In the beginning, everybody is a nobody. This is what Srdja Popović tells activists from other countries who feel that change is not possible in their home country, that dictators can’t be overthrown, and corporations with predatory practices can’t be stopped. Popović is one of the founding members of the Serbian resistance group Otpor! that successfully ousted a longtime tyrant in 2000, and the founder of the NGO CANVAS (Centre for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies). His experience in the resistance efforts has become a lifelong passion, and his resumé as trainer for nonviolent resistance has helped ragtag groups from all over the world become effective organizers for positive regime change. From Buddhist monks in Burma to intellectuals in the Maldives to students in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, his methods have a proven track record that continues to make him a sought-after consultant. In a word, Popović is on a mission to make the principles of successful nonviolent movements user-friendly.

The ideas that would eventually lead to the Serbian student resistance movement Otpor! began percolating when Popović’s favorite music group, instead of playing songs on a stage, sang snatches of their songs from the back of a flatbed truck that circled Republic Square. The songs they sang were against the war Serbia was fighting with Croatia. (What else could they mean by “There’s no brain under the helmet”?) The young people who had come out began chasing after the truck. It was a fun and joyous moment of spontaneous protest at a time when speaking against the war earned a beating or arrest.

It was also a moment of realization for the author, a young, apathetic university student at the time. He saw that protest did not have to be an insufferably stuffy, somber affair. It could be an enjoyable experience. Even under difficult conditions, people could be convinced to care. He saw that if enough people who cared could be brought together, change could actually happen.

The Serbian dictator in the 90s (Slobodan Milošević) left much to be desired and moved Serbia steadily toward totalitarianism. In 1996, he declared invalid a legitimate parliamentary election that would have ousted his favorite political crooks and cronies. In 1998, he seized total control of Serbian universities, from management to curricula.

The nonviolent student movement Otpor! materialized as the list of injustices and overreaches continued to grow. One of the author’s friends created a logo of a black fist and that became emblematic of Serbian subversion.

It might sound ridiculous, but a logo is a necessary tool to create an association with resistance. If the band of indignant college kids had tried to drum up support from friends and family for a march, they might have gathered a few dozen. Not exactly inspiring. But if they graffiti the fist 300 times on buildings around the capital city, people might be more intrigued. In a city terrorized by Milošević, it would give the appearance of a large, well-run underground movement. 

The fist symbol proved effective. Otpor! became a trendy, alluring organization that people wanted to learn more about and join. To get rid of the half-hearted and the informants, the core group would send out those interested with the stencil and spray paint and tell them to tag certain parts of the city. The fist’s presence spread and the group’s numbers grew.

The movement was emphatically nonviolent from the beginning. A dictator with thousands of police and the military at his beck and call is not a fight that can be won through arms. But if they could make a movement so popular that he could not refuse to open up elections, maybe life in Serbia could improve.

They also decided against building the movement around a charismatic personality. If they relied on one key figure, it would be easy for the regime to chop the head off and let the resistance organism die out. Otpor! had to be structured in such a way that it could withstand arrests of key members and still gain momentum. The goal was to create the kind of movement where the arrest of one would win a dozen more recruits.

In order to win support, Otpor! needed to win a string of small but memorable nonviolent clashes with the government. These small wins had to convey a sense that change was not only possible, but already coming to Serbia. 

Eventually, Otpor! demonstrations became the places where people wanted to be. Only the anti-social and those who hated having a good time did not show up. Arrests became a kind of social currency, a badge of honor. There was an aura of adventure and risk that the youth found enticing. Even the nerds at university started getting arrested and landing dates with girls who would have been out of their league under normal circumstances.

But these were not ordinary circumstances. This was the start of a movement that was beginning to leverage power through creative and peaceful means, and would successfully overthrow the Milošević regime. 

The first step that must be taken to start a movement is to eradicate the belief that what happened there cannot happen here. Disbelief is self-sabotage that ends the movement before it ever begins. It stunts creative thinking and extinguishes hope. 

Of course every place is different. The Ukranian movement that involved women baring their chests to police forces to protest gender inequality would not catch on in Riyadh or Cairo. But the assumption that nonviolent protest is impossible—end of discussion—is completely wrong.

A dictatorship is like a brand. It is the worst kind of quality, but it is the only one available. Dictatorship is the political equivalent of a monopoly. But a dictatorship needs airtime and no competition in order to keep control. The trick with an opposition movement is to launch a brand in the political market that can compete against it. All you have to do is create a better brand. In Serbia, the revolutionary Otpor! brand used  the fist symbol. They graffitied that fist thousands of times on the sides of buildings and covered elevators with stickers.

It is best to begin with an action small enough that no one gets killed or beaten to a pulp, but is also memorable and piques community interest. When Pinochet ruled Chile, the masses protested by walking in slow motion. Cab drivers would drive at half speed. His brand tagline was “Me or chaos” and the Chileans responded with small creative protests that formed a kind of alternative brand.

People will choose the dictator’s brand as long as it is the only brand. Advertise another brand that isn’t based on corruption, violence, and terror, and you will find that a movement is possible wherever you are from. 

Martin Luther King Jr., and Gandhi have a lot in common: Both were gifted, visionary leaders of nonviolent protest movements that expanded the freedoms of millions. Yet another commonality is that neither was very funny. For all they got right, they missed an opportunity.

Humor is the totalitarian’s worst enemy.

A tyrannical regime is built on fear, and the best response to terror is laughter. In the age of the internet, where a movement or a moment can be mobilized quickly, humor helps. In the days preceding widespread internet usage, Otpor! used street theater in Belgrade. It was never on-the-nose politics. That would have been boring. The point was to make people laugh.

In one major city, Otpor! took white flowers (which had come to symbolize the hated wife of the dictator Milošević, who always wore a white flower in her hair), and attached them to the heads of turkeys. To deepen the insult, the Serbian word for “turkey” is an incredibly offensive thing to call a woman. The turkeys were released across town, and it fell to the police to collect the birds. The longer the birds roamed downtown, the longer the message of resistance was broadcast, but in order to quell that message, the police spent the morning tackling turkeys. How can people stay afraid of a cop they just saw running after turkeys to preserve his master’s image? It only cost a few turkeys and some time to find a creative way to make the forces of oppression look silly in public.

A group of Russians put the same principle to work in 2012 when another election came and went and Vladimir Putin once again won by a landslide. Those in the opposition party found video evidence of voter fraud, and applied to their municipality to protest the results. Application after application was denied. Instead of risking arrest or worse, activists collected their children’s toys and positioned an assortment of Lego men, stuffed animals, model cars, and toy soldiers in the town center. This toy army was carrying signs denouncing fraud and corruption. If you look up photos, you find even some of the police could not help but laugh at the spectacle. Within days, there were similar toy armies rising up all over Russian cities, protesting the election. The police shut down the Siberian provocateurs’ attempt to stage another toy protest, but they had to respond with overly serious bureaucratic severity, which made them sound even more ridiculous and out of touch with the people. 

Vladimir Putin has a well-crafted image of a former KGB officer who knows no fear. There are plenty of memes about him wrestling bears and achieving other outrageous, superhuman feats. Could this man really be afraid of Lego armies and teddy bears? Even the most daunting public image is susceptible to a good sense of humor.

This laughtivism is a newer form of revolution that older revolutionaries failed to utilize. You will not find many pictures of Mao or Stalin or Lenin looking jolly and thrilled to be alive. The revolutions of yesterday were fueled by rage and bitterness. Today’s successful revolutionaries not only integrate humor into their campaigns, they make it the basis of their campaigns. Revolution that begins with fun has proven far more effective and far less bloody. To bring a revolution is certainly a serious business with weighty implications for political economy and society. But in the past several decades, the role of humor has become increasingly clear. When tyrants retaliate to jokes in anger or emotional tone deafness, the joke only gains traction, and so will the movement.

Unfortunately, creating a vision of tomorrow sounds like a slide from a profoundly boring PowerPoint presentation. We want to stay away from these associations, but a vision of tomorrow is crucial for a movement to be attractive. It has to be something catchy that captures the interests of everyday people.

In Syria, activists simply desired life to be “normal,” and to convince people that life under Assad was far from normal. In Serbia, that meant peace and cool music, like they had experienced even under the Communist dictator, Tito. When the xenophobic Milošević took power in the late 1980s, only a goofy blend of traditional folk and techno was permitted. In the days of Tito, he helped Serbia stay connected to the rest of the world. He was very open to the best of the arts from around the world. Famous bands like Deep Purple and the Beatles recorded with Serbia’s record label. Serbia remembered a time when there was music allowed and the arts were not just tolerated but embraced. Even if there were not free elections, most Serbs considered Tito a thoughtful leader and far more open than anyone else in the Eastern bloc. Otpor! wanted a Serbia that was open to the world, that maintained good relations with bordering nations, and held free elections. That was the vision of tomorrow that Otpor! was selling.

But what do you do in a nation that has been under a dictator’s thumb for 30 years, where most people don’t even have a concept of what could be different? In the islands of Maldives off the coast of India, intellectuals were among the few who wanted to see things change, and this was because many of them had traveled to the United States or Europe for education and had seen how different a society could be. The vast majority who left Maldives did not want to come back. It was brain drain by design: The fewer people who knew life could be different, the fewer objections to the way the dictator Gayoom was running his country.

And at any rate, Western notions of free press and human rights were meaningless to a village fisherman catching tuna off the pier with a hook and scrap of plastic for bait. Those intellectuals who did come back needed a more concrete vision of tomorrow that their people could relate to.

In the early 2000s, some Maldivian activists got their hands on a translation of the Otpor!-produced DVD Bringing Down the Dictator, and sought out Popović. They had begun organizing rice pudding parties on the beaches of Maldives. It was an act of civil disobedience in the eyes of the government that prevented any kind of gathering, and it had effectively leveraged the universally beloved Maldivian dessert. The police would come, confiscate the pudding, and break up the protest. The meetings became increasingly popular, but they weren't going anywhere. Rebellious pudding parties were a good initial step, but the activists needed a simple alternative vision of tomorrow that regular people could get behind.

They needed to find out what different major sectors of society actually cared about and incorporate those concerns into the vision of tomorrow. Lofty ideals are not enough. This meant getting a sense of the concerns of fishermen, police officers, hotel workers, and village elders.

When you ask people what they really want for their community, they talk about things that are significant, but ordinary. They want safety for their families, peace on their streets, and they want to be paid on time for the work they do. This was the start of a new vision of tomorrow for Maldives, and it is a vision that made significant headway in the years that followed.

Syrian activists zealous for change leaped before they looked. They were inspired by the thousands of young Egyptians marching against Hosni Mubarak (interestingly, while donning the same fist emblem that Otpor! had used in Serbia). Unfortunately, a peaceful revolution is a fire that builds slowly—not an explosion. The Syrian protests were well-intentioned but ineffective. Thousands of young Syrians took to the streets as they had seen the Egyptians do, but the Syrians did not realize that several years of careful planning had preceded the Egyptian coup. The Egyptian activists had consulted with Otpor! members and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies and sought training to develop their strategy; they had taken the time to win small victories; they had built their vision of tomorrow; they developed a brand that the people associated with resistance and the possibility of change.

When a group of Syrian activists met with Popović to discuss the revolution, he showed the group how a tyrant relies on pillars of power to hold him aloft. Some are military, others are political, and still others are economic. In an African village, the tribal elders would be one such pillar, the local shaman might be another. In Serbian towns, it was doctors, priests, and professors whose opinions carried weight in the community. For corporations, stakeholders form a pillar of power. Some activists make the mistake of going after the military, which is usually the most impenetrable pillar and leads to heavy casualties. Violent revolutions play into the hands of the powerful, not the plebeian. If you want to beat a professional soccer player, you do not meet him on the soccer field—you challenge him to a game of chess.

Economic pillars are usually the most vulnerable. Topple these and a dictator will eventually fall. Invariably tyrants take cuts from industries. Send tremors through those industries and you disrupt cash flow. Reduced cash flows mean fewer bombs and fewer guns. There is no such thing as absolute power, whatever image a regime attempts to project. If you bring down one pillar, the others will start to crumble, too.

As long as the totalitarian machinery stays humming along, the dictator stays in power and it is business as usual. The activist must find a way to disrupt that usual flow.

Since 1962, the southeast Asian nation of Burma has lived under a repressive military dictatorship. When an opposition party won decisively in a 1990 election, the regime declared the results invalid and talk of elections were stowed for several decades. In 2007, economic policies were so stifling that people began protesting.

One unexpected activist was a short, thin, soft-spoken Buddhist monk named Ashin Kovida. Somehow, Kovida obtained an illegal copy of the film Bringing Down the Dictator, translated into Burmese. In some off-the-beaten-path Buddhist monastery, Kovida watched as Otpor! members detailed the story of how a handful of Serbian university students organized a movement that eventually ousted Milošević.

Kovida saw what was possible and decided that revolution needed to come to Burma. He sold his religious robes and used the funds to make pamphlets encouraging the people of Burma to come march with him. Hundreds of monks joined him for the protest.

The people watching were convinced that not even the army would attack monks. However repressive the dictator, this was Burma, where monks are considered the gold standard of goodness. Tragically, the army opened fire on Kavida and his cadre of monks. Many were killed, and many more were arrested.

This was the harshest suppression by the Burmese government in years. It was so harsh that it backfired. What kind of a regime allows its army to train their weapons on Buddhist monks peacefully and respectfully protesting? These moments inevitably come to any regime. Dictators will eventually go too far, and it galvanizes the population into super focused, concerted, unified action. That tragic massacre of monks catalyzed the Saffron Revolution (saffron, a reference to the color of the monks’ robes). That first troublemaker, the rebellious monk Kovida, continues to be heavily involved in campaigns for democracy.

Recognizing moments where tyrants have sunk to new lows and then using the force of their moral failures against them is a skill that any activist must learn.

In order to recognize these moments and make the most of them, we have to understand the mechanics of oppression. Tyrants of any stripe, whether a dictator or a grade school principal, use oppression in a calculated way. It serves the dual purpose of punishing dissent and sending a warning to anyone thinking about trying anything like it. The point is not to make you fearful for the sake of fear. The goal of the tyrant is to make you obey.

Always remember that the choice to obey or not to obey is always available to you.