Summary
TBD — distil a 2-4 sentence summary from Body.
Body
Pillars of support are the constituencies that hold up the target — the people and institutions whose continued cooperation lets the target act. A campaign aims to weaken, split or remove those pillars.
In the pillars model, each pillar represents a segment of society whose consent, compliance or resources the target depends on. Tactics are designed to peel away or pressure specific pillars — workers, customers, allied politicians, regulators, the public. The model comes out of civil-resistance studies and is closely linked to the spectrum of allies [source: commons-library], [source: beautiful-trouble]. ICNC extends the framework with contemporary pillars (the international community, institutional allies, media) that Sharp’s original work did not name [source: icnc]. Alinsky.fr uses the same idea under piliers de soutien as the natural complement to the spectrum [source: alinsky-fr]. A common mistake is to attack only the target’s enemies — but pillars of support often include groups who are sympathetic to your cause in general and need only a specific reason to withdraw their cooperation.
Use it for
Designing a corporate-accountability campaign; planning a multi-front strategy against a government; sequencing who to apply pressure on first.
Related
- power-mapping
- spectrum-of-allies
- nonviolent-direct-action
- civil-resistance
- beautiful-trouble
- commons-library
- icnc
- thinkers/gene-sharp
- thinkers/robert-helvey
Summary
TBD — distil a 2-4 sentence summary from Body.
Open Questions
None yet.
Sources & verification
- sources/commons-library — grounding: secondary — RAW (5257 chars)
- sources/beautiful-trouble — grounding: secondary — RAW (2589 chars)
- sources/icnc — grounding: secondary — RAW (15436 chars)
- sources/alinsky-fr — grounding: secondary — RAW (1304 chars)
Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.