Recollecting my past sit-in and march with Bersih 2.0 in Kuala Lumpur (and Sydney), I wonder if Bersih 5 on Nov 19 will ever move us closer to seeing real reforms happen.

The red-shirts’ bellicose denunciation of Bersih, indirectly sanctioned by the state and emboldened by the mainstream media portrayal of the movement as oppositional activists, makes me want to scream: “We’re as mad as hell, we’re not going to take this any more!” (Howard Beale, The Network, 1976).

Will Bersih’s pitch for a ‘new Malaysia’ be more of the same, only packaged differently? What else can the people do to show the prime minister that “we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it any more”? Have the annual protests significantly raised the stakes in demanding for fundamental reforms?

Protest movements essentially draw power from non-compliance and civil disobedience, disruption and sacrifice. The Albert Einstein Institution in Boston, Massachusetts, notes: “Practitioners of nonviolent struggle have an entire arsenal of nonviolent weapons” at their disposal - nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation (social, economic, and political), and nonviolent intervention.

Gene Sharp, founder of the institution and Nobel Peace Prize nominee 2015, listed ‘198 methods of non-violent action’, which could be adapted to the Malaysian environment. The tactics are in three categories. The first is methods of ‘protest and persuasion’ (public assemblies, forum, display of banners, petitions and public speeches), which Bersih have tried since 2007 with short-term impact.

The other two categories are more confrontational and disruptive. They involve ‘methods of non-cooperation’ - economic boycotts, student walkouts, workplace strikes, civil disobedience.

The Occupy movements adopted this strategy. Protesters were willing to break the rules to gain political mileage, if not to shut down the system. Which was more effective and strategic than sitting in a forum, such as that organised by Proham on Nov 17, to deliberate on how to exercise our rights to peaceful assembly.

If these methods fail to achieve concrete outcomes, disrupting the daily civil activities through a nationwide refusal to participate in the political and economic structures is the last resort - as happened in the Arab Spring. This represents a ‘direct and immediate challenge’.

Sharp writes that since “the disruptive effects of the intervention are harder to withstand for a considerable period of time,” active disruption can produce results more swiftly and dramatically than other approaches to nonviolent conflict. I can’t see this method of last resort happening in Malaysia - not when we’re unprepared to take on short-term pains and sacrifice for long-term gains.