“The lesson from Curtailing Corruption is that citizen action can be a powerful force anywhere. There is much to be learned from this pioneering book.”   —Brian Martin, openDemocracy

From the Introduction by Shaazka Beyerle

“Little did I know in August 2004 that a trip to Ankara, Turkey, would change the course of my professional life. The setting was the New Tactics in Human Rights Symposium, organized by the ever-innovative Center for Victims of Torture. 1 While speaking on a panel discussion, “Mass Actions for Public Participation,” a fellow panelist riveted all of us in the room. He told us about a campaign in Turkey in 1997 that mobilized an estimated 30 million people—yes, 30 million—to fight endemic corruption and linkages between crime syndicates, arms traffickers, the state, the private sector, and the media. The campaign was the One Minute of Darkness for Constant Light, and the speaker was Ersin Salman, one of its founders. I returned home inspired and intrigued. Here was an astounding case of people power that had gone unnoticed—in the international media, in the civil resistance realm, and in anticorruption circles. Regular people mobilized, truly en masse, not to oust a dictator or occupier but to expose, shake up, and begin to change a rotten system of graft, abuse, and impunity.”

The above excerpt was downloaded from the Lynne Rienner Publishers website www.rienner.com

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How do citizens counter corruption and exact accountability from power holders? What strategic value does people power bring to the anticorruption struggle? Can bottom-up, citizen-based strategies complement and reinforce top-down anticorruption efforts?

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Addressing these questions—and demonstrating the critical role of grassroots efforts in the anticorruption/accountability equation—Shaazka Beyerle explores how millions of people around the world have refused to be victims of corruption and become instead the protagonists of successful nonviolent civic movements to gain accountability and promote positive political, social, and economic change.

Shaazka Beyerle is senior adviser at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and also visiting scholar at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

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Copyright © 2014 ISBNs: 978-1-6637-052-4 hc 978-1-62637-056-2 pb

Lynne Rienner, Publisher. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314 Boulder, CO 80301 USA telephone 303.444.6684 fax 303.444.0824

Rise Up Times first learned about this book from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC)

ICNC Facebook page here.  Website: ICNC

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