A nonviolent campaign proceeds through four defined stages: collecting the facts to confirm injustice exists, negotiation, self-purification to prepare for suffering, and then direct action. Each earlier stage must be exhausted before the next is justified, so direct action is a last resort rather than a first impulse.
Nonviolent direct action deliberately creates tension and crisis so that a community that has refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue it has ignored. The aim is not to avoid tension but to produce the kind of constructive tension that makes genuine negotiation unavoidable.
A just law is a human code that aligns with moral or natural law and uplifts human personality; an unjust law degrades it or is imposed by a majority on a minority not bound by it themselves. One has a moral duty to obey the former and to disobey the latter.
The greatest obstacle to freedom is not the open opponent but the moderate who values the absence of tension more than the presence of justice, and who keeps urging the oppressed to wait for a more convenient time. A negative peace that is merely the absence of tension blocks the positive peace that is the presence of justice.
Those who have not felt the specific sting of an injustice find it easy to counsel patience and gradual timing, because waiting costs them nothing. Experienced from inside the harm, the delay reads not as prudence but as a continued denial of a right already overdue.