The Movement Action Plan:
A Strategic Framework Describing The 
Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements

The United States anti-nuclear energy movement was launched in the Spring of 1977, when 1,414 Clamshell Alliance activists occupied the Seabrook nuclear power site and spent the next 12 days in jail. During those two weeks, nuclear energy became a worldwide public issue as the mass media spotlight focused on the activists locked in armories throughout New Hampshire. Support demonstrations popped up across the United States, and in the following months hundreds of new grassroots anti-nuclear energy direct action groups started. 

The Clamshell Alliance was considered a prototype of the new movement. Activists throughout the country idealized the accomplishments of the Clamshell activists. They had created a new nationwide uprising against nuclear energy, the powerful nuclear energy industry, and the national government's goal (set by "Operation Independence") of 1,000 nuclear power plants by the turn of the century. Until then nuclear power had the public's approval and had not been a social issue. We wondered howon Earth they did it. I eagerly looked forward to attending the strategy conference in February, 1978, with 45 Clamshell organizers from around New England. 

I wondered how I could convince these activists, in my scheduled talk the next morning, that they were extremely successful and considered national heroes by many in the new movement. I stayed up most of that night creating a model framework (now called "MAP") that describes stages that successful social movements go through. I presented the model the next morning, explaining how, led by Clamshell, a new movement was created; how in one year it had achieved most of the goals of stage four; and how it was about to move the next stage—majority opposition. The stages framework helped empower many of the Clamshell activists and helped them create a new strategy. 

The Clamshell experience of discouragement and collapse is far from unusual. Within a few years after achieving the goals of "take-off", every major social movement of the past twenty years has undergone a significant collapse, in which activists believed that their movements had failed, the power institutions were too powerful, and their own efforts were futile. This has happened even when movements were actually progressing reasonably well along the normal path taken by past successful movements! 

The Movement Action Plan (MAP) was first published as the Fall 1986 edition of the Dandelion. Twelve-thousand copies were published and distributed. This is a revised edition of that article. People are invited to participate in the continuing development of MAP and help spread it to local groups. 

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
Social movements are collective actions in which the populace is alerted, educated, and mobilized, over years and decades, to challenge the powerholders and the whole society to redress social problems or grievances and restore critical social values.Students, young people and scientists play an important role in social initiatives. Each of them often chooses a narrow specialization to solve urgent social problems. They are often involved in socio-political projects, so they can sometimes buy term papers online at the end of the school year. By involving the populace directly in the political process, social movements also foster the concept of government of, by, and for the people. The power of movements is directly proportional to the forcefulness with which the grassroots exert their discontent and demand change. The central issue of social movements, therefore, is the struggle between the movement and the powerholders to win the hearts (sympathies), minds (public opinion), and active support of the great majority of the populace, which ultimately holds the power to either preserve the status quo or create change. 

There needs to be a revival of democracy through "people power".The increasingly centralized power of the state and other social institutions, combined with the new use of the mass media to carry out the political process, has all but eliminated effective citizen participation in the decision-making process. Centralized powerholders now make decisions in the interests of a small minority, while simultaneously undermining the common good and aggravating critical social problems. 

But people are powerful. Power ultimately resides with the populace. History is full of examples of an inspired citizenry involved in social movements that achieve social and political changes—even topple tyrannical governments. Powerholders know this. They know that their power depends on the support or acquiescence of the mass population. 

Nonviolent social movements are a powerful means for preserving democracy and making societies address critical social problems. They enable citizens to challenge the prevailing centers of power and become active in society's decision-making process, especially at times when the normal channels for their political participation are ineffective. Social movements mobilize citizens and public opinion to challenge powerholders and the whole society to adhere to universal values and sensibilities and redress social problems. At their best, they create an empowered citizenry, shifting the locus of social and political power from central elites and institutions to new grassroots networks and groups. In recent years, social movements have helped establish many civil rights for Blacks and women, end the Vietnam War, curb U.S. military interventions, and topple dictators in Haiti and the Philippines. Presently, there are strong movements opposing nuclear weapons, nuclear power, South African apartheid, and U.S. intervention in Central America, among others. 

THE NEED FOR A STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK
How-to-do-it models and manuals provide step-by-step guidelines for most human activity, from baking a cake and playing tennis to having a relationship and winning a war.While there have been some models available for organizing nonviolent actions, based on Gandhi and King, and organizing communities, based on Alinsky and Ross, there have been no such analytic tools for evaluating and organizing social movements. 

The lack of a practical analytic model which describes the long process normally taken by successful social movements disempowers activists and limits the effectiveness of their movements. Without the guiding framework that explains the step-by-step process that social movements go through, many activists are unable to identify successes already achieved, set long and short term goals, confidently develop strategies, tactics, and programs, and avoid common pitfalls. 

Many experienced activists are "take-off junkies". They know how to create new social movements, but they do not know how to wage long-term movements that progress through a series of successive stages and win actual positive change. Within two years after "take-off", most activists inevitably perceive that their movement is failing, and their own efforts are futile. This leads to burnout, dropout, and the dissipation of movements. Astoundingly, this happens even when social movements are progressing reasonably well along the road normally taken by successful social movements in the past! Consequently, many activists keep repeating the cycle of "take-off" to "despair and burnout" with each succeeding new movement. MAP can enable activists to be social-change agents who help their movements progress through all the stages of social movements. 

There is another problem we hope MAP alleviates. Most social problems need to be resolved through changes in policies and structures at the national level. But the national power of social movements comes from the strength of its local groups; national social movements are only as powerful as their grassroots, yet grassroots groups often are unable to make a connection between their own efforts and what happens at the national and international level. It all seems too distant and unconnected. The Movement Action Plan, however, enables local activists to clearly see a direct connection between their own efforts and their impact at the national level. 

THE MOVEMENT ACTION PLAN (MAP)
The Movement Action Plan provides activists with a practical, how-to-do-it analytic tool for evaluating and organizing social movements that are focused on national and international issues, such as nuclear energy and weapons, nonintervention in Central America, civil and human rights, AIDS, democracy and freedom, apartheid, or ecological responsibility. 

MAP describes eight stages through which social movements normally progress over a period of years and decades. For each state, MAP describes the role of the public, powerholders, and the movement. It provides organizers with a map of the long road of successful movements, which helps them guide their movement along the way. 

Most social movements are not just in one stage. Movements usually have many demands for policy changes, and their efforts for each demand are in a specific stage. The different demands of the Central America solidarity movement, for example, might be in the following stages:prevent U.S. military invasion of Nicaragua (middle of stage seven), stop aid to the contras (stage six), and a positive peace resolution in Central America (stage three). 

For each of the movement's major demands or goals, MAP enables activists to evaluate the movement and identify which stage it is in; identify successes already achieved; develop effective strategies, tactics, and programs; establish short and long-term goals; and avoid common pitfalls. 

Social movements do not fit neatly into MAP's eight stages or move through them in a linear way. Social movements are more dynamic. Movements have a number of different demands, and the effort for each demand is in a different MAP stage. When movements achieve one demand, they focus on achieving other demands that are at earlier stages. For example, in 1960, the civil rights movement's restaurant sin-in campaign successfully went through all the stages. This was repeated over the next years with buses and public accommodations, and it was repeated again in the 1965 voting rights movement, whose take-off began in March with the Selma demonstrations and ended in August with a Voting Rights Act. 

Finally, MAP is only a theoretical model, built from past experience. Real-life social movements will neither fit exactly nor move through the stages linearly, smoothly, or precisely in the manner outlined. 

The purpose of MAP is to give activists hope and empowerment, increase the effectiveness of social movements, and reduce the discouragement that often contributes to individual burnout, dropout, and the winding down of social movements. 

TWO VIEWS OF POWER
Many activists simultaneously hold two contrasting models of power—power elite and people power. Each of these views, however, leads to opposite movement strategies and target constituencies. 

The Power Elite Model holds that society is organized in the form of a hierarchical pyramid, with powerful elites at the top and the relatively powerless mass populace at the bottom. The elites, through their dominant control of the state, institutions, laws, myths, traditions, and social norms, serve the interests of the elites, often to the disadvantage of the whole society. Power flows from the top to bottom. 

Since people are powerless, social change can be achieved only by appealing to the elites at the top to change their policies through normal channels and institutions, such as the electoral process, lobbying Congress, and use of the courts. The target constituency is the powerholders, and the method is persuasion, either convincing existing powerholders to change their view or to elect new powerholders. The chief opposition organizations are professional opposition organizations (POOs), which have national offices and staff in Washington, D.C., with regional offices around the country. 

The People Power Model holds that power ultimately resides in the mass populace. Even in societies with strong power elites, such as the United States or Marcos-led Philippines, the powerholders' power is dependent on the cooperation, acquiescence, or support of the mass public. This model is represented by an inverse triangle, with the people at the top and the power elite at the bottom. 

People power is the model used by social movements. The movement's strategy is not only to use normal channels in an effort to persuade powerholders such as President Reagan to change their minds, but also to alert, educate, and mobilize a discontented, impassioned, and determined grassroots population using nonviolent means beyond the normal parliamentary methods institutions. 

THE MOVEMENT'S SOURCE OF POWER
The source of power of social movements lies in two human qualities:

• A strong sense of right and wrong. People have deeply felt beliefs and values, and they react with extreme passion and determination when they realize that these values are violated.
• We understand the world and reality, in large part, through symbolism.

• The first line of defense is through a strategy of "bureaucratic management" to prevent the issue from becoming a public issue. This is achieved by (1) "internalized obedience," keeping the problem out of the public's view of the world and thereby out of people's consciousness; (2) keeping issues out of the public spotlight and off the society's agenda; and (3) keeping the issue off of society's political agenda of hotly contested issues.
• Some of the means used by the powerholders to achieve this strategy are the following:(1) maintain hegemony of information available to the public through the media; (2) deny that the problem exists (e.g., "no arms have been sent to Iran"); (3) create "societal myths" which define the problem for the public exactly the opposite of reality, such as calling the contras "freedom fighters" or saying that the Marcos Duvallier governments were part of the "free world"; and (4) create the threat of demons, such as Communism and terrorism, to install fear in the general population so that they will unquestioningly support whatever policies the powerholders take.
• After a policy becomes a public issue, the powerholders are forced to switch to a "crisis management" strategy by doing the following:(1) vindicate unjust policies through "justification myths", which explain that their policies are needed to overcome a bigger evil (e.g., "we need to support President Marcos, a minor dictator, to prevent the worse evil of the Communist takeover in the Philippines"); (2) re-emphasize old demons or create new ones; (3) create trigger events to justify a new policy and to get public consent, such as when the American Government got the support of the American people for escalating the Vietnam War by proclaiming that American ships were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin; (4) overcome public opposition by first ignoring then discrediting, destabilizing, and if necessary, repressing the movement; (5) appearing to be involved in a resolution process through promises, new rhetoric, appointing studies and commissions, and negotiations, as in the Geneva nuclear arms reduction meetings; (6) make minor changes through reforms, compromises, and cooptation of opponents; and (7) coopt the opposition.
• The chief means by which the powerholders maintain unjust policies and keep them hidden from the public is by having a two-track system of "official" vs. "operative" doctrines and policies. (These are Noam Chomsky's terms.) Official policies are fictitious policies which are given to the general public. They are explained in high-sounding moral terms, such as democracy and freedom. Operative policies, on the other hand, are the government's actual policies, which are kept hidden from the public because they violate widely held values and therefore would upset most citizens. For example, after the Boland amendment was passed in 1984 forbidding U.S. governmental aid to the Nicaraguan contras, the Reagan administration adopted an official policy of not providing governmental aid; yet, the Irangate revelations have exposed the Administration's operative policy of providing massive covert government aid spearheaded by Ollie North and the National Security Council.

• Publicly show that the social conditions and powerholder policies violate values, traditions, and self-interests of the general public. This includes publicly revealing the difference between official and operative policies and doctrines.
• Keep the issue and moral violations in the public spotlight and on society' agenda of hotly contested issues.
• Keep the issue and powerholders' policies on society's political agenda, such as having aid to the contras voted on in Congress rather than carried out secretly by the CIA.
• Counter the powerholders' social myths, justifications, anddenials that the problem exists.
• Counter the powerholders' demonology. For example, the thousands of American "citizen diplomats" who visit Russia counter the Reagan demonology that the Soviets are monsters and an "evil empire" by revealing that the Russians are people like us.
• Involve increasingly larger portions of the public in programs that challenge the powerholders' policies and promote alternative visions and programs.
• Don't compromise too much too soon.
• After a large majority of public opinion is won, have an "endgame" strategy that mobilizes the populace and institutions to create change, despite the determined opposition of the central powerholders.
• Finally the movement's organizations and leadership, especially at the national and regional levels, should serve, nurture, and empower the grassroots activists and promote participatory democracy within the movement.

• to document that a serious problem exists,
• to maintain an active opposition no matter how small, and
• to move to the next stages.

• Undertake research to prove that a problem exists which violates social values and sensibilities.
• Prove that the official doctrine and policies of governmental powerholders and institutions violate society's values and the public trust. This must be not only from researching the facts but also from actually trying every avenue for official citizen participation in the democratic process for deciding on social policies and programs, and proving that they do not work.
• Testify, undertake challenges, and file complaints in every branch of the bureaucratic machinery at the local, state, and federal level of both public and private bodies that are supposed to be open for citizen participation and redress.
• Prove that they are "kangaroo courts". Go to every decision-making body whether welcome or not.
• File suit in the courts.
• Take their concerns to city council, state assembly, and national Congress. These programs are usually primarily carried out through the auspices of professional opposition organizations.

• Document the problem, including the involvement of the powerholders.
• Document the citizens' attempt to use the normal channels of citizen participation and prove that they did not work.
• Become experts.
• Build small opposition organizations.

• Holding the belief that social problems can be corrected by POOs using mainstream institutions and methods without building a new social consensus, mobilizing widespread grassroots opposition, and engaging in a long struggle, which uses extra-parliamentary nonviolent action that changes the present imbalance of power.
• Continuing to feel powerless and hopeless.

• There needs to be a growing consciousness and discontent among subpopulations of victims and their allies, providing them with a new level of understanding about the seriousness of the problem, the values violations, how they are affected, and the illicit involvement of the powerholders and their institutions. The discontent can be caused by (1) either perceived or real worsening conditions, which creates many new victims, such as in the 1970s when hundreds of new atomic plant sites upset millions of Americans who lived nearby; (2) rising expectations, as when the new wave of Black college students felt themselves to be full citizens but were refused the simple civil rights of service at local lunch counters; or (3) personalization of the problem, in which the problem is revealed through the experience of real victims, as when four church women were killed in El Salvador in 1980.
• The growing numbers of discontented local people across the country quietly start new autonomous local groups, which as a whole form a "new wave" of grassroots opposition, which is independent from the established POOs. These groups soon become frustrated with the official institutions, channels, and powerholders, which they realize are totally biased in support of the status quo; and they become The Movement Action Plan 15 increasingly upset with some of the established POOs, whom they see as working in a dead-end process with the powerholders.
• Small local prototype demonstrations and nonviolent action campaigns begin to dramatize the problem, put a dim public spotlight on it, and set a precedent for future actions.
• A few key facilitator-visionaries provide the new-wave local opposition with information, ideology, training, networking, hope, and a vision of a rising opposition.
• Pre-existing networks and groups, which can provide support, solidarity, and participants for a new movement, need to become available to be used in the new movement. The nonintervention movement, for example, had available for its take-off church networks, which had lots of experience in Central America, and activists who had been in the nuclear weapons and energy movements, both of which had just got out of their own take-off stages.

• Recognize historical conditions that help make a new movement possible.
• Create, inspire, and prepare the new wave groups, including the formation of new networks, leadership, and expertise that will spearhead the new movement.
• Prepare pre-existing networks to be concerned about the issue and involved in the upcoming movement.
• Personalize the problem.
• Begin a small prototype nonviolent action project.

• Not recognizing the ripening conditions for a new social movements.
• Having the bureaucracy, legalism, and centralized power of the POOs squash the creativity, independence, nonviolent methods, and spontaneity of the new grassroots groups.

• The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 made anti-war activists and networks available for a new movement.
• The temporary success of the occupation of the Whyl, Germany, nuclear plant site by 25,000 citizens provided an inspiring method of nonviolent resistance.
• In the Spring of 1976, the AEC local hearing decided to license the Seabrook, New Hampshire, nuclear plant construction plans, ignoring the overwhelming legal arguments against it. A few weeks later, the Clamshell Alliance held the first civil disobedience occupation of a nuclear plant site. Inspired by the Whyl mass blockade, Clamshell announced it would organize a mass blockade the next Spring.

• are dramatic and exciting;
• enable demonstrators to put themselves into the key points where the powerholders carry out their policies;
• clearly reveal the values violations by the powerholders;
• show the movement supporting and representing the values, symbols, myths, and traditions of the society; and
• are repeatable in local communities across the country.

• The right conditions were created by the earlier stages. The Movement Action Plan 19
• The public, altered by the mass media because of the trigger event and nonviolent action campaigns, is outraged by the contradiction between its values and the social conditions and powerholders' operative policies.
• The new movement groups join the powerholders as the keepers of society's values and symbols.
• The new climate of social crisis gives hope and inspires action by many citizens.
• The repeatability of the nonviolent action campaign is local areas provides grassroots activists with an effective means for involvement, which they believe can be effective.
• Participation in the new movement gives meaning to many peoples' lives because it gives them an opportunity to act out their beliefs, feelings, and spirituality.

• Create a new grassroots-based social movement.
• Put the powerholders' policies in the public consciousness and spotlight and on society's agenda of contentious public issues.
• Create a public platform for the movement to educate the populace.
• Create public dissonance on the issue. That is, force the general population to have to think about the issue by having two contradictory views of reality presented to them constantly.
• Win the sympathies and the opinions of the public.
• Become recognized as the legitimate opposition. Getting the powerholders to change their minds and policies is not a goal of this stage!

• political naivete;
• burnout from overwork, not seeing progress as success, and unrealistic expectations of immediate victory; and
• arrogant self-righteousness and radicalism.

• The movement has not achieved its goals. After two years of hard effort, which included big demonstrations, dramatic civil disobedience, arrests, court scenes and even time in jail, media attention, and even winning a majority of public opinion against the powerholders' policies, the movement has not achieved any of its goals. The government is still waging the war in Vietnam, building five nuclear weapons a day, or sending aid to the contras. The problem, however, is not that the movement has failed to achieve its goals, but that expectations that its goal could possibly be achieved in such a short time were unrealistic. Achieving changes in public policies in the face of determined opposition of the powerholders takes time, often decades.
• Judging that the movement has failed because it has not achieved its goals after two years is analogous to parents criticizing their daughter for not graduating after completing two years in college with straight "A" grades.Parents don't do this because they know that achieving a B.S. degree is a four-year process. The movement, therefore should be judged not by whether it has won yet, but by how well it is progressing along the road of success.
• The movement has not had any "real" victories. This view is unable to accept the progress that the movement has made along the road of success, such as creating a massive grassroots-based social movement, putting the issue on society's agenda, or winning a majority of public opinion. Ironically, involvement in the movement tends to reduce activists' ability to identify short-term successes. Through the movement, activists learn about the enormity of the problem, the agonizing suffering of the victims, and the complicity of powerholders. The intensity of this experience tends to increase despair and the unwillingness to accept any short-term success short of achieving ultimate goals. "What difference does it make that a majority of the American people and Congress oppose contra aid, when people are still being killed in Central America?" This is another version of judging the movement for not having achieved its ultimate goals rather than by whether it is making reasonable progress along the road.
• The power holders seem too powerful—they have not changed either their minds or their policies, but defiantly proclaim them louder than ever, totally ignoring the protests of the movement and the objections of half of the populace. The failure of the central powerholders to change either their minds or policies is a poor indicator of the movement's progress. The central powerholders will be the last segment of society to change their minds and policies. The longer that the public sees that the powerholders are violating social values and ignoring the democratic majority opinion, the higher the political costs to the powerholders for continuing those policies. Continued used public exposure of the powerholders upholding these policies in the face of public opinion, therefore, can be an indicator that the powerholders' original goal of keeping the issue out of public consciousness and off the society's agenda is failing. For example, with increasing worldwide media coverage of President Botha's proclamations of apartheid and the effects of this policy, the world's resistance to apartheid increases.
• The movement is dead because it no longer looks like the take-off stage. The image that most people have of successful social movement is that of the take-off stage—giant demonstrations, civil disobedience, media hype, crisis, and constant political theater—but this is always short-lived. Movements that are successful in take-off soon progress to the much more powerful but more sedate-appearing majority stage, as described in the next section. Although movements in the majority stage appear to be smaller and less effective as they move from a national to local focus, and from mass actions to less visible grassroots organizing, they actually undergo enormous growth in size and power. The power of the invisible grassroots provide the power of national social movements.
• The powerholders and mass media report that the movement is dead, irrelevant, or non-existent. The powerholders and mass media not only report that the movement is failing, but they also refuse to acknowledge that a massive popular movement exists. Large demonstrations and majority public opposition are dismissed as "vaguely reminiscent of the Sixties", rather than recognized as social movements at least as big and relevant as those 20 years ago. And when movements do succeed, they are not given credit. The demise of nuclear energy is said to be caused by cost overruns, high lending rates, lack of safety, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, rather than from the political and public opposition created by the people power.

• Use an analytic framework of successful social movements, such as MAP, to evaluate their movement, identify successes, and set strategy and tactics.
• Form personal/political support groups that enable activists to participate in movements as holistic human beings, take care of their personal needs, reduce guilt, have fun, and provide support (and challenge) in doing political analysis and work.
• Adopt a strict policy of nonviolence.
• Adopt "empowerment" models of organization and leadership at both the national and local levels. The empowerment model is a third way that tries to maximize the positive and minimize the negatives of both the hierarchical and the loose models, trying to blend participatory democracy, efficiency, personal support, and effectiveness. This model of leadership more resembles the nurturing mother than the strong patriarchal father. While the national organization leadership need to coordinate and represent the whole movement, their primary goal should be to nurture the empowerment of the grassroots and foster democracy and non-elitism within the whole movement.
• Help activists evolve from protestors to long-term social change agents. Provide social change agent training, which includes not only nonviolence but all the skills for understanding and organizing successful social change movements. Powerholders
• Continue a hardlinestrategy, including escalatingtheir policies to prove that they are in charge and that both the movement and public have no effect.
• Infiltrate the movement to get intelligence and to confuse, disrupt, and discredit the new activism. Agent provocateurs promote wild schemes, violence, structurelessness, disorganization, rebelliousness, machismo, and schemes to dominate organizations.

• become strategists by using a framework such as MAP,
• form political and personal support groups,
• adopt nonviolence,
• adopt empowerment models of organization and leadership, and
• move from protesters and long-life social change agents.

• Disempowerment—feeling the movement is losing when it is succeeding
• The "tyranny of structurelessness" and anti-leadership
• Rebellion, machismo, and violence
• Despair, burnout, and dropout

• Ongoing low-intensity local organizing. The key to Stage Six success ultimately is the ongoing, day-in and day-out basic efforts of grassroots local activists—public speaking, information tables at supermarkets, leafletting, yard sales, and so on—all involving face-to-face education of citizens by their peers and keeping the issue before the public.
• Massive public education and conversion. The basic purpose of the movement in this stage is to educate, convert, and involve all segments of the population. This is accomplished through a broad variety of means, including the mass media. Most important, however, are direct contacts through the low-intensity activities at the local level, through sidewalk tables, demonstrations, leaflets, petitions, housemeetings, literature, and bumper stickers. The issue needs to be re-defined to show how it directly affects everyone's values and self-interests and what they can do about it.
• Build a broad-based pluralized movement. The movement needs to include all segments of the population through coalitions, networks, co-sponsorship of events and petitions, and directly involving all constituency groups, example, unemployed, Blacks, workers, teachers, Hispanics, religious, women, students, etc. This includes movement organizations within each constituency such as Women for Peace and Teachers for Social Responsibility. In addition, the movement needs groups in all three categories—professional opposition organizations, new wave grassroots, and principled dissent. The different movement organizations must be allies with each other, overcoming the tendency towards self-righteousness, anti-mosity, and divisiveness.
• Renewed use of mainstream political and social institutions. As the movement wins larger majorities of public opinion, mainstream channels (e.g., Congress, city councils, officials, election campaigns, candidates, courts, official commissions and hearings, and ballot referenda) are used with increasing effectiveness. While they serve to build the movement—keeping the issue in the public spotlight, educating the public, and so on—they also win actual victories on demands where there is big public support in places where the movement is strongest and the central powerholders weakest, often at the local and state levels. These successes serve to build the movement's success from the ground up over the coming years. For example, the opposition to U.S. direct military invasion of Nicaragua has been (at least temporarily) successful at the Congressional level, but not at the central powerholder level of the Reagan administration. And nuclear energy plans have been halted at the local and state levels, while the central government and nuclear industry maintain their policies favoring increased use of nuclear power. Also, the opposition to nuclear weapons has been built into a national consensus, which is putting enormous pressure on the national government.Even President Reagan has tried to appear to be ending nuclear weapons, especially U.S. missiles in Europe, where there is overwhelming public opposition.
• Nonviolent rallies, demonstrations, and campaigns, especially at critical times and places. Although the movement now includes a wide range of programs, it must continue to have nonviolent actions, rallies, and campaigns, with occasional civil disobedience. While nonviolent actions should be held at traditional times and places, such as on Hiroshima and Nagasaki days, they should also occur at critical times and places, such as when Congress votes on aid to the contras, when dictators visit, and during re-trigger events, such as the Chernobyl accident. Because people are involved in so many different programs in this stage, and many no longer see the purpose of some nonviolent actions, the numbers participating in any specific national or local demonstration usually drop below those of the take-off stage (with the exception of some new crises). However, because there are nonviolent actions happening in hundreds of local communities around the country when movements are in the majority stage, the nationwide total number participating in demonstrations actually increases enormously in this stage. 
  
  Although nonviolent actions sometimes do help win immediate successes, such as change a city council member's or Congressperson's vote, their chief purpose is to help achieve many of the goals of Stages Four to Six, such as keeping the issue in the public spotlight and providing a platform for the movement to educate the public.
• Citizen involvement programs. The movement needs to develop programs in which large numbers of common citizens can become actively involved in programs that challenge current traditions, policies, and laws, while simultaneously carrying out the society's values and the movement's alternatives. This empowers the movement and citizens because they can carry out their values and goals without waiting for the powerholders to make the decision for them. This is quite different form isolated alternative "demonstration" projects. Citizen involvement programs put large numbers of people directly in contradiction with official policies. Some excellent massive citizen involvement programs of today's movements include the sanctuary movement, in which local churches and towns throughout the country provide official sanctuary for Central American political refugees; the thousands of "citizen diplomats" traveling to Russia and Nicaragua; sending tools and aid to Nicaragua in violation of U.S. sanctions; and nuclear free towns, counties, and even countries, such as New Zealand and Palau. These programs educate and convert the public, demonstrate the alternative values and policies sought, demonstrate the extent of popular opposition, undercut the authority of the powerholders to carry out their policy goals, and build change from the bottom up.
• Respond to new trigger events, such as the Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents, to again put the issue in the public spotlight, educate the public to new levels of awareness, build the movement organizations, and increase the pressure for change.

• Keep the issue in the public spotlight and on society's agenda over time. Keep the policies and conditions which violate the values, interests, and beliefs of the majority of the populace in the public spotlight. Over time, this helps build the social and political conditions for change because it helps fulfill Robert Jay Lifton's view that the way to get rid of a social delusion is to keep telling the truth. The present social movements against nuclear weapons and in opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America should recognize as tremendous success the fact that these issues have been kept in the public spotlight and on society's social and political agendas for a number of years.
• Identify all of the movement's key goals and identify which stage each is in and develop strategies to achieve them. Identify the movement's full range of demands, from the very specific to the general, such as end all nuclear weapons, stop nuclear testing, stop Star Wars, and stop U.S. Euromissiles. Strategies, submovements, and campaigns need to be developed for each of these major demands. Activists should identify which MAP stage the movement is in for each of these demands and develop strategies, submovements, and campaigns to achieve each major demand. For example, stop U.S. direct invasion of Nicaragua might be in Stage Seven, official support for the contras in Stage Six, and a positive Contadora peace resolution for all of Central America is possibly just in Stage Three.
• Counter the powerholders' strategy. The movement needs to identify the powerholders' long-term goals, strategies, and programs and develop counterstrategies against each one. For example, the U.S. is considering invading Nicaragua, supporting the contra's war against Nicaragua, preventing a meaningful peaceful Contadora resolution, etc. The movement needs to develop campaigns to prevent the government's achieving each of these objectives.
• Beyond reforms:propose alternatives, larger demands, and a new paradigm. The movement now needs not only to protest present policies but also to propose specific alternatives.In the process of struggle, people act their way into thinking, and they learn that the problem is much bigger than they had thought. They come to realize that their original concerns were merely symptoms of much bigger and deeper problems; consequently, the movement needs to make larger demands. This ultimately includes the necessity for a whole new worldview or paradigm. The movement against Cruise and Pershing 2 missiles in Europe, for example, realized that they needed to remove all nuclear weapons from East and West Europe. This has led a new worldview of a nuclear free East and West Europe that will become increasingly neutral and independent of the Soviet-United States superpower bloc system.
• Guide the movement through the dynamics of conflict with the powerholders. Waging a social movement is similar to playing chess. The movement and powerholders constantly engage in moves and countermoves to win the public and build conditions to support their own position. The movement tries to build moral, political, and economic conditions that will erode the support that enables the powerholders to continue their policies. The powerholders keep changing their policies to keep their capacity to maintain the status quo. The movement's goal is to keep weakening the powerholders' position and raising the price that they must pay to continue their policies. The Reagan administration, for example, seemed about to invade Nicaragua in 1984, but the anti-intervention movement raised public opposition to a new level. The government then switched its chief focus to supporting the contras, but the movement made this illegal by helping pass the Boland amendment, thereby forcing the government to undertake the high-risk policies of illegal and unconstitutional covert aid through Ollie North. This has weakened President Reagan's capacity to wage his policies in Central America as well as elsewhere.

• Promote new rhetoric and myths and re-emphasize the threat of outside demons, such as terrorism and Communism, to try to rally an increasingly skeptical public.
• Increase their counter-movement strategy to gather intelligence; discredit the movement; cause internal disruption, control, and steer the movement; preempt it by claiming to do the movement's program (e.g., "Star Wars will end nuclear weapons"); and try to co-opt the movement under mainstream political control (e.g., co-sponsor grossly watered down Congressional bills).
• Engage in the dynamics of conflict with the movement by switching strategies, stance, and policies as needed, for example, from invading Nicaragua with U.S. troops, to supporting the proxy contras and waging low-intensity warfare against Nicaragua.
• Publicly appear to be engaged in a meaningful "negotiation process", while actually carrying out operative policies and doctrines without giving up any important advantages. Powerholders keep pronouncing that their policies are correct and winning. Finally, splits begin happening within the power structure, as over time pressure from the new social and political consensus force increasing portions of the mainstream political, economic and social elites to switch their position, even openly oppose the policies of the central powerholders in order to protect their own self-interests. The issue is now hotly contested within Congress, the Administration, and all other political levels.

• Keep the issue and the powerholders' values violations in the public spotlight and on society's agenda.
• Switch from only crisis protest to waging protracted social struggle to achieve positive social change.
• Gear efforts to the public to keep winning a bigger majority opinion.
• Involve large numbers of the populace in programs at the grassroots level.
• Propose alternatives, more demands, and a new paradigm.
• Have activists able to use a strategic framework such as MAP. 32 Bill Moyer
• Adopt empowerment organizational and leadership models.

• Activists become stuck in the protest stage.
• Movement violence, rebelliousness, and macho radicalism.
• Believing that the movement is losing and local efforts are futile.
• National organizations and leadership disenfranchise grassroots activists by dominating the movement.
• Cooptation by powerholders through collusion and compromise.
• Political sects dominate the movement organizations.

• Dramatic showdown resembles the take off stage. A sudden trigger event sparks a mobilization of broad popular opposition and a social crisis, but this time the overwhelming coercive force, in a relatively short time, changes policies or leadership. This was achieved in each issue of the early 1960s civil rights movement, such as when the Selma march started President Johnson and the Congress into motion that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 within a few months. Activists usually feel that they won and had played an important role in achieving success.
• Quiet showdown. Realizing that they can no longer continue their present policies, the powerholders launch a face-saving endgame process of "victorious retreat". Rather than admit defeat, they proclaim victory and start a publicly recognized process of changing their policies and conditions to those demanded by the movement and social consensus. The powerholders try to take credit for this "victory", even though they were forced to reverse their previously hardline policies, while activists often have difficulty seeing their role in this success. A current example is President Reagan's efforts to reach an agreement with Gorbachev to end Euromissiles.
• Attrition is when success is quietly and seemingly invisibly achieved in a long process which could take decades, in which social and political machinery slowly evolves new policies and conditions, such as the present winding down of nuclear energy in the United States. During the attrition process, activists usually have even more difficulty recognizing the successful endgame process and the fact that they had a crucial role in causing it. In all three forms, once the endgame process starts, final success is not guaranteed. Until the change is finally actually accomplished, the situation can be reversed. Stage Seven involves a continual struggle, but one in which the opposition is on the offensive until the specific goal is won.

• In dramatic showdown, the movement more resembles the take-off stage, in which it plays a massive, publicly obviousrole involving mass-demonstrations in a time of crisis leading to success in a relatively short time, such as the toppling of Marcos, following the election process, or the achievement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, five months after the Selma campaign.
• In quiet showdown, the movement continues its strategy and of both take-off and Stage Six, and while still publicly active, activistsneed to work hard to recognize the victory and their own role.
• In attrition, the endgame process is often not recognized as success, the movement's role is much less visible, and much of the opposition's efforts are carried out through the work of elites and the POOs.

• forced into making fatal mistakes, such as President Nixon's ordered Watergate break-ins and other "dirty tricks" against the opposition, or when President Reagan felt forced to violate the Boland amendment through illegal covert aid to the contras;
• increasingly prevented from doing what is fully required to successfully carry out their policies, such as when the Pentagon was prevented from carrying out programs it felt were necessary to win the Vietnam War; and
• resort to extreme emergency acts of political and economic decrees and repression, which serve only to spur the opposition. The economic, social, and political penalties erode the base for support of the powerholders to either continue their policies or remain in office. The central powerholders have three different endgame strategies, according to the type of ending:
• Custer's last stand (in dramatic showdown), in which they hold out until either their policies are defeated in the mainstream political process, such as in the courts, Congress, or referenda, or they lose their office or position through elections or mass social actions and pressures;
• Victorious retreat (in quiet showdown), in which the powerholders lose on the issue, but in reversing their policies declare victory for themselves; or of
• Persistent stubbornness (in attrition), in which they hold out in an increasingly losing cause over many years, until one of the above two endings occur.

• felt powerless,
• did not know what to do,
• were not called to action by a trigger event and crisis, and
• feared the alternative (e.g., Communism, or the unknown) more than they desired change.

• Wage a successful "endgame" strategy to achieve one or more demands.
• Have activists recognize the success and their own role in it.
• Raise larger issues and propose alternative paradigms.
• Create new decentralized centers of power based on more participatory structures and an empowered public.
• Continue the movement.

• compromising too many values and key demands;
• achieving minor reforms without building toward basic social change;
• having activists feel dismayed and powerless because they do not recognize success and the movement's role in a successful endgame; and
• having apparent final victory end the movement.

• Celebrate success. The successes of Stage Seven and the movement's role in achieving them should be clearly recognized by activists.
• Follow-up. There needs to be follow-up, mainly by the POOs, at the local and national level (1) to make sure that the new promises, laws, and policies are actually carried out (e.g., after the 1965 Voting Rights Act a major effort was required to assure that Blacks were actually allowed to vote); (2) to achieve additional successes, which are now possible under the new political conditions and legal mandate; and (3) to resist backlash which might reverse the new gains.
• Work on achieving other demands. The movement needs to focus on achieving other demands, which are probably in earlier MAP stages. After the civil rights movement desegregated restaurants in 1960, for example, the whole MAP stages process was repeated with successive movements to achieve integrated buses, equal public accommodations, voting rights, and work to end poverty.
• New social consciousness, issues, and movements. The modern student and women's movements emerged out of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
• Beyond reform to social change. Social movements need to go beyond immediate reforms to build toward fundamental structural changes by (1) creating empowered people who become life-long social change agents, and not just oneissue protesters; (2) creating ongoing grassroots political organizations and networks; (3) broadening the analysis, issues, and goals of movements; (4) propose new alternatives and worldviews or paradigms that put forward new political and social systems, not just oppose symptoms.

Powerholders
Governmental bureaucracies are supposed to carry out new laws and directives but could drag their feet and even fail to follow through. While most powerholders will be part of the new social and political consensus and try to carry out the new laws and policies, some may counterattack to reverse the new successes, as the Reagan administration did in ignoring the Boland amendment and continuing its support of the contras after 1984. 

Public
A new social consensus of about 80 percent of the populace supports the favorable resolution of the movement's demand and the resulting new policies and conditions. The new demands on which the movement now begins focusing are supported by between 10 and 80 percent of the public and are different MAP stages. 

Goals
The movement's goals are to assure that the demands achieved are maintained and to circle back to focus the movement on other demands. 

Pitfalls 
The chief hazards of Stage Eight are having the new successes either inadequately implemented or revoked from backlash. 

Conclusion
There is no end. There is only the continuing struggle, acted out in cycles of social movements. The process of winning one set of demands creates new levels of citizen consciousness and empowerment, and generates new movements on new demands and issues. 

Peoples' movements move the world further along the path towards more fully meeting the spiritual, physical, social, and political needs of humanity. Moreover, the very process of being fully involved in the struggle of peoples' movements contributes to peoples' political and spiritual fulfillment. Activists are part of the emerging people-power movements around the world. People worldwide are struggling to transform themselves and the world from the present era of superpowers, materialism, environmental breakdown, disenfranchisement, abject poverty amidst opulence, and militarism, to a new, more human era of democracy, freedom, justice, self-determination, human rights, peaceful coexistence, preservation of the environment, and the meeting of basic human needs. 

Consequently, the long-term impacts are more important than their immediate successes. The civil rights movement, for example, created a new positive image of Blacks among themselves and whites, established nonviolent action as a means to achieve people power, directly spun off the student and anti-Vietnam War movements, and inspired peoples' movements got the American people, for the first time, to challenge and change American foreign policy and created the "Vietnam syndrome" in which the American people oppose the century old policy of U.S. military intervention in Latin America to achieve the interests of American powerholders. Social movements are also contagious: Philippines people's movement spurred similar efforts in Haiti, Chile, and now South Korea. 

CASE STUDY: THE AMERICAN ANTI-NUCLEAR ENERGY MOVEMENT Stage Eight: Through 2025
If the nuclear energy endgame is that of attrition, the movement will have to continue its vigilance and opposition indefinitely into the future, opposing the barrage of central powerholder efforts to revive the nuclear energy era, until there is a total social and political consensus for cancelling nuclear energy and switching to a soft energy path. On the other hand, the dramatic showdown scenario could go as follows: The industrialized world is rocked again in 1995 by the report of an international commission that was set up following the 1993 accident to predict the world's energy future into the next century. Its findings went far beyond the nuclear energy issue. The study included many of the coming crises that had been documented over the past 30 years. It showed that the current rates of fossil fuel (oil, wood, and coal) energy production would cause many catastrophes by the year 2025. The greenhouse effect would raise the Earth's temperature reducing the agricultural production and creating the loss of many coastlines from the melting of glacial ice; the Earth's ozone layer would be reduced, causing hundreds of millions of additional skin cancers; forests would be devastated by acid rain; the oceans would be threatened; and the world's production of oil would peak and drop by 50 percent, as the available oil sources dry up, and oil production over the next five years would drop while prices skyrocketed. 

Nations throughout the world hastily turn away from the hard energy policies based on high consumption of nuclear and fossil fuels and begin crash efforts to adopt soft energy strategies. 

Please note that the information below these lines is significantl;y dated and is provided here for archival purposes. Some out-of-date addresses have been deleted.

ABOUT MAP...
About This Issue
The Second edition of the Movement Action Plan is an expanded and updated version of the Fall 1986 Dandelion. It includes suggestions from readers of the first edition and attenders of the MAP workshops, and has grown from eight to sixteen pages in length. Please sent your feedback—affirmations, criticisms, Ideas, and references. 

This edition was produced by Jeff Aiken, Sharon Kocher, Bill Moyer, and Sean Stryker. Editing and productions coordinated by Sean Stryker, Green Alternative Information for Action (GAIA). 

About the Author
Bill Moyer has been an organizer, writer, trainer, and strategist with a wide range of social movements for over 25 years. His experience includes work with the civil rights, anti- Vietnam War, anti-nuclear energy and weapons, European nuclear disarmament, and non-intervention in Central America movements. He was staff with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Poor Peoples' Campaign, director of the American Friends Service Committee's Chicago open housing program, national nonviolence trainer, and co-founder of the Movement For a New Society and its Philadelphia Life Center. Currently Bill is the National Project Coordinator of the Social Movement Empowerment Project. 

The Social Movement Empowerment Project
The Social Movement Empowerment Project is a technical assistance program that is developing the Movement Action Plan and educating activists to use it. The goal is to have activists in a wide variety of movements apply MAP to their own organizing and strategizing. SMEP has a local Board of Directors, a National Advisory Group, a full-time Project Coordinator, and support volunteers across the country. 

The Social Movement Empowerment Project is carrying out the following programs:

1. Develop, publish, and distribute MAP publications. There were 12,000 copies of the Fall 1986 MAP Dandelion published and sold, and 12,000 additional copies of this second MAP tabloid edition have been published. Additional upcomingpublications include a MAP wall poster, a book (1988), and training materials.
2. Train activists to understand and use MAP. The Project Coordinator is holding MAP trainings and presentations in five regions of the country.
3. Train activist-trainers to teach others to understand and use MAP. Beginning in late 1987, several pilot training for trainers workshops will be held in several regions.Training for trainers will be held in five different regionsin 1988, and there will be a national MAP trainer gathering.

The global human rights movement challenges the
systems, structures, and institutions that create, defend, and extend
oppression and repression in a society.