Like any strategic approach, this approach works best in specific conditions. In particular it works most effectively in challenging a regime, law or practice maintained by violence, because that very violence plays into the kind of ‘throwing technique’ whereby the non-violent activist uses the state’s own violence against it. Such movements can thus, by disobeying the unjust law, take the violence that necessarily maintains it – violence that is normally concealed behind acquiescence to the law – and abruptly surface it. Notably in the above examples, protestors are not doing something unrelated to their cause to draw attention but rather in refusing to support the day-to-day function of colonial rule or by sitting at a specific lunch counter these actions surface the specific violence maintaining that specific law. It follows that laws, practices or regimes whose connection to violence is more indirect are much harder to challenge with these strategies.7 Because – and this is important to continue stressing – these methods are about messaging because the ‘target’ is will, so the clarity of the message matters quite a lot.
7. Perhaps the classic example are climate protests blocking traffic: the relationship between the disruption and the protest action, while not non-existent, is obscure. When protestors are arrested, it is not because of the violence inherent in carbon emissions, but because blocking traffic is illegal which prompts observers not to assess if carbon policy is unjust (probably), but if laws against blocking traffic are unjust (probably not). It is a lot harder to protest complex economic interactions precisely because the violence sustaining those interactions (to the degree they are sustained by violence at all) is very indirect and remote and thus hard to directly and visibly surface.
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