It is make or break time in the fictional republic of Bedorvan, which sounds central European but could just as easily be part of the former Soviet Union or, more pertinently, Iran. Will the fledgling opposition manage to overthrow its undemocratic leader and win free elections?

Peter Ackerman, a multi-millionaire American financier in his late fifties, is introducing his whizzy toy to students at King’s College London: it is a computer game called A Force More Powerful, which cost more than $3m (£1.7m) of his own money to produce and is designed as a manual for “colour” revolutions worldwide.

Inspired by the example of Solidarity in Poland, the fall of Milosevic in Serbia and the orange and rose revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, Ackerman intends to flood the world’s nastiest regimes with copies. “What would happen if we dropped 10,000 of them in Iran?” he muses.

Ackerman, who made a fortune from junk bonds in the “greed is good” era of the 1980s, runs his own mini-fiefdom, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, in Washington. Known by some as the George Soros of subversion because of his wealth and willingness to spend it on the creation of open societies, he is intent on spreading the message that tyrants can be toppled peacefully from within.

A Georgian dissident told The Washington Post that the centre’s documentary on the fall of Milosevic, Bringing Down a Dictator, guided them through the 2003 revolution. “Most important was the film,” said the protester. “All the demonstrators knew the tactics of the revolution in Belgrade by heart . . . Everybody knew what to do.”

Ackerman also chairs Freedom House in Washington, a pro-democracy body where President George W Bush gave a speech on the march of freedom last month. The people-power advocate is one of the most curious and compelling figures to emerge from the strange times we live in.

Hobbled by the war in Iraq and Hamas’s electoral victory, Bush’s project to spread democracy throughout the Middle East is not in healthy shape despite the Arab spring that flowered after the first election in Iraq last year.

With American enthusiasm for sustained foreign adventures diminished, even in the most hawkish “bomb Iran” circles, the vogue is for non-military regime change by means of strikes, boycotts, protests and demos, Solidarinosc-style.

This is where Ackerman comes in. “How do people who are living under oppression, who have no military option, remove the power of an authoritarian who has got his boot on their necks?” he asks.

He first posed the question as a doctoral student in the 1970s but nobody was interested. Now that he is rich, people listen, and with Iran preparing to go nuclear, Washington is filling up with exiles and dissidents dreaming of change in Tehran.

The very name of his organisation upsets traditional democracy activists, who regard the word “conflict” as provocative. Others regard him as a hero who is spending his money nobly.

Ackerman insists he is merely advocating the type of non-violent resistance represented by Mahatma Gandhi. He dislikes the phrase “regime change”. “We’re not in the business of external interference,” he says. “Regime change is about kicking over the bucket and knocking over the bad guys. Most of democracy promotion is about institution-building and strengthening the rule of law.”

Ackerman is concerned that the term has become so associated with violent upheaval that it is causing “blowback”, such as the crackdown on foreign-funded non-governmental organisations by Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. “In the Ukraine, they tried to push the military button and it short-circuited. It led Putin to think, ‘If it can happen there, it can happen in my society’.”

He accepts, however, that what gives the concept of non-violent conflict its frisson is that it is far from passive. The aim is to foster local opposition groups and shift the loyalties of the police and security services over months and years so that by the time students and workers are on the streets it is too late for a crackdown.

Although it failed to work in Tiananmen Square in 1989 a Chinese official in charge of regulating the press admitted last autumn: “When I think of the ‘colour revolutions’ I feel afraid.” With the spread of the internet, knowledge about how to resist is growing. It is one of the reasons Ackerman is producing computer games.

For some the merest hint of involvement of Americans in the internal affairs of other nations screams CIA plot. Others say the centre is secretive. No names are released of the reformers and dissidents who attend Ackerman’s “non-violent conflict” workshops out of concern for retaliation, a well justified fear in the case of several Iranians who attended a conference in Dubai last summer and were later arrested. Ackerman insists the centre’s advice is purely generic and that the same people-power lessons can be applied to Milosevic or the mullahs. There is no tailor-made plan for particular nations. “If someone comes to us and says, ‘Tell us what to do in Iran,’ we won’t. We’re passing on best practice from 100 years of protest movements,” he says.

Some attempts at colour revolutions have led to a grisly backlash, as in Uzbekistan, where protesters were killed by security forces last year. Demos by pro-democracy activists in Nepal led to a crackdown with police firing on crowds and killing people last week — but the protests show signs of succeeding.

In Iran there is no sign that people are ready to rise up against the clerics, despite pockets of labour and ethnic unrest. Yet if they don’t, it is likely that Bush will bomb Iranian nuclear sites, making the prospect of regime change more than a theoretical question for the West.

In the computer game all sorts of parameters can be fed in: infiltrators in the opposition movement, media involvement, bickering ethnic groups, takeovers of anything from the local police station to the dockyards.

In real life it is called playing with fire: get the mix right and thousands turn out to cheer the victory of pro-democracy forces. Get it wrong and the place burns.

Andrew Sullivan is away