Jonathan Pinckney

The University of Texas at Dallas | UTD · School of Economic Political and Policy Sciences

How do international relations affect domestic civil resistance? Does variation in the patronage of liberal democratic major powers such as the United States affect the likelihood of the onset or success of unarmed revolutions? Prominent qualitative research suggests the existence of an "iron cage of liberalism", arguing that liberal patrons or Wes...

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,...

Can civil resistance counter democratic backsliding? Civil resistance campaigns are most effective when they shift the loyalty of regime “pillars of support.” Yet we know little about how loyalty shifts occur or the tactics that erstwhile pillars employ post-loyalty shift. And the literature has focused on civil resistance against autocracies, rath...

Do protests impact politics? Many scholars argue they do, but disagree about their mechanisms of impact, with some arguing protests must disrupt to have impact while other focus on protest’s processes of political activation. Findings on protest’s political impact from prior literature also often suffer from endogeneity problems that make it diffic...

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...

Nonviolent action is a powerful tool for peacebuilding, through which ordinary people can shift power to advance peace with justice. “External Support for Nonviolent Action” examines how international actors can most impactfully assist locally led nonviolent-action campaigns, with the aim of respecting local autonomy and following a do-no-harm appr...

Forecasting major political conflicts is a long-time interest in conflict research. However, the literature thus far has focused almost exclusively on armed conflicts such as civil wars. Attempts to forecast primarily unarmed conflicts have yet to identify a model able to forecast such uprisings with a high degree of accuracy. This thorny forecasti...

An emerging consensus holds that nonviolent resistance campaigns are more successful than violent campaigns, partly because they attract more participants. Yet, we lack an understanding of whether and why nonviolent tactics attracts support. We propose two motivational logics that can explain support for nonviolence: An instrumentalist logic, where...

From the Plebeians' refusal to engage in military service in the Roman Republic to the uprisings of the Arab Spring, nonviolent action has been at the centre of social change throughout history. Yet the systematic theoretical understanding and empirical examination of nonviolent action is a relatively recent development. This chapter traces the eme...

Do more protesters on the streets make governments likely to grant their demands? Several studies link protest size and government concessions. Yet existing research has limitations: many studies suffer from potential endogeneity due to potential protesters joining protests when they anticipate that concessions are likely, causal mechanisms are oft...

When are episodes of resistance likely to lead to democratization? We argue that the participation of durable organizations rooted in quotidian relationships that are not themselves designed to compete for political power (what we call “quotidian civil society organizations,” QCSOs) drives successful democratic transitions. QCSOs are more likely to...

We introduce the Anatomy of Resistance Campaigns (ARC) dataset, which records information on 1,426 organizations that participated in events of maximalist violent and nonviolent contention in Africa from 1990 to 2015. The ARC dataset contains 17 variables covering organization-level features such as type, age, leadership, goals, and interorganizati...

Current literature finds that democratization is most likely when opposition social movements have initiated a political transition. Yet little work has disaggregated bottom-up transitions to suggest when this effect obtains. This article examines a case not widely known in the social movements' literature: the 1991 political transition in Zambia....

Do transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) promote the international diffusion of democracy? If so, how? Scholars of democratization have studied a plethora of international factors in the spread of democracy, including geographic or regional proximity, colonial history, trade and alliance networks, and joint inter-governmental organiza...

How have activists responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? While there have been many anecdotal reports of the pandemic's impact, there has been little to no cross-national comparative research examining how movements discouraged from protesting on the streets because of the risk of infection have or have not continued their activities through the COVI...

An emerging consensus holds that nonviolent resistance campaigns are more successful than violent campaigns because they have more participants. Yet, we lack an understanding of whether nonviolent tactics themselves (rather than correlated characteristics) attract mass participation , and how nonviolent resistance motivates supporters. We conduct a...

Under what conditions will successful nonviolent revolutions lead to democratization? While the scholarly literature has shown that nonviolent resistance has a positive effect on a country’s level of democracy, little research to date has disaggregated this population to explain which cases of successful nonviolent resistance lead to democracy and...

What are the effects of nonviolent (civil) resistance on political transitions? This chapter examines what we know about the relationship between nonviolent resistance and political order and uses that established knowledge to argue for a novel theory of civil resistance transitions. Civil resistance gives countries a democratic advantage relative...

This chapter presents the first of three case studies of civil resistance transitions (CRTs) and the impact of the challenges of mobilization and maximalism in CRTs. The case examined is the transition in Nepal following the 2006 Second People’s Movement that overthrew the Nepali monarchy. The case study shows that while the Nepali transition had h...

The three chapters that follow present case studies of political dynamics in transitions following civil resistance movements. The goal of these chapters is not to perform a strict comparison to tease out causal impact but rather to examine the dynamics of the two transitional challenges of mobilization and maximalism in three specific environments...

This chapter presents the second of three case studies of civil resistance transitions (CRTs) and the impact of the challenges of mobilization and maximalism in CRTs. The case examined is the transition in Zambia following the Movement for Multiparty Democracy’s campaign against Zambia’s one-party authoritarian regime. The case study finds that low...

This chapter presents the third and final case study of civil resistance transitions (CRTs) and the impact of the challenges of mobilization and maximalism in CRTs. The case examined is the transition to democracy in Brazil in the 1980s following the Diretas Ja campaign against Brazil’s military dictatorship. The case study finds that high levels o...

Why do nonviolent revolutions sometimes go so wrong? Scholars have found that nonviolent resistance promotes democratic transitions, but have not yet developed explanations for when this effect will occur and when it will not. This introduction places this central puzzle in the wider scholarly literature and debates over the decline of democracy an...

This chapter presents the results of two statistical analyses: one comparing transitions initiated by nonviolent resistance (civil resistance transitions) with all other types of political transitions from 1945 until 2011, and a second looking at the effects of the challenges of transitional mobilization and maximalism within civil resistance trans...

This chapter concludes the study of civil resistance transitions (CRTs), summarizing the evidence from the quantitative and qualitative studies. It speaks to the limitations of the study, including its inability to speak to the effects of failed civil resistance campaigns on democratization, dependence on specific conceptualizations of civil resist...

Do peacekeeping missions facilitate nonviolent political contention in post–civil war countries? The nonviolent expression of political grievances is a crucial part of the post–civil war peace-building process but is understudied thus far. We claim that the presence of peacekeepers significantly contributes to establishing a secure environment for...

There is growing consensus that large oil and gas revenues in autocracies have multiple pernicious effects, from decreasing democratization to increasing armed conflict: the so-called “resource curse.” Yet we know little about the effects of oil and gas revenue on the onset of major nonviolent dissent. The logic of the resource curse would lead us...

Previous research has shown that successful non-violent resistance (NVR) campaigns promote democracy compared with violent revolutions and top-down liberalization. However, research to date has not examined the character and quality of the democratic regimes following NVR campaigns, or evaluated the mechanisms that produce this effect. In this pape...

Do transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) promote the international diffusion of democracy? If so, how? Do TSMOs promote the spread and consolidation of democracy in ways that are distinct from regional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)? Modern scholars of democratization have focused on a growing number of international factors i...

We refine and test theoretical mechanisms linking mass mobilization to democratization by focusing on variation in the organizations that participate in collective dissent. Specifically, we investigate the effects of organizational diversity and durability on the likelihood of democratization. Using new data on maximalist claims-making organization...

Although the empirical study of strategic nonviolent action has expanded in recent years, no current dataset provides detailed accounts of the day-to-day methods and tactics used by various nonviolent and violent actors seeking political change. We introduce the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) version 3.0 dataset, which assemb...

Insurgency is the use of irregular tactics by a weaker foe seeking to impose military costs upon a stronger armed incumbent government or occupying power. Insurgencies have been ubiquitous in the twentieth century, with well over 200 new insurgencies emerging. Although insurgency has been a fairly popular method of conflict, it has not been particu...

While several existing datasets can help to address pressing questions on nonviolent resistance, data collection on nonviolent conflict involves several distinct challenges, including (1) conceptual distinctions between the absence of violence, non-violent behavior, and nonviolent direct action; (2) a systematic violence bias in mainstream news rep...