World System Simulation: Our goal is to recreate the world.
To do so, we have to find the driving forces of the world.

We need to simplify the world somehow to find the most fundamental, the most important, driving forces that move social, cultural, and political changes.

We might start with POWER.

What is power? Ability to MOVE something, to have an effect on something.

But where does it come from? You can't touch it, see it, hear it, smell it, taste it. So what is it? Where is it? Who has it? Is it really an IT? Can somebody really "have" it? Remember how language plays games with us.

Hard Power vs. Soft Power

"The basic concept of power is the ability to influence others to get them to do what you want. There are three major ways to do that: one is to threaten them with sticks; the second is to pay them with carrots; the third is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they want what you want. If you can get others to be attracted, to want what you want, it costs you much less in carrots and sticks."

- Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics 2004

Hard Power -Economic & Physical Force (Coercive) (carrots and sticks)
Soft Power - shaping minds(Co-optive)
Examples: Education, Media, Consumerism, Exporting Values, Defining "cool"
Hard Power + Soft Power = "Structural Power" -power and inequality embedded in (and produced by) economic, social, political, and ideological structures

from the text: Structural Power is "Power that organizes and orchestrates the systemic interaction within and among societies, directing economic and political forces on the one hand and ideological forces that shape public ideas, values and beliefs on the other." (page 381 of Haviland)

The history of Britain's colonization of India and Gandhi's nonviolent struggle to free India can illustrate these concepts.



Though several European countries established settlements and trade relations with India, it was not until the 1757 Battle of Plassey that Britain started to realize that they could gain nearly complete control over present-day India through direct or indirect rule, which they had done by the early 1800s.

The British rule can be understood in terms of hard, soft, and structural power:
Hard Power: Strong military power (many of them hired Indians) as well as economic power by taxing essentials like land and salt
Soft Power: Creating demand for British goods such as textiles, and a desire among many (including young Gandhi) to become like the high class British.
Structural Power: As a complete structure, Indians needed money to pay taxes and buy the new products they desired. Many of them took jobs enforcing British rule: as soldiers, police, etc.

Gandhi is born in 1869 and though he was small in stature and used no guns, he would be the unquestioned leader of India for 30 years. Albert Einstein said of him: "Generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood."

Early years: stole money to buy cigarettes. He admitted this to his father, who embraced him with thankfulness that he had the courage to admit his fault. Gandhi later mused that this loving form of discipline shaped his love and empathy for all humanity.
Age 13 - married according to Hindu custom
Age 17 - goes to London to attend law school
Tries being a lawyer but freezes in front of the judge
Age 24 - Goes to South Africa and experiences discrimination on the train - thrown off at the first stop.
He spent a long cold night on the train platform, and resolved to resist the oppression.
He started organizing Indians to resist with him ...
The Mahatma (Great Soul) was born ...



Until 1906 he was a loyal citizen of the British Empire. He wanted equal rights and equal citizenship, not Independence.

From 1899-1902 he was involved in the Boerr War (Zulus vs. British) in which he was awakened to the brutality of British domination. He begins to reflect on domination and power and how it effects all aspects of life.

In 1906, new laws requried all Indians to be fingerprinted and for women to strip to reveal body marks to British police.

Gandhi has the epiphany of resisting through simple non-cooperation with the law. His speech sparked an historically unprecented act of mass civil disobediance. This was the beginning of the Satyagraha movement. Seeking truth through Non-Violence.

Gandhi describes it as follows:

"Its root meaning is holding onto truth, hence truth-force. I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself."

1913 - Hindu and Muslim marriages declared invalid. Gandhi was able to mobilize a mass strike and the laws were overturned.

Meanwhile, he promoted the idea that men and women were equal, thereby mobilizing women in his movement as well.

1915 - He returns to India as a hero (with tremendous influence). At this time over 300 million Indians were ruled by 100,000 British.



Gandhi was beginning to form a new idea of power. It is not a possession of the empowered, it is something given to the powerful by the masses. If the masses decide the power is invalid and not legitimate, they can stop accepting it.

He also begins to recognize the structural power of the British. He calls for Indians to give up their British textiles, to weave their own cloth, and to go on a massive nation-wide strike - effectively halting the empire.

The response from the British General Dyer was the Armitsar Massacre of 1919, a horrific example of hard power.

The British had very little "Soft Power" though and they were losing it with every act of hard power. They did not control the hearts and minds of Indians. Gandhi had tremendous soft power, and the more the British used their hard power, the more Gandhi's soft power increased (the Jiu-Jitsu effect). Gandhi employed non-violent techniques of "non-cooperation". He recognized that Britain was attempting to set up a pervasive structure of power.

By not participating in the structure (by not purchasing British goods, refusing to pay taxes, and not working for them) he undermined British structural power.



In 1930 (age 61), he decided to fight the British laws against Indians manufacturing salt.

He and 80 followers set out to walk 240 miles to the coast where he would pick up salt and process it.
They walked just 10 miles a day through thousands of villages. By the time he arrived at the beach, hundreds of thousands of people had followed him there along with members of the international press.

Gandhi was imprisoned ("he was delighted" because it increased his soft power and undermined the British)

His followers continued the protest with a march on the salt works.

He was invited to Britain to discuss India's future. It appeared that Independence was imminent, but so was WWII, which delayed progress.



Independence would not come until 1947. Gandhi was saddened to see his country split into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India. As many as 500,000 people died in the ensuing violence.

Gandhi went on a hunger strike to stop the violence. After one week, violence ceased in New Delhi.

Gandhi was killed by a Hindu extremist in 1948. His assassination stopped the violence as all of India mourned the death of "their father."