His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.

They weren't organizing violence but they were instead making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.

This shifted the baseline of what a "compromise" could look like (as we today see baselines shift very frequently often in a less just direction)

Seen that way, nonviolence wasn't just a moral stance, it was one side of a coin and once piece of a broader ecosystem of pressure from different directions. King's approach was powerful because there were alternatives he was NOT choosing.

You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective. And that contrast made his path viable without endorsing the alternatives as a model

* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978...

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistanc...

You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence. Further, less violent movements are more likely to end up more democratic / less authoritarian.

The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence. So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule

The book is 'minorly academic', but it's an easy read and probably more geared toward the general public.

(The studies/book recognize that "violence" exists on a spectrum. The book also talks about generally non-violent movement(s) that have factions that attach to them that want to use violence, and various other scenarios.)

Without agape, political activism is more zero-sum and utilitarian. Non-violence becomes a gambit that is only appealing as long as it is making obvious gains against the current winners, and there is little motivation to remain nonviolent after becoming winners.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46683205

Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.

We need both violent and nonviolent forces, but we're not permitted to say that out loud. But historically, thats what works.

Violence, particularly civil war, is utterly destructive to a society, completely tears apart the social fabric and creates wounds that never really heal.

That said, when you look at America, India, both movements required the threat of violence to succeed. MLK had the Black Panthers, and whilst Ghandi himself preached non-violence he did so against a background of riots in which thousands of British officers were killed and wounded.

The social reforms Western Europe and America saw in the post-war period were an capitulation to the implicit thread of violent communist revolution.

Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.

This is very idealist of him. And that, I find, is the fundamental problem of nonviolence. It depends on a notion of "good" existing, or that, at the very least, the people in power will care about the appearance of their policies and revert them for "goodness" sake.

This is a fundamental problem.

It is not that good cannot exist, it is that most evil is done for material reasons, and nonviolence does not take that into account. Try stopping a war, that are done for economic reasons, by appealing to "goodness". Try stopping racism, that has economic roots (profits), by appealing to "goodness". It won't take you very far.

The defining feature of this dilemma can be found right on the edge of where the definition of defense become offense.