Guide
2021
How Agent Provocateurs Harm Our Movements
Some Historical Examples and a Few Ideas on Reducing the Risk
By Steve Chase
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Steve Chase’s book is valuable in this new period when governments are likely to plant agent provocateurs. Steve’s alternatives to ‘security culture’ (which breaks down trust we need for strong movement organizations) become all the more important.”
About the book
History shows us that peoples’ movements are more likely to succeed when they have unity among supporters, widespread participation, strategic planning, and nonviolent discipline. Unsurprisingly, movement opponents use agent provocateurs—fake activists working undercover—to behave in counterproductive ways that undermine these four keys to success. Drawing from international examples and an in-depth case study of the US Black Liberation Movement, this volume explores how agent provocateurs—and agent provocateur-like behavior—make movements smaller, weaker, and easier to defeat. It also offers some ideas for how activists can inoculate their movements against such harms and increase their chances of success.
Countries
United States
Regions
North America
Also in
Spanish, Turkish
Written for
Activists
About the author
Steve Chase
Steve Chase is a long-time activist, educator, and writer. He has been an editor at South End Press, the founding director of Antioch University’s master’s level activist training program in Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability, and the Manager of Academic Initiatives for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. He is currently the Assistant Director of Solidarity 2020 and Beyond, a solidarity network and community of practice for grassroots movement organizers in the Global South using advocacy, peacebuilding, and nonviolent resistance to win sustainability, rights, freedom, and justice. He is also a contributor to Minds of the Movement and Waging Nonviolence.
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La historia muestra que los movimientos tienen más probabilidades de triunfar cuando cuentan con unidad entre sus simpatizantes, participación generalizada, planificación estratégica y disciplina noviolenta. Como era de esperar, los opositores de los movimientos usan agentes provocadores —falsos activistas que trabajan encubiertos— para inducir comportamientos contraproducentes que socavan estas cuatro claves del éxito.
