Nonviolent Resistances In The Contemporary World

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 volume studies nonviolent movements as instruments of change in contemporary global politics. It presents case studies of civilian-led nonviolent efforts in India, Poland, and Turkey and analyzes how they have enabled people’s voices, influenced popular resistance cultures, and pushed for change across the world. The book discusses complex sociopolitical scenarios that challenge democracy, patriotism, and the question of identity across the world. It examines how popular resistance movements have been received by the media, subverted governments across the world, and how they have contributed to the development of new “protest paradigms.” The volume brings together leading experts who explore the significant wave of nonviolent mass movements in contemporary global affairs to understand how these discourses can be leveraged to study peace and conflict today. The authors involve extensive pedagogical discussions, new tools, and techniques to map emerging political discourses to identify and explain how contemporary peace-conflict research can study nonviolent resistance and facilitate the development of new narratives in the future. An invaluable guide to understanding social movements, this book will be a must-read for scholars and researchers of politics, governance and public policy, gender, and human rights.

This widely-praised book identified peaceful struggle as a key phenomenon in international politics a year before the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt confirmed its central argument. Civil resistance - non-violent action against such challenges as dictatorial rule, racial discrimination and foreign military occupation - is a significant but inadequately understood feature of world politics. Especially through the peaceful revolutions of 1989, and the developments in the Arab world since December 2010, it has helped to shape the world we live in. Civil Resistance and Power Politics covers most of the leading cases, including the actions master-minded by Gandhi, the US civil rights struggle in the 1960s, the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the 'people power' revolt in the Philippines in the 1980s, the campaigns against apartheid in South Africa, the various movements contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989-91, and, in this century, the 'colour revolutions' in Georgia and Ukraine. The chapters, written by leading experts, are richly descriptive and analytically rigorous. This book addresses the complex interrelationship between civil resistance and other dimensions of power. It explores the question of whether civil resistance should be seen as potentially replacing violence completely, or as a phenomenon that operates in conjunction with, and modification of, power politics. It looks at cases where campaigns were repressed, including China in 1989 and Burma in 2007. It notes that in several instances, including Northern Ireland, Kosovo and, Georgia, civil resistance movements were followed by the outbreak of armed conflict. It also includes a chapter with new material from Russian archives showing how the Soviet leadership responded to civil resistance, and a comprehensive bibliographical essay. Illustrated throughout with a remarkable selection of photographs, this uniquely wide-ranging and path-breaking study is written in an accessible style and is intended for the general reader as well as for students of Modern History, Politics, Sociology, and International Relations.

We see nonviolent resistance all over today’s world, fromEgypt’s Tahrir Square to New York Occupy. Although wethink of the last century as one marked by wars and violentconflict, in fact it was just as much a century of nonviolence asthe achievements of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. andpeaceful protests like the one that removed Ferdinand Marcos fromthe Philippines clearly demonstrate. But what is nonviolence? What makes a campaign a nonviolent one, and how does it work? What values does it incorporate? In this unique study, Todd May, a philosopher who has himselfparticipated in campaigns of nonviolent resistance, offers thefirst extended philosophical reflection on the particular andcompelling political phenomenon of nonviolence. Drawing onboth historical and contemporary examples, he examines the conceptand objectives of nonviolence, and considers the different dynamicsof nonviolence, from moral jiu-jitsu to nonviolent coercion. May goes on to explore the values that infuse nonviolent activity,especially the respect for dignity and the presupposition ofequality, before taking a close-up look at the role of nonviolencein today’s world. Students of politics, peace studies, and philosophy, politicalactivists, and those interested in the shape of current politicswill find this book an invaluable source for understanding one ofthe most prevalent, but least reflected upon, political approachesof our world.

The use of nonviolent action is on the rise. From the Occupy Movement to the Arab Spring and mass protests on the streets of Brazil, activists across the world are increasingly using unarmed tactics to challenge oppressive, corrupt and unjust systems. But what exactly do we mean by nonviolence? How is it deployed and to what effect? Do nonviolent campaigns with political motivations differ from those driven by primarily economic concerns? What are the limits and opportunities for activists engaging in nonviolent action today? Is the growing number of nonviolence protests indicative of a new type of twenty-first century struggle or is it simply a passing trend? Understanding Nonviolence: Contours and Contexts is the first book to offer a comprehensive introduction to nonviolence in theory and practice. Combining insightful analysis of key theoretical debates with fresh perspectives on contemporary and historical case studies, it explores the varied approaches, aims, and trajectories of nonviolent campaigns from Gandhi to the present day. With cutting-edge contributions from leading scholars and practitioners in the field, this accessible and lively book will be essential reading for activists, students and teachers of contentious politics, international security, and peace and conflict studies.

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.

In the past quarter century the world has witnessed dramatic social and political transformations, due in part to an upsurge in civil resistance. There have been significant uprisings around the globe, including the toppling of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the Color Revolutions, the Arab Spring, protests against war and economic inequality, countless struggles against corruption, and demands for more equitable distribution of land. These actions have attracted substantial scholarly attention, reflected in the growth of literature on social movements and revolution as well as literature on nonviolent resistance. Until now, however, the two bodies of literature have largely developed in parallel—with relatively little acknowledgment of the existence of the other. In this useful collection, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars takes stock of the current state of the theoretical and empirical literature on civil resistance. Contributors analyze key processes of nonviolent struggle and identify both frictions and points of synthesis between the narrower literature on civil resistance and the broader literature on social movements and revolution. By doing so, Civil Resistance: Comparative Perspectives on Nonviolent Struggle pushes the boundaries of the study of civil resistance and generates social scientific knowledge that will be helpful for all scholars and activists concerned with democracy, human rights, and social justice.