A Guide To Civil Resistance

This second volume of A Guide to Civil Resistance covers nonviolent action campaigns in both democratic and undemocratic contexts. It considers indigenous, feminist, LGBT and regional movements in different countries. It provides a global perspective on struggles for peace, the environment and social justice. It highlights a variety of nonviolent strategies and range of tactics from kiss-ins and public fasts to blockades, protest camps and civil disobedience. This annotated bibliography has 844 references to scholarly, journalistic and activist sources. It concludes with a section on preparation and training. An Addendum surveys key sources on nonviolent resistance and peace action in French, German and Spanish. --

'People power' movements using unarmed or strictly nonviolent resistance have recently toppled oppressive regimes round the world. This annotated bibliography documents numerous episodes of civil resistance including 'the Arab awakening' [and] facilitates the investigation of issues around this global phenomenon. This new edition has 945 itemized references. It begins with a more general section covering theory and practice. It outlines the context of particular struggles, documents movements struggling for political goals against repressive regimes or occupation, samples scholarship on social movements and has subsections on formative examples: Gandhi and the US civil rights movement. A new section takes up the question of 'external support' for popular resistance. --

Exploring both historical cases of civil resistance and more contemporary examples such as the Arab Awakenings and various ongoing movements in the United States, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know® provides a comprehensive and engaging review of the current field of knowledge.

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

This is an annotated bibliography of nearly 1000 itemised references, providing a guide both to recent campaigns and to the theory and practice of nonviolent action. It covers diverse movements, some not exclusivly nonviolent, and raises highly controversial issues.

Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle is a groundbreaking book by the "godfather of nonviolent resistance." In nearly 1,000 entries, the Dictionary defines those ideologies, political systems, strategies, methods, and concepts that form the core of nonviolent action as it has occurred throughout history and across the globe, providing much-needed clarification of language that is often mired in confusion.

The Path of Most Resistance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Planning Nonviolent Campaigns is a practical guide for activists and organizers of all levels, who wish to grow their resistance activities into a more strategic, fixed-term campaign. It guides readers through the campaign planning process, breaking it down into several steps and providing tools and exercises for each step. Upon finishing the book, readers will have what they need to guide their peers through the process of planning a campaign. This process, as laid out in the guide, is estimated to take about 12 hours from start to finish. The guide is divided into two parts. The first lays out and contextualizes campaign planning tools and their objectives. It also explains the logic behind these tools, and how they can be modified to better suit a particular group's context. The second part provides easily reproducible and shareable lesson plans for using each of those tools, as well as explores how to embed the tools in the wider planning process.

This volume covers how regime changes, political movements and nonviolent unrest develop and then shape the political decisions of both civil society and the state. Chapter discussions include the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, youth movements in Post-Communist states, and the efforts of nonviolent INGOs.