A Force More Powerful, directed by Steve York

A key argument expressed within “A Force More Powerful” is that non-violent protest is an effective method to motivate social and political change. The documentary provides three case studies as historical instances where non-violent protest met high levels of success. A main purpose of the filmmakers is to investigate the non-violent aspects of popular uprisings that had been previously underestimated in terms of their contribution to a larger conflict. The instances taken as case studies are all of groups marginalised due to racial, colonial, and economic reasons. The histories of the conflicts from which arise the case studies are given only briefly, with a focus upon the groups shown to be oppressed by their respective states and governmental institutions.

Throughout the course of the film, more emphasis is placed upon the effects of the actions taken by particular individuals and their non-violent groups of dissident citizens than the overall outcome of the struggle. The roles played by violent groups in these same struggles are either completely ignored by “A Force More Powerful”, or shown in an extremely negative light. For example, Nelson Mandela’s continued support for violence as a political weapon is implied by the film to be foolishly stubborn. There is an obvious emphasis placed upon the conditional release that the President was willing to grant Mandela if he were to stop endorsing violent actions by anti-government groups. This information is paired with comments about spontaneous violent outbursts that the filmmakers say threatened to jeopardise the movement, though it is unclear to the audience whether it is only the non-violence method that is threatened, or the entire anti-apartheid movement.

In each insta...

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...can Civil Rights movement, and Mkhuseli Jack’s community boycotts to the implementation of egalitarian policy within South Africa. If we infer that each of these cases are serving to prove the hypothesis put forward by the filmmakers, then it follows that the comparative design being used is the Most Different Systems (MDS). MSS is eliminated, as that method can be identified by the case studies having opposing outcomes, and in this films all instances are shown to have successful, and similar y-variables.

The validity of the comparison made can be drawn into question, however. “...in an MDS design, the researcher is attempting to show that the relationship between the presumed independent variable(s) and a dependent variable holds across a wide variety of vastly divergent settings”¹. Although the researched, investigated variables could be contended as congruent.