The first COIN project I worked on was Bruce Mansfield’s Gandhi. Even as a relative newcomer to the COIN Series, I knew that Gandhi was a very different game. The model of nonviolent resistance presented in Gandhi sparked my imagination; where else could conflicts be modeled using these principles? As I continued to read I was surprised to find that one of the most common examples of how nonviolent resistance works was the People Power Revolution of 1986. I was even more surprised to find that Ken was already very far along in his design of People Power.
When Ken and I started talking about how to make the nonviolent narrative in People Power clear and evocative, my immediate recommendation was to steal Bruce’s best idea – that Activists are only Active (and only effective) in Protest spaces, and use of the Protest marker to lock Government cubes in place. This model of nonviolence is rich and creates myriad possibilities for interaction. People Power’s model takes the ideas from Gandhi and extends them in two new directions: the interaction between nonviolence and Terror, and the introduction of a second nonviolent action, Strike!
Strikes represent worker movements and civil disobedience due to NPA agitation, while Protests represent traditional mass movements and demonstrations, as well as other forms of nonviolent direct action (sit-ins, boycotts, activism, etc.). Terror, on the other hand, represents political violence and includes both violent direct action by Insurgents and the Government reprisal towards both violent and non-violent movements. Each of these has a different effect and different interactions with other modes of action, and each space can only contain one of these three markers in total. Some actions replace markers with other markers, and other actions are blocked entirely by the presence of a certain marker or markers. In addition, the double-sided Protest/Strike markers form a shared pool, meaning that if all Strikes are active it might be harder for the Reformers to Protest, and vice versa.
Terror is probably the most familiar to veteran COIN players. The violent insurgent Faction in People Power is the CPP-NPA, referred to as simply the NPA in the game. The New People’s Army is the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the best known of the Communist insurgent organisations in the Philippines. The NPA is one of several Marxist-Leninist-Maoist insurgent groups waging a protracted people’s war against the state (similar to the Shining Path in Peru), and its continued struggle is tightly coupled to the influence and leadership of the CPP, even today.
The Terror Operation is the main violent tool used by the NPA to influence the population of an area, and its effects mirror other COIN volumes: flip an Underground Guerilla to Active to shift towards Resistance, and place a Terror marker in the space. Additionally, Terror removes any Protest or Strike marker in that space, modeling the tendency for violent action to lower engagement with nonviolent protests due to fear, collateral damage, and radicalization. The Government can also place Terror with the Reprisal Special Activity, which is equally effective at dispersing Strikes or Protests.
Protest is placed by the Reformers via the appropriately named Protest Operation. Unlike in Gandhi’s two step process, the Reformers in People Power place a Protest marker and shift the space in the same action. This is a function of scale and method; while Gandhi’s campaigns of nonviolence were decades long, People Power takes place over the course of approximately 5 years. Placement of a Protest marker Activates all Activists in that space, making them vulnerable to the Government but also able to contest Control and Convert Government forces. Protest can never be placed in a space with Terror, but it can replace a Strike in spaces with Activists; this comes at the cost of requiring a further action on a later turn to shift the space towards Opposition.
Strike is an entirely new action in People Power, and is conducted only by the NPA faction. The balance between the political and violent struggles was a constant debate among the CPP-NPA leadership throughout the late 70s and early 80s, even leading to certain areas being declared off limits for violent action by the party. Labor movements were often infiltrated by CPP-NPA Cadres, who agitated to create sympathy for Communist causes. Because these labor movements were centered in heavily populated Cities, the Strike Special Action is limited to Cities. Like Protest, Strike shifts the political alignment of a space and pins Government forces in place, but it does not activate Reformer Activists (instead representing a much smaller and more focused political action by CPP cadres). Strikes also have the ability to subvert Protests – any time a Strike is placed, it removes an Activist and replaces a Protest if there is one in the space – but they cannot take place in Terrorized Cities due to the reluctance of workers to expose themselves to violence. In short, if the NPA player wishes to execute a hybrid violent/nonviolent strategy, they have to Strike first and then Terror later.
For more reading on the interactions between violent and nonviolent movements, I recommend Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence, eds. Deborah Avant, Marie E. Berry, Erica Chenoweth, Rachel A. Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, Oliver Kaplan, and Timothy Sisk.
Next week, we’ll look at the Reformer Faction in more detail.
Previous Articles:
Laban! Chapter 1: Corruption and Patronage in People Power
Laban! Chapter 2: Support, Opposition, and Resistance in People Power
Author: Jason Carr
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