Ches Thurber

Northern Illinois University · Department of Political Science

When do political transitions lead to greater inclusion for groups historically excluded from power? Scholars and policymakers often assume the answer is simple: a transition will result in more inclusion when it ends in democracy. Yet this answer is incomplete at best, since many democracies systematically exclude women, particular ethnic groups,...

When do political transitions lead to greater inclusion for people historically excluded from power? Scholars and policymakers often assume democratization and political inclusion go hand in hand. Yet many democracies systematically exclude women, particular ethnic groups, or lower economic classes. Using data on every political transition from 194...

This study proposes an organizational mechanism that links ideology to the use of terrorism in mass dissident campaigns. Ideology affects the level of competition among factions within mass dissident campaigns by shaping whether actors see their interactions as a positive- or zero-sum game. We identify ideological diversity within a campaign and th...

In the past three decades, there has been a global surge in the use of nonviolent protests by ordinary citizens to challenge dictatorships. The track record of these “civil resistance” campaigns has been surprisingly good: they have historically been more effective than both armed struggles and elite-driven transitions in advancing democracy around...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has proven capable of overthrowing autocratic regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change. How do dissidents come to embrace a nonviolent strategy in the first place? Why do others rule it out in favor of taking up arms? Despite a new wave of attention to the ef...

THIS CASE STUDY BUILDS ON Véronique Dudouet’s 2017 ICNC Special Report, Powering to Peace: Integrated Civil Resistance and Peacebuilding Strategies. Utilizing Dudouet’s framework, we trace the development of conflict in Nepal over the past thirty years, with a specific emphasis on the 2006 civil resistance campaign and subsequent peace process that...

This article examines the impact of social ties on a challenger's ability to initiate a civil resistance campaign. Recent waves of nonviolent uprisings, from the color revolutions of Eastern Europe to the Arab Spring, have sparked renewed scholarly interest in civil resistance as a strategy in conflict. However, most research has focused on the eff...

While ethnic cleavages have featured prominently in our understanding of civil wars, attention to ethnic and social structures has been surprisingly absent from the recent wave of research on civil resistance. Yet these structures likely have an important impact on when and where we see nonviolent campaigns occur. This article argues that the strat...

The ethnic composition of state security forces is believed to have important effects on the dynamics of conflict processes, but data limitations have impeded our ability to test such hypotheses cross-nationally until now. To address this problem, the Security Force Ethnicity dataset provides time-series, group-level measures of the ethnic composit...

The Shia militia has emerged as one of the most powerful and important actors in the Middle East security environment. Despite this trend, they remain poorly understood by scholars and policymakers alike. This article seeks to expand our understanding of the militia as a type of non-state armed group through an examination of Shia militia movements...

The global spread of technology will inevitably result in more states gaining access to the scientific and technical means to create a nuclear weapon. In order to confront this reality, policymakers and analysts must develop a better understanding of why some states feel compelled to conduct overt nuclear tests while others are content to pursue a...