From: The politics of nonviolent action, Gene Sharp

Traditional power

A grassroots approach sees power as something that flows upwards: this is what we call the inverted triangle.

Unjust power

In this way of viewing power, the manager of an oil company or a head of state is inherently unstable. Like an inverted triangle, unjust power and authority are unstable and can easily collapse. To prevent this, they rely on support points that keep them upright – we call them pillars of support. For example, oil executives are not only reliant on their managers but also on other pillars of support, such as the company’s shareholders, the secretaries who manage their agendas, the technicians who keep their mobile phones and emails operational, the janitors who clean their offices, their limousine drivers, truck drivers, and ship captains who transport their oil, journalists who do not expose their human rights violations, engineers and contractors who build the roads on which oil company trucks travel, customers who buy their products, and so on.

Through all these actions, individuals (unwittingly) legitimize the oil companies and support them, allowing them to continue their destructive practices. A campaign from the 1970s illustrates this. The U.S. government sent weapons to the Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan, which were used to massacre the population of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). It is estimated that three million East Pakistanis were killed in this genocide. A group of Quakers in the United States wanted to make a difference. When they discovered that some of the weapons shipments were being loaded from ports in their own city, they chose a dramatic action to stop the flow of weapons – a sea blockade! For a month, they publicly practiced 'maritime maneuvers' in canoes and kayaks in full view of TV cameras. Some days had special themes, and religious leaders, children, and the elderly worked together in anticipation of the arrival of the massive cargo ships heading to Pakistan. (Read more about the theory and tactics of kayak activism). When the first cargo ship arrived, the group jumped into their canoes and rowboats. The Coast Guard immediately pulled them out, while multiple photographers scrambled to get the best shot. In the following weeks, they played a cat-and-mouse game, with the cargo ships trying to avoid the public spotlight by changing their arrival times or rerouting to other nearby ports. But an important group of people was watching the story unfold on TV: the dockworkers who loaded the ships. The Quakers decided to go to the bars and meet them. The dockworkers were moved by the sincerity of the Quakers and the sense that this was a historic moment. The local longshoremen's union agreed to refuse to load weapons bound for Pakistan. It was the beginning of the end for this weapons shipment. The local dockworkers persuaded the national union to stop loading military shipments to Pakistan. With the loss of this crucial pillar of support, the government could no longer use any port on the East Coast to send weapons. This classic example of civil disobedience made it too costly to send the weapons. Soon after, the federal government announced that it would no longer support the dictator (it will come as no surprise that they did not mention the role of the activists). Without firing a shot or lobbying even once, this small group of activists changed the course of the American empire. That is power.

People Power

This is a different conception of 'people power,' where people only collaborate to try to push those in power to change. Instead, the concept of the inverted triangle uses the specific strategy of transforming allies to destabilize power.

By analyzing our targets in this way, we may discover new support pillars that we can 'remove' from the system—and we can also better analyze which sources of power we have relationships with and access to in order to enforce change.

Read more here about mapping the power of your target. 

Support Pillars 

Use this to analyze the power of your campaign target:

1. Start by placing your target in the center.

2. Brainstorm different support pillars. Who supports this target? Even if they don't agree with the target (or don’t care about their position), who are the people who carry out the orders or otherwise hold up a support pillar? Be specific with the names of unions, media conglomerates, secretaries, etc.

3. Optionally, you can take a few and create separate inverted triangles for them with their own support pillars.