window the sentiment of many people in my city, “I hate the Republicans, too — but I need to go pick up my kids.”

The tactic didn’t have its intended effect. We can’t eliminate this possibility. But we can reduce it.

Perhaps one of the core lessons to learn for movements wishing to engage in confrontation is how to create dilemma demonstrations.

Dilemma demonstrations are actions that force the target to either let you do what you want, or to be shown as unreasonable as they stop you from doing it. Dilemma demonstrations provide an advantage either way the opponent responds.

The Civil Rights sit-in activists go into a luncheonette and demand a cup of coffee. If they get the cup of coffee, great — another discriminatory practice falls! If they get arrested or beaten up instead, the activists still gain an advantage. The violence that underlies racism is exposed, and the movement grows.

The secret in designing a dilemma is that the campaigners need to create an advantage for themselves no matter what happens.

It wouldn’t work if the demonstrators couldn’t create an advantage either way — if the sit-in organisers, for example, regarded getting the coffee (or being beaten and jailed) as a defeat.

In the transparency campaign against the casinos, the document search action was doing the thing we wanted done.
This is at the heart of most powerful direct actions. These are vastly different from tactics like rallies, marches, or vigils, which are symbolic in nature. And they’re different from other direct actions like a generic blockade, which impedes motorists but whose goal isn’t made clear by the action.

Dilemma demonstrations take a piece of our vision and implement it. That gives them action logic. Action logic is the degree to which the outsider can understand the meaning of the action because its message is embedded in the action itself, not in a sign.

Dilemma demonstrations have been used to great effect:

  • Faced with a giant pipeline being built through their territories, Standing Rock Sioux elder LaDonna Brave Bull Allard established a camp. The camp was a physical barrier blocking the pipeline, but it was more than that. It was a camp for cultural preservation and spiritual resistance. The camp became an international symbol, even as the actual camp was also a physical bulwark against the pipeline.
  • Dilemma demonstrations have been done again in the same campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline. Indigenous communities, landowners, farmers, along with supporting organizations, launched Solar XL. This time they are putting up active solar panels (“a wave of renewable energy resistance”) directly in the route of the proposed pipeline. In each case, the opponents have a dilemma: wipe out a camp or solar panels — or let them block the pipeline?
  • Gandhi was a tactical genius and created a brilliant dilemma demonstration. The British occupation of India oppressed his people in many ways. He wanted to find an action that could be replicated in other places, would be meaningful, and would challenge British power. He knew salt was something everyone needed to live. And the British made a lot of money because they were the only ones allowed to sell salt. So he began a whole campaign of people making their own salt. If they had been allowed to make salt, they would have been delighted. But the British empire chose repression — and that shredded the idea that the British had a right to rule India and hastened their departure.
  • Neo-Nazis regularly marched in a small town in Germany. The population was not happy about it. But counter-protesting them never amounted to much. So activist group Recht gegen Rechts (Right against Right) came up with a different strategy — an “involuntary walkathon.” For each meter the Neo-Nazis marched, money was donated to an organisation that specialised in helping former Neo-Nazis get away from that movement. The dilemma was clear: If they chose to march, it created funds. But if they chose not to march, well, that’s what the town wanted all along.
  • A neighbourhood in my city of Philadelphia didn’t have trash or recycling picked up. They organised a neighbourhood trash pickup and sent a bill for the services they provided. When it wasn’t paid, they dumped next week’s trash in front of City Hall. The city found money to do trash collection the next week!
  • The Pacific Climate Warriors found a dilemma demonstration by reaching back to their old traditions to save their islands. With support from elders, they built hand-carved traditional canoes. Warriors from 12 different nations took those canoes to Newcastle, Australia. That’s one of the largest coal ports in the world.

    For a day, the warriors took the canoes and blockaded the coal port — confronting gigantic coal ships that pass through the channel. Their action was their message: the future is rooted in our past traditions, not more coal.

Newcastle flotilla: canoes vs coal ships
During the visit by the Pacific Warriors in October 2014. Credit: Kate Ausburn, Attribution 2.0 Generic

When we manage to find dilemma demonstrations, we strengthen our campaigns. These actions are impossible for our opposition to ignore — and force them to make a difficult choice (repress us, or allow the movement to make a concrete achievement).

About Book

This article is from the Climate Resistance Handbook which brings together a wealth of learnings from the climate justice movement. It starts with breaking social myths about how social movements win. Then dives into campaign tools and frameworks you can use. It closes with how to grow your group and use creative, impactful actions and tactics. This book is full of stories of climate warriors from around the globe and historical movements. It’s filled with practical wisdom and inspiration to make you more effective, more active, and ready for what’s next.

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The Commons Library has featured parts of the book as separate articles.

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This article can be read in different languages. See pages 12 – 18 from the book links below. Please Note: With different translations these page numbers may vary slightly.

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