Term coined by Michael Nagler to describe the core energy at the heart of any nonviolent social movement. Nonviolence begins with an individual’s conversion of a negative drive to a positive drive. When one person transforms fear, anger, and aggression, into universal love, compassion, and resilience, nonviolence is born. Even though two million people were in the streets of Manila during the Philippines People Power movement, that movement ultimately consisted of “two million individual decisions” according to Cardinal Jaime Sin. Scholars of strategic nonviolence such as Gene Sharp tend to think about people power as the key factor – get enough people together on the streets and anything is possible. (And a lack of discipline can result in an unhelpful mob mentality known as the effervescence of the crowd.) The term person power was coined to account for the fact that the popular term ‘people power”s focus on numbers fails by implication to recognize the importance of the individual in revealing nonviolent truth. Both terms are contrasted with – and often stand in opposition to – state power.