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The appeal of limited alignments -- Later stages of the Cold War -- The post-Cold War era -- Maritime Southeast Asia -- The mainland peninsula -- The prevalence of limited alignments today -- Key findings and implications

If there are some things in life that should not be bet on, the question of who will next win the Nobel Peace Prize somehow feels like it should be among them. Internet bookmakers, however, will place odds on almost anything, and they are not above taking wagers on Nobel prospects. Over the past two years, some of the safest money has not been on a head of state, a major nongovernmental organization, or a charismatic resistance leader, but rather on a soft-spoken, eighty-five-year-old academic. His name is Gene Sharp. Sharp, a theorist and author of ground-breaking works on the dynamics of nonviolent conflict, has been called the "dictator slayer," the "Machiavelli of nonviolence," and the Clausewitz of unarmed revolution. His circumstances are humble: he runs his research outfit, known as the Albert Einstein Institution, out of the ground floor of his row house in East Boston, and the organization has just one other staffer. For the most part, Sharp has labored for decades in quiet obscurity -- well respected within a small field of study but virtually unknown outside of it. At the same time, Sharp's work has had an unusually broad impact. His pamphlet From Dictatorship to Democracy, a ninety-three-page distillation of his core insights and a handbook for overthrowing autocrats, has been translated into more than thirty languages. The slim volume has a habit of turning up in hot spots of global resistance. Originally written in 1993 to help dissidents in Burma use nonviolent action against the ruling junta, the book made it into the library of Serbian students seeking to overthrow the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, circulated among activists during successful uprisings in Georgia and the Ukraine, and was downloaded in Arabic amid mass protests in Tunisia and Egypt. The Iranian government has denounced the book and its author by name. In the summer of 2005, two independent bookshops in Russia were burned down after stocking the newly available Russian translation. ("I still keep a half-burned copy on a shelf in my office," one opposition leader told the Wall Street Journal.) Particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring, Sharp's renown has grown, and he was the subject of a feature documentary, entitled How to Start a Revolution, released just as the Occupy movement took shape in 2011. Of course, the idea that any mass movement can be attributed to one person is dubious. With regard to the Arab Spring, Middle Eastern analysts have taken exception to the Western media's eagerness to credit an American "Lawrence of Arabia" for rebellions that have deep local roots. Similarly ignoring indigenous agency, conspiracy theorists on the far left have painted their own picture of Sharp as a puppet master at the center of a sinister CIA-led scheme to overthrow governments disliked by Washington. Those who recognize such notions as wildly off base but are intrigued by the evident power of Sharp's work may be curious for a more sober assessment of the scholar's contributions. And those involved in U.S. social movements might pose a more pressing question: can Sharp's ideas about nonviolent conflict, which have proven potent in challenging dictators abroad, be used to oppose the corporate takeover of democracy at home? Adapted from the source document.