As a journalist in East Europe, Steve Crawshaw was witness to acts of defiance against the Soviet bloc. We witnessed the Indian middle class version two weeks ago thanks to Anna Hazare's fast. Now read about civil disobedience around the globe

You wouldn't be too off the mark if you called Small Acts of Resistance a handbook, although the authors Steve Crawshaw (advocacy director for Amnesty International) and John Jackson (once the director of the Burma Campaign in UK), are clear that they aren't propagating anything. The book, however, makes a compelling case for civil disobedience through small, powerful acts of dissent via its collection of incidents from around the world. Its release is timelyu00a0-- we've already witnessed what a people's movement can do in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen, in the past few months.



There are brave stories of men and women who defied fascist rulers like as Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat, who supplied vital information about Hitler's plans to the Allied Forces, and churchmen Jaime Wright, Cardinal Paulo Arns and Philip Potter, who sneaked documents that offered graphic details of state torture to create a book Brasil: Nunca Mais (Brazil: Never Again) in 1985. Potter, who was at the time, the general secretary of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, raised funds and, says the book, "used the kind of financial secrecy associated with Mafia-style money laundering than with a church-funded book on human rights abuses."

In the midst of these tales of heroism, you'll find accounts of collective resistance that never made it to the pages of world historyu00a0-- from how Oxford students played a part in forcing Barclays, a multi-million dollar bank, to exit South Africa during the Apartheid regime, to the Burmese developing an ingenious method to protest against the military junta after it became too dangerous to step into the streets. They tied pictures of the military leader around the necks of stray dogs, who, unlike them, were allowed to roam the streets without fear of being shot.

The idea behind the motley selection of stories, says Crawshaw, is to show how mischief can be an equally powerful tool to unsettle dictators. "We (the authors) have both lived in places where we've seen how bad it gets. We wanted to show the connection between politics and daily life through humour, and how mischief is as much part of protests," says Crawshaw, who saw the fall of the Soviet Bloc in East Europe through the late '80s and early '90s, while serving as the political editor of The Independent.

The other point that the book makes is the power of the faceless men and women living in a seemingly all-powerful regime. This is best brought out through one storyu00a0-- in 1981, the Communist authorities in Poland put tanks on the streets to end the people's Solidarity movement against the regime. In retaliation, the people decided to boycott the propagandist television news. In the town of Swidnik, every evening at 7.30, the time the news was aired, people would go for a walk outside their homes.

Some even went to the extent of taking their TV sets for a walk, in wheel barrows and baby strollers. This tactic, informs the book, spread to other towns and cities too, infuriating the government, which responded by advancing the time of curfew from 10 pm to 7 pm. "The citizens of Swidnik responded by going for a walk during the earlier edition of the news at 5 pm instead."

Pick this up: For its interesting anecdotes of untold world history.
Don't expect:u00a0 Detailed analysis of political events.