Sean Chabot

• Eastern Washington University

Scholars of nonviolent resistance, in particular, almost exclusively focus on oppositional action against oppressive forces. They pay much less attention to positive dimensions of resistance that allow practitioners to create alternative social relationships and ways of life. As a result, studies on nonviolent resistance tend to take "the colonizer...

Western scholars dominating the field generally suggest that civil resistance struggles involve public contention with unjust states to expand political rights and civil liberties. We argue that this perspective is an example of Eurocentric universalism, which has three blind spots: it tends to ignore struggles seeking to subvert rather than join t...

Satyagraha literally means tenacity in the pursuit of truth, with the purpose of activating our capacity for moral compassion and love of humanity in struggles for personal and social liberation. Mohandas Gandhi, India's famous leader, coined the concept as an alternative to passive submission and violent extremism in the face of oppression. It imp...

The Gandhian repertoire of nonviolence caught the imagination of American intellectuals soon after the 1919 Rowlatt Bills campaign in India. It sparked heated debate in the early 1920s, especially among religious pacifists led by John Haynes Holmes and civil rights activists led by W.E.B. DuBois. But the first wave of American interest tended to ex...

On February 21, 1936, after traveling for nearly six months, Dr. Howard Thurman and his delegation finally arrived in Bardoli for a meeting with Gandhi. They exchanged warm greetings with the Indian leader and sat down on the floor of a large tent. Then Gandhi started asking Thurman (accompanied by his wife Sue, Edward Carroll, and Phenola Carroll)...

Critical sociologists have long recognized the intersections between love and revolution. For the most part, however, our understanding of love and its relevance for revolution remains vague. My article seeks to remedy this limitation. It starts by sketching the social and personal contexts of alienation, indicating that in today's capitalist world...

The emerging synthesis between nonviolent action and contentious politics studies has yielded important insights. Yet it also reproduces the dichotomy between politics and culture that continues to haunt both fields. Extending recent work by Jean-Pierre Reed and John Foran, our contribution introduces the political cultures of nonviolent opposition...

Most of the contentious-politics scholars who pioneered the study of framing in social movements now also recognize the importance of transnational diffusion between protest groups. Interestingly, though, they have not yet specified how these two processes intersect. This article, in contrast, explores the framing-transnational diffusion nexus by h...

Cet article se penche sur les modalites de diffusion transnationale des mouvements sociaux en contexte de mondialisation. Il reinterroge le diffusionnisme essentialiste qui pose la mondialisation comme un processus institutionnel isomorphique sans s'interroger sur le caractere contingent et reciproque de ses modes de dissemination entre l'Occident...