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Good afternoon. I am proud to be here at TEDxKrakow.

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I'll try to speak a little bit today about a phenomenon

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which can and is actually changing the world,

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and whose name is people power.

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I'll start with the anecdote, or for those of you

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who are Monty Python lovers, a Monty Python type of sketch.

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Here it is. It is December 15, 2010.

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Somebody gives you a bet. You will look at a crystal ball

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and you will see the future. The future will be accurate.

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But you need to share it with the world. Okay?

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Curiosity killed the cat. You take the bet.

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You look at the crystal ball. One hour later,

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you are sitting in a building on the national TV

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in a talkshow, and you tell the story.

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"Before the end of 2011, Ben Ali and Mubarak

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and Gaddafi will be down and prosecuted.

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Saleh of Yemen and Assad of Syria

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would be either challenged or already on their knees.

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Osama bin Laden will be dead,

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and Ratko Mladic will be in the Hague."

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Now, the anchor watches you with a strange gaze on his face,

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and then on the top of it you add,

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"And thousands of the young people from Athens, Madrid

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and New York will demonstrate for social justice,

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claiming that they are inspired with Arabs."

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Next thing you know, two guys in white appear.

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They give you the strange t-shirt,

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take you to the nearest mental institution.

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So I would like to speak a little bit about the phenomenon

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which is behind what already seems to be the very bad year

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for bad guys, and this phenomenon is called people power.

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Well, people power has been there for a while.

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It helped Gandhi kick the Brits from India.

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It helped Martin Luther King win a historic racial struggle.

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It helped local Lech Walesa to kick out

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one million Soviet troops from Poland

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and beginning the end of the Soviet Union as we know it.

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So what's new in it? What seems to be very new,

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which is the idea I would like to share with you today,

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that there is a set of rules and skills which can be learned

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and taught in order to perform successful nonviolent struggle.

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If this is true, we can help these movements.

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Well, first one, analytic skills.

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I'll try where it all started in the Middle East,

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and for so many years we were living with completely the wrong

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perception of the Middle East.

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It was looking like the frozen region, literally a refrigerator,

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and there are only two types of meals there:

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steak, which stands for a Mubarak, Ben Ali-type of

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military police dictatorship, or a potato,

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which stands for Tehran types of theocracies.

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And everybody was amazed when the refrigerator opened

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and millions of young, mainly secular people step out

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to do the change. Guess what? They didn't watch the demographics.

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What is the average age of Egyptians? 24.

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How long was Mubarak in power? 31.

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So this system: just obsolete. They expired,

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and young people of the Arab World have awakened

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one morning and understood that power lies in their hands.

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The rest is the year in front of us. And guess what?

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The same Generation Epsilon with their rules,

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with their tools, with their games and with their language,

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which sounds a little bit strange to me. I am 38 now.

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And can you look at the age of the people on the streets of Europe?

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It seems that Generation Epsilon is coming.

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Now let me set another example.

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I'm meeting different people throughout the world,

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and they are, you know, academics and professors

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and doctors, and they will always talk conditions.

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They will say, "People power will work only if the regime is not too oppressive."

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They will say, "People power will work if the annual income

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of the country is between X and Z."

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They will say, "People power will work only if there is a foreign pressure."

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They will say, "People power will work only if there is no oil."

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And, I mean, there is a set of conditions.

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Well, the news here is that your skills [that you] bring in the conflict

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seem to be more important than the conditions,

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namely skills of unity, planning,

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and maintaining nonviolent discipline.

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Let me give you the example.

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I am coming from a country called Serbia.

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It took us 10 years to unite 18 opposition party leaders,

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with their big egos, behind one single candidate

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against Balkan dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

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Guess what? That was the day of his defeat.

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You look at the Egyptians, they fire on Tahrir Square,

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they get rid of their individual symbols.

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They appear on the street only with the flag of Egypt.

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I will give you a counter-example.

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You see nine presidential candidates running against Lukashenko.

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You will know the outcome.

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So unity is a big thing, and this can be achieved.

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Same with planning. Somebody has lied to you

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about the successful and spontaneous nonviolent revolution?

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That thing doesn't exist in the world.

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Whenever you see young people in front of the road

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trying to fraternize with the police or military,

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somebody was thinking about it before.

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Now, at the end, nonviolent discipline,

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and this is probably the game-changer.

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If you maintain nonviolent discipline, you will exclusively win.

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You have 100,000 people in a nonviolent march,

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and one idiot or agent provocateur is throwing stones,

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guess what takes all the cameras? That one guy.

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One single act of violence can literally

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destroy your movement.

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Now let me move to another place.

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It's selection of strategies and tactics.

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There are certain rules in nonviolent struggle you may follow.

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First, you start small.

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Second, you pick the battles you can win.

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It's only 200 of us in this room.

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We won't call for the March of Millions.

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But what if we organize spraying graffiti throughout the night

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all over Krakow city? The city will know.

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So we pick the tactics which accommodates to the event,

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especially this thing we call the small tactics of dispersion.

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They're very useful in a violent oppression.

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We are actually witnessing the picture

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of one of the best tactics ever used.

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It was on Tahrir Square, where the international community

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was constantly frightened that the Islamists

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will overtake the revolution. Well, they've organized

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Christians protecting Muslims, who are there praying,

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Coptic wedding cheered by thousands of Muslims.

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The world has just changed the picture,

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but somebody was thinking about this previously.

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So there are so many things you can do instead of

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getting into one place, shouting and

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showing off in front of the security forces.

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Now there is also another very important dynamic,

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and this is a dynamic normally analytics don't see.

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This is dynamics between fear and apathy on one side

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and enthusiasm and humor on another side.

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So it works like in a video game.

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You have a fear high, you have status quo.

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You have enthusiasm higher, you see fear starting to melt.

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Day two, you see people running towards police

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instead of from the police.

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In Egypt, you can tell that something is happening there.

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And then it's about humor. Humor is such a powerful

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game-changer, and of course it was very big in Poland.

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And you know, we were just a small group of crazy students

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in Serbia when we made this big skit.

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We put the big petrol barrel with a

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portrait picture of Mr. President on it

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in the middle of the Main Street. There was a hole on the top

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so you could literally come, put a coin in,

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get a baseball bat, and pow, hit his face.

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Sounds loud. And within the minutes, we were sitting

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in a nearby cafe having coffee, and there was

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a queue of people waiting to do this lovely thing.

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Well, that's just the beginning of the show.

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The real show starts when the police appears.

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What will they do? Arrest us? We are nowhere to be seen.

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We are three blocks away observing it from our espresso bar.

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Arrest the shoppers with kids? Doesn't make sense.

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Of course, you could bet they have done the most stupid thing:

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They arrested the barrel. And now the picture

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of the smashed face on the barrel with the policeman

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dragging them to the police car, that was the best day

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for the photographers from newspapers that they ever will have.

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So, I mean, these are the things you can do,

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and you can always use the humor.

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There is also one big thing about the humor: It really hurts,

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because these guys really are taking themselves too seriously.

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When you start to mock them, it hurts.

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Now, everybody is talking about His Majesty, the Internet,

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and it is also a very useful skill, but don't rush

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to label things like Facebook Revolution, Twitter Revolution.

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Don't mix tools with the substance.

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It is true that the Internet and new media are very useful

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in making things faster and cheaper.

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They make it also a bit safer for the participants

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because they give the part of anonymity.

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We are watching the great example of something else the Internet can do.

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It can put the price tag of state-sponsored violence over nonviolent protesters.

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This is a famous group, We are all Khaled Said,

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made by Wael Ghonim in Egypt and his friend.

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This is the mutilated face of the guy who was beaten by the police.

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This is how he became the public, and this is what probably

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became the straw which broke the camel's back.

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But here is also the bad news.

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The nonviolent struggle is won in the real world,

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in the streets. You will never change your society

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towards democracy or economics

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if you sit down and click.

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There are risks to be taken and there are living people

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who are winning the struggle.

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Well, million dollar question: What will happen in the Arab World?

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And though young people from the Arab World

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were pretty successful in bringing down three dictators,

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shaking the region, kind of persuading clever kings

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from Jordan and Morocco doing substantial reforms,

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it is yet to be seen what will be the outcome,

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whether the Egyptians and Tunisians will make it through the transition

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or this will end in bloody ethnic and religious conflict,

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whether the Syrians will maintain nonviolent discipline,

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faced with the brutal daily violence

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which kills thousands already,

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or they will slip into violent struggle

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and make ugly civil war.

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Will these revolutions be whole like through the transitions

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to democracy or be overtaken by military

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or extremists of all kinds? We cannot tell.

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Same works for the Western sector, where you can see

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all of these excited young people protesting around the world,

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occupying this, occupying that.

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Are they going to become the world wave?

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Are they going to find their skills, their enthusiasm,

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and their strategy to find what they really want

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and push for the reform, or will they just stay

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complaining about the endless list of the things they hate?

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This is the difference between two towns.

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Now, what [do] the statistics have?

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My friend's book, Maria Stephan's book,

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talks a lot about violent and nonviolent struggle,

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and there are some shocking data.

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If you look at the last 35 years

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and different social transitions from dictatorship to democracy,

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you will see that out of 67 different cases,

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in 50 of these cases it was nonviolent struggle

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which was the key power.

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This is one more reason to look at this phenomenon.

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This is one more reason to look at the Generation Epsilon,

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enough for me to give them credit and hope

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that they will find their skills and their courage

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to use the nonviolent struggle

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and thus fix at least a part of the mess

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our generation is making in this world.

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Thank you. (Applause)