And what difference does this make? Let's say Sharp truly is a CIA toadie who has managed to abet U.S. sponsored regime change from Belgrade to (just maybe) Cairo, haven't the results been worth it?

Serbia, probably. Egypt? Hopefully, but we can't tell for sure until the dust has settled and we know what sort of government emerges. It's not hard to imagine American puppets that could be worse then Mubarak. Fortunately, it seems that the Americans have played only a minor role here, with the main show being the labour unions, with a helping of coup d'etat on the side.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

As for the usefulness of the methods - a key point in the argument against Sharp is that there's no evidence they actually work as advertised. All of the "success stories" were funded and pushed externally, not created spontaneously.

And you can't take Egypt as evidence if the key planners were personally US-trained, rather than independently Sharp-inspired.

If the narrative is that all you have to do is hand out copies of Sharp's books and wait for freedom after an inevitable low body count - which was the implication of the original NYT piece - clearly, that's nonsense. That has never happened anywhere, and never will.

You can of course take the point that formal study of methods of civil disobedience and resistance with active practice and organisation can be powerful things.

But I don't think Sharp's supporters are going to pretend that he invented an idea that has been around in one form or another for hundreds of years.

So what is actually new here? It seems to me the only formal innovation is a catalogue of methods - which except for the Internet and media elements, wouldn't surprise anyone from the 19th century - and the suggestion that nation states can use these methods to support regime change on their own terms.

As I said in my diary, I think that idea has obvious appeal in Washington, for obvious reasons. What I'm less convinced by is its usefulness for independent dissent.

In fact that the idea that you can use these methods successfully could actually be dangerous, because it's likely to instill false confidence and minimise the messy reality of regime change.

Or information about funding, and personal and corporate relationships collected from AEI's own documents?

You think these are poor sources?

Let us know when you find some better ones.

Actually having read a few more books, I'm tending more to the idea that Sharp's ideas are interesting, but naive, and easily co-opted.

To be fair to him he did suggest in 1975 that a civilan defence of Nicaragua against US military intervention would make an interesting case study - which answers one specific point, even though most of his early writing is still about possible anti-Soviet actions.

But otherwise he seems to trade in generalities and potentials. And since the only attempts at practical applications have been US-funded for expedient aims with the help of Col. Helvey - if you know better, point us to an example - more specific critiques of real-world effectiveness aren't difficult.