Gene Sharp, an obscure American political scientist whose writing on non-violent political resistance ended up being an inspiring influence on the Arab Spring, has died peacefully at home at the age of 90.

Sharp distilled the wisdom of icons of non-violent struggle against oppression down the ages, put his own spin on it and disseminated the philosophy around the world, most famously in his seminal work From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. The book made waves upon publication in the early 1990s and became in effect a handbook for non-violent revolt.

It has been translated, often by activists themselves, into dozens of languages and cited directly in many grassroots uprisings and protests.

The retired professor believed fervently in the power of ordinary people to disempower dictators, motivating resistance leaders in the face of fear and violence with the idea that bullies ultimately could not rule if the masses withheld their support.

His death, at his home in Boston on Sunday, was confirmed on Tuesday by Jamila Raqib, the executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution he founded in Massachusetts in 1983.

“I’m having a lot of difficulty adequately putting into words what he meant to me and to the world. I’ve been observing an outpouring at the news of Gene’s passing and I think many people are reflecting on the profound effect he had on their thinking and their approaches to the massive challenges in life,” Raqib told the Guardian on Tuesday.

She said she had been looking back at Sharp’s early writing from his teens and into the 1950s.

“It was a dark world: the rise of totalitarianism, atomic weapons, the struggle against racial injustice, and he found there was not one cure, a super-solution, for oppression. He collected the wisdom of thousands of years of people fighting oppression,” she said.

Raqib said Sharp was less an activist than an intellectual and an advocate. But his passion in empowering the grassroots with the belief that people could rebel successfully using non-violent means enraged dictators from Hugo Chávez to Slobodan Milošević and authorities from Russia to Angola. And it inspired modern uprisings from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004 to Egypt in the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement against economic inequality that spread out of the US in 2011, and beyond.

He identified 198 methods of non-violent action grouped according to the level of risk, preparation and forcefulness associated with them.

Sharp was nominated for the Nobel peace prize multiple times. He never won it but received many other prizes and awards for his work.

The British journalist and film-maker Ruaridh Arrow, who made a documentary about Sharp and the drive behind Dictatorship to Democracy in 2012, said Sharp was painfully aware that resistance could cost lives.

“You will sustain casualties, but fewer casualties than if you resort to violence. And non-violent action can make the transition to democracy easier. Sharp examined the models and strategies of titans of non-violence and basically put it in a manual,” Arrow told the Guardian.

Arrow’s documentary about Sharp, How to Start a Revolution, was about to be released when the Arab Spring, the series of popular uprisings across parts of north Africa and the Middle East that began in Tunisia in 2011, took place.

Arrow recently completed Sharp’s authorized biography, which is due to be published in the US and the UK some time this spring.

He said that Sharp admired icons such as Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King Jr and many others but he did not so much argue for the moral values of non-violent resistance as the sheer pragmatism and effectiveness of it. Sharp argued that that could mean the masses all staying at home, refusing to participate in a society’s everyday functioning.

Sharp served time in prison for civil disobedience. He refused to carry his draft card and submit to conscription to fight in the Korean war. He was born in Ohio and studied at Ohio State and Oxford universities, later becoming a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Sharp’s first book, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Modern Power: Three Case Histories, was published in 1960.