Srdja Popovic

Named among Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers—and author of inspirational handbook Blueprint for Revolution—Popovic is a founder of Otpor!, the Serbian youth movement that toppled Slobodan Milosevic. Now at CANVAS, he teaches a new form of protest that is changing the nature of peaceful revolutions. In 1998, Srdja Popovic and his friends formed Otpor! (“Resistance” in Serbian)—a youth movement that grew to 70,000 members, and which displaced Serbia's dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. For Otpor!, Popovic and his friends drew on their love of Monty Python, using street theater, pranks, and simple yet powerful messages as their chosen (and inspired) form of protest. With an understanding of how peaceful revolutions worked, Popovic and his friend Slobodan Djinovic next created the Centre for Applied Non-Violent Action & Strategies—or CANVAS. Soon after Otpor's victory in 2000, Popovic left politics to found CANVAS and pursue the life of a revolutionary. CANVAS is an NGO that trains pro-democracy activists in key strategies of unity, planning, and nonviolent discipline, as well as the impact of humor. Popovic and his team travel all over the world to teach, training activists from Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon, among others. Popovic is the author of new book Blueprint for Revolution, a handbook for anyone who wants to effectively (and peacefully) improve your neighborhood, make a difference in your community, or change the world. Popovic is determined to spread the models and messages of Otpor! and CANVAS worldwide—and from the looks of it, he's achieving his goal. Otpor! was the inspiration for the Arab Spring protestors: Otpor!’s symbol—a clenched fist—would be used in their logo (as in other revolutions around the world), and they passed around subtitled copies of the Otpor! documentary, Bringing Down a Dictator. Popovic is currently an adjunct lecturer in several academic institutions including NYU, Colorado College, University of Essex and Harvard.