Andreas Malm’s now famous book How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Verso, 2021) had its origins in the activist-author’s frustration with mainstream distortions concerning the history of working class struggles. But in challenging those who impose misleading nonviolent narratives upon the processes of social change – a task that I too sought to undertake in my own book On Nonviolence (2025) — Malm goes too far and ends up offering up his own problematic political shortcuts. [1] This much is apparent in his book’s title, but also in his concluding paragraph whereupon Malm romanticises violence as acting as a “cleansing force” for the human soul.
Last year the Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence published an enlightening “forum” which invited seven academics to review Malm’s influential text. Isak Svensson’s contribution “How to blow up chances for success” begins:
“Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a well-articulated argument for more forceful action in the age of the escalating climate crisis. Pointing to decades of popular mobilisation that has evidently led to insufficient political action which is nowhere near the systematic change that is required to meet the challenges, Malm asks “At what point do we escalate?” Malm makes a strong case against climate fatalism and defeatism and also – at first glance – against the wisdom of the climate movement to commit to nonviolent discipline in their actions.”
Svensson observed how:
“From the empirical fact that most maximalist popular uprisings and revolutionary movements (that is, campaigns over regime change, territorial autonomy, or end of colonial rule) have included both violent and nonviolent components, Malm draws the conclusion that the violent component is not only a necessary component but also that it is this component that explains the outcome.”
This comment, while partly true, contains a major misrepresentation, as the primary argument made in Malm’s book is a debunking of the false belief that political campaigns must adopt purely nonviolent tactics if they are to succeed. That said, in making his case Malm does go too far in over-egging the emancipatory power of sabotage/violence. Yet at the same time Malm is clear that: “1.) non-violent mass mobilisation should (where possible) be the first resort, militant action the last; and 2.) no movement should ever voluntarily suspend the former, only give it appendages.” That much makes sense.
The second contribution to the forum discussion was Brian Martin’s “Sabotage is the wrong climate radicalism” – a review that came to a similar position as the previous author. Martin concluded: “Basically, Malm believes that when both violent and nonviolent methods were used in a successful campaign, violence was essential for success.” Again, Malm may well overstate the specific importance of violence to mass movements, but the primary argument he was making was that success never comes from a purely nonviolent approach to social change. This fact is evidently not understood by Martin who surmises that “Malm attributes the success of the Iranian revolution to sabotage, when there is contrary evidence.”
But the point that Malm made about the Iranian Revolution (of 1979) was that it was incorrect for nonviolent theorists to reify it as an example of a successful nonviolent revolution, particularly given the important role that violence played within this revolutionary struggle. [2] Making Martin’s point even more irrelevant, the article that Martin cited to back-up his argument about “contrary evidence” was a book chapter titled “Iran’s Islamic Revolution and nonviolent struggle” – an academic article which it turns out partly supported Malm’s argument, albeit unintentionally. The chapter does this in passing when it touches upon the violence that was adopted by “hostile (and now highly armed) crowds” that fought running battles in the streets against the Iranian regime’s brutal military apparatus. [3]
The third forum contributor, Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, writes more accurately about Malm’s actual views in a review entitled “Sabotage and complex public opinion.” Cunningham may not agree with Malm on many matters, but she admits that his advocacy “for the incorporation of sabotage into the repertoire of civil resistance aimed at climate change” is partly rooted in his idea that “’successful’ resistance in the past has often (if not always) been accompanied by sabotage (i.e. destruction of property) …” This is true.
The fourth contributor to the Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence’s Malm forum, Alexei Anisin, titled his review “Nonviolence and morally-induced property destruction”; and this article adopted a more critical interpretation of the work of leading state-department theorists of nonviolence like Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. As he reminds us:
“Riots and other forms of unarmed violence, however, have typically been viewed as belonging to an umbrella of protest strategies that were classified by Chenoweth and Stephan (2008; 2011) as “primarily nonviolent.” While these inquiries were grounded in an analytical foundation that integrated an impressive amount of data and popularised nonviolence to the general public, the authors operated under the presumption that such oppositional movements are largely nonviolent and, in turn, glossed over the intricate and complex variations of events that unfold across wider landscapes of protest and revolution.”
This argument is similar to the point that was made by Malm, and it is an argument that I develop in detail in my own book (On Nonviolence). Moving on, Anisin added that his own research had demonstrated…
“…that many movements that have been considered by scholars to be “primarily nonviolent” are actually filled with much more violence than commonly assumed. What’s more, it appears that a mixture of unarmed violence and nonviolence is most effective in the context of large-scale regime-change-seeking campaigns. Specifically, if different resistance tactics are broken down, one will quickly observe that movements which are labelled as “primarily nonviolent” actually include significantly more violence than typically acknowledged.”
Expanding on this point Anisin continued:
“Contemporary scholarly discourse on the efficacy of various protest strategies is predicated upon an analytical framework that draws from aggregated datasets which assume oppositional movements are predominantly nonviolent in nature. These assumptions and their associated methodological approaches, while initially helpful for facilitating a mass dissemination of knowledge, are inherently flawed.”
Neatly following on from this, Antoine Durance and Manuel Cervera-Marzal, in their forum contribution “From efficacy to legitimacy,” support both Malm and Anisin’s criticisms of the work of Chenoweth and Stephan. They explain:
“Anisin (2020) questioned Chenoweth and Stephan’s choice to categorise as nonviolent campaigns those relying “primarily” (but not exclusively) on nonviolent methods. Campaigns including stone-throwing and the use of Molotov cocktails were therefore considered nonviolent. Criticising the binary categorisation of methods of action into only two categories, Anisin proposed a more precise analysis based on the intermediate category of “unarmed violence” proposed by Kadivar and Ketchley (2018). Using an expanded version of Chenoweth and Stephan’s NAVCO database, he demonstrated that “unarmed violence,” formerly categorised as nonviolent, was more effective than strictly nonviolent actions.”
Nevertheless, despite raising these concerns, Durance and Cervera-Marzal seem to side with Chenoweth and Stephan, apparently trusting them to plot a suitable academic way forward for revolutionary research… which is a big shame, and a big mistake.
The final contribution to the forum is Alexandre Christoyannopoulos’ article “Approaching pacifism and diversity with eyes wide open”. Christoyannopoulos, as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence, uses his piece to welcome the controversial arguments presented within Malm’s book.
“In stimulating such a debate as well as reminding its readers of the climate emergency, of the failures of political and economic leaders, and indeed of the particularly pernicious impact of luxury consumption (not least by these same political and economic elites), the book’s contribution to public and activist debates is helpful and to be welcomed.
“It is also fair to recognise that Malm acknowledges some of the reasons why nonviolent tactics are so widespread and why many of their advocates prefer them, from the tactical advantages they bring (pp23–24) to the way they lower barriers to participation (pp114–115). Moreover, critical though he is of Extinction Rebellion for example, he also acknowledges its “achievements,” including how it “massively shifted the point of gravity in domestic politics” (p129).
“Malm says explicitly that “non-violent mass mobilization should (where possible) be the first resort” (p115).”
But what Christoyannopoulos takes umbrage at is “the way ‘pacifism’ is caricatured” by Malm, leading him to accuse Malm of “overlook[ing] the richness, complexity, and internal diversity of pacifist comments about violence and how to respond to it.” This complexity apparently involves engaging with the misrepresentations of the writings of the likes of Chenoweth and Stephan – the former being an editorial board member of his Journal. Thus Christoyannopoulos asserts:
“No researcher on nonviolence has claimed that nonviolence is guaranteed to work, nor that violence never works. Overall, however, the empirical evidence suggests that nonviolence succeeds more often and begets better outcomes – because it appears to be a more effective strategy for facilitating the mechanisms identified by researchers as associated with movement success (such as building broad-based, diverse support for a movement, eliciting defections from those holding up the unjust system, etc.).” [4]
This being exactly the type of problematic narrative that Malm set out to debunk in his book and which I also interrogate in my own book-length engagement with this subject matter.
Footnotes
[1] Alyssa Battistoni, “Is sabotage a pipe dream?,” Verso blog, April 21, 2022; Lars Henriksson, “Should we blow up pipelines? Once again on sabotage and climate change,” Röda rummet , May 22, 2021; Alan Thornett, “Review of Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Global Ecosocialist Network, February 15, 2021; and for a discussion of Malm’s book in relation to the types of mass struggle that are urgently needed, see Arne Johansson, “Climate transformation demands a revolutionary struggle for democratic socialism,” Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna — International Socialist Alternative in Sweden, December 28, 2021; Grace Voss, “COP26 was a failure: What’s next for the climate movement?,” Socialist Alternative, December 11, 2021.
[2] To develop his point about the role played by violence Malm refers to Misagh Parsa’s useful book Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution (Rutgers University Press, 1989) – a book which Maria Stephan heavily relied upon to write her own ‘nonviolent’ history of the Iranian Revolution (see following footnote).
[3] Mohsen Sazegara and Maria Stephan, “Iran’s Islamic Revolution and nonviolent struggle,” in Stephan (ed.), Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization, and Governance in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.198. The primary source material for this chapter is Charles Kurzman’s book The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Harvard University Press, 2004).
[4] In his review Christoyannopoulos refers to his own 2024 article “Mapping the landscape between pacifism and anarchism: accusations, rejoinders, and mutual resonances,” wherein he observed: “Chenoweth and Stephan’s (2011) Why Civil Resistance Works, with the associated dataset, has changed this. Coding and analysing 323 examples of violent and nonviolent resistance from 1900 to 2006, it concludes that nonviolent campaigns succeeded twice as often as violent ones, while also ushering outcomes more respectful of democracy and human rights. Some anarchists have questioned the scientific rigour of that study (Gelderloos, 2020), and some scholars have nuanced and queried some of its findings (see below), but on the whole, it has been widely praised, refined, and built upon in further studies. It is also widely cited in activist circles.” (p.411)
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