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Where it's effective is when you are up against an oppressive force but there are more of you than there are of them, and you can take deliberate action to throw so much sand in their gears that their mission becomes untenable, either because they can't function as they intended and/or because their actions lead to significant public disapproval and resulting political backlash. This worked in Minneapolis, as it worked during the civil rights movement of the '60s and Gandhi's opposition to British rule in India. Often these movements take a long time to defeat the opposition. Had it not been for the public outrage following the murders of Good and Pretti, we probably would still have 3,000 ICE agents in Minneapolis and we would still be out by the hundreds following vehicles, blowing whistles and throwing dildos, and we'd have to keep doing it indefinitely.

Direct nonviolent action would absolutely not work against an invasion of Greenland by US military forces, however; not the least because there aren't enough people in Greenland to raise a resistance movement that could effectively drive the forces out. Resistance movements work only when there are so many people willing to stand in front of the tanks or link arms on a bridge or allow themselves to be arrested that the occupiers' systems become overwhelmed. That's the sand in the gears. But if the gears are so large that sand doesn't impede them, nonviolent methods fail. The US could easily take over an unarmed, unassisted Greenland, but not so easily the well-armed forces of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and France. Even if the larger US forces could win in the end, the cost, both political and military, would be too great.