from Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence :
Sharp’s ideas about nonviolent action are generally billed as apolitical, post-ideological, common sense activist strategy and tactics. But they actually flowed from a clear worldview. Sharp saw “centralized government” as the key vector of violence in the modern world. He supported “decentralizing” state functions to “independent,” “non-State” institutions—a prescription that sounds a lot like privatization. Importantly, he argued nonviolent action itself was the most strategic way to bring about this state transformation.
With the rise of the Reagan-era foreign policy of communist “rollback,” Sharp began promoting “strategic nonviolence” internationally through his Albert Einstein Institution (AEI). Sharp co-founded AEI with his former student Peter Ackerman, who was simultaneously right hand man to the notorious corporate raiding “junk bond king” Michael Milken. Later, Ackerman was a Cato Institute board member and advocate of disemboweling social security. AEI spent the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s training activists, policymakers, and defense leaders around the world in Sharp’s nonviolent methods, supporting numerous “color revolutions”—again and again in state socialist countries whose administrations were attempting to oppose the privatization, austerity policies, and deregulation being pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and U.S. Treasury-led “Washington Consensus.” Sharp’s “people-powered” nonviolent “ju-jitsu” would prove surprisingly effective, distinguishing itself as a powerful weapons system in the U.S. regime change arsenal. While AEI was an independent non-profit, it had significant connections to the U.S. defense and intelligence community. One prominent AEI consultant was Colonel Robert Helvey, former dean of the National Defense Intelligence College. AEI’s regular funders included U.S. government pass-throughs like the U.S. Institute for Peace, the International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
as of March 19, yes it should be