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Donning the Velvet: Nonviolent Resistance in the 2018 Armenian Revolution
Jonathan Pinckney
1
Introduction
On 17 April, the Armenian parliament elected long-time former President Serzh Sargsyan as
Armenia’s Prime Minister. Protests against his election had been small and sparsely attended. A
lack of faith in Sargsyan’s political alternative and remembrance of a violent crackdown on
protesters ten years previously when Sargsyan first came into office held the opposition in check.
The prime minister seemed well-placed to continue his tight grip on Armenian politics
indefinitely. Yet less than a week later Sargsyan was gone. A mere two weeks after that a
majority of Sargsyan’s own party members voted opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan, thrust into
the office on the wave of a ‘Velvet Revolution,’ into power as his replacement.
In this chapter, I draw upon one of the revolution’s most distinctive features – nonviolent
resistance as its primary tactical repertoire – to help explain its trajectory and long-term
prospects.
2
Nonviolent revolutions are almost always unexpected, even shocking (Kuran, 1991).
Even those who end up leading them rarely anticipate their trajectories. Yet by tracing the
common threads from Republic Square in Yerevan through the Euromaidan in Kiev to
Wenceslas Square in Prague and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a growing literature on nonviolent
resistance can give insight into the causes and consequences of these transformative events.
What can we learn about Armenia's Velvet Revolution from the growing literature on nonviolent
resistance? I examine two topics: the factors that helped the revolution succeed and what we may
expect in the future.
1
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). PhD 2018 from the
Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver (jonathan.pinckney@ntnu.no).
2
See, for example, the description of nonviolent tactics in Amiryan, 2018 and Abrahamian and Shagoyan, 2018.
2
I summarize the factors that led to success using Ackerman and DuVall’s (2006) three
‘engines’ of nonviolent resistance. The first engine is unity, bringing together diverse
organizations and social groups around a shared agenda. The second is strategic planning, the
careful sequencing of tactics to achieve maximum political leverage. The third is nonviolent
discipline, the strict avoidance of violence even in the face of violent government repression. I
argue that all three played important roles in the events of 2018 and help us understand the
revolutionary outcome.
I am also cautiously optimistic about the long-term impact of the Velvet Revolution.
Political transitions initiated by nonviolent resistance tend to lead to more democratic outcomes
than the alternatives (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011; Celestino and Gleditsch, 2013; Bethke and
Pinckney, 2016), and mobilization of society towards building new political institutions during
transitions – a major focus of the Pashinyan administration – is a key force pushing in this
democratic direction (Pinckney, 2018). Challenges certainly remain for the new regime. Yet
there are encouraging signs that the Velvet Revolution is likely to initiate significant democratic
progress.
The remainder of the chapter proceeds as follows. First, I introduce the concept of
nonviolent resistance and situate the Armenian Velvet Revolution in the tradition of twentieth
and early twenty-first century resistance movements. Next, I illustrate the role of the three
strategic factors of unity, strategic planning, and nonviolent discipline in helping the Velvet
Revolution succeed. Then I reflect on the likely next stages in the Armenian transition and
conclude with some reflections on its challenges.
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Nonviolent resistance
Nonviolent resistance is ‘a technique of socio-political action for applying power in a conflict
without the use of violence’ (Sharp, 1999, p. 567). Thus, it is action that takes place outside
traditional avenues of political power but does not rely on physical violence or the threat of
physical violence for its coercive force. Nonviolent resistance seeks to achieve leverage over
opponents by organizing a systematic withdrawal of cooperation from a system of power,
particularly through undermining the loyalty of the central social groups and institutions that
maintain a regime’s power. These are often referred to as a regime’s ‘pillars of support’ (Helvey,
2004; Schock, 2005). If this withdrawal of cooperation can be wide and coordinated enough,
then even the most robust political regime will have difficulty maintaining itself (Chenoweth and
Stephan, 2011). This organized withdrawal of consent can take many different forms, and uses
many different tactics, depending on the context. Foundational nonviolent resistance scholar
Gene Sharp (1973) identified 198 distinct nonviolent resistance tactics, and his list is far from
exhaustive. Typical tactics include public demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts. The intention of
such tactics is in part, but not exclusively, communicative. Nonviolent resistance does not just
communicate opposition to a regime or policy; it actively seeks to disrupt the continued
operations of that regime or policy.
Nonviolent resistance has no necessary connection to an ideological aversion to violence,
and to engage in nonviolent resistance does not imply that one is a pacifist (Schock, 2003). Most
major nonviolent resistance movements of the last century have been led by people who adopted
nonviolent tactics primarily for instrumental rather than ideological reasons (Ackerman and
Kruegler, 1994). Even ostensible pacifists have typically approached violence in a more nuanced
way, acknowledging some appropriate uses. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, participated in the
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British army during World War I, and advocated for independent India to have a strong military.
The key feature in defining whether one is engaged in nonviolent resistance is not what one
believes but what one does.
3
Nonviolent resistance campaigns
4
have been a common feature of global politics in
recent decades. More than 180 major nonviolent resistance movements seeking regime change,
secession, or an end to military occupation have occurred since 1945 (Chenoweth and Lewis,
2013). Countless more movements of nonviolent resistance for less extreme goals regularly take
place around the world.
5
Nonviolent resistance movements have pushed for democratization
(Bratton and Van de Walle, 1997; Brancati, 2016), for greater ethnic autonomy and self-
determination (Bartkowski, 2013; Cunningham, Dahl and Fruge, 2017), and against corruption
(Beyerle, 2014), among many other goals.
Nonviolent resistance movements have been a major force for global political
transformation. More than 80 political transitions have been primarily initiated through
nonviolent resistance since 1945 (Pinckney, 2018). In the last twenty years nonviolent resistance
was a major force in initiating the post-Soviet ‘colour revolutions’ (Bunce and Wolchik, 2011),
the ‘Arab Spring’ movements of 2011 (Roberts et al., 2016), a democratic transition in Burkina
Faso (Harsch, 2017), and the resignation of Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Raghavan,
2019). Many of the leading figures of these revolutions explicitly drew on the ideas and
3
Because of this, nonviolent resistance can also be pursued by any number of different kinds of political actors. It is
perhaps most typically associated with social movements (Tarrow, 1998; Della Porta and Diani, 2009) and ‘civil
society,’ but can also be pursued by political parties, businesses, and private individuals.
4
That is to say, ‘a series of observable, continual tactics in pursuit of a political objective’ (Chenoweth and Stephan,
2011, p. 21).
5
Many of these movements are regularly profiled in the Global Nonviolent Action Database published by Swarthmore
College at https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/
5
strategies of foundational authors of nonviolent resistance such as Gene Sharp (Popovic, 2015),
and many also received training in nonviolent resistance.
Nonviolent resistance in the Velvet Revolution
Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution is thus a part of a widespread phenomenon. Leaders of the
revolution such as current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan explicitly drew on the symbols and
tactical repertoires of major nonviolent resistance movements, seeking to take advantage of the
tactics that had succeeded in achieving change nonviolently in the past. The march from Gyumri
to Yerevan echoed Gandhi’s 1930 march to the sea in opposition to British salt taxes. The name
‘Velvet Revolution’ drew on the iconography of the 1989 uprising in Czechoslovakia that
successfully ended that country’s communist regime.
The Velvet Revolution has much to tell us about nonviolent resistance. In particular, it
highlights the transformative potential of what Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall (2006) refer to
as the three ‘engines’ of nonviolent resistance: unity, strategic planning, and nonviolent
discipline. The literature on nonviolent resistance highlights how these three factors can allow
nonviolent resistance movements to bring about major political change in the face of even near-
prohibitively challenging circumstances (Ackerman and Kruegler, 1994).
Unity in nonviolent resistance movements is the articulation of a single set of goals and
strategies among diverse constituencies. Unity increases movements’ participation and thus
points of leverage over their opponents. Unified movements present a popular alternative to
authoritarian opponents, and have many different potential avenues into the regime’s pillars of
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support (Tilly, 1994). Disunified movements struggle to articulate their demands and can be
discredited by their opponents as simply reflecting a minority opinion.
Strategic planning is the intentional sequencing and execution of tactics to achieve the
greatest leverage over the opponent with the lowest cost to the movement (Ackerman and
Kruegler, 1994). Strategic planning is crucial for movements to achieve success because
movements often face a resource imbalance against their opponents. Resistance movements are
typically working with whatever they can scrape together, while the state has extensive resources
at its disposal to maintain its solidarity and divide and demobilize its opponents. Thus, if
movements do not efficiently deploy their own resources to the greatest effect, the state is likely
to be able to crush them simply because of its greater capacity for conflict.
Nonviolent discipline involves the members of a movement not engaging in violence
even when subjected to violent repression. Nonviolent discipline helps nonviolent resistance
movements to succeed because it de-legitimizes government repression and encourages broader
participation (Pinckney, 2016). In contrast, if movements combine violent and nonviolent tactics
the state can easily bring its full coercive force to bear upon them with little danger of backfire.
In contrast, even the most extreme totalitarian governments often hesitate to deploy violent
repression against fully peaceful movements for fear of the consequences to their reputations and
the loyalty of their pillars of support (Binnendijk and Marovic, 2006; Hess and Martin, 2006).
Many movements struggle to activate all three of these ‘engines’ of success, particularly
because nonviolent resistance movements are typically made up of many different groups with
diverse goals that do not necessarily coordinate with one another. However, if achieved, these
three factors can help movements achieve success even in the face of very unfavourable
conditions. This is what we observe in the Armenian case. The situation in Armenia was
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unfavourable for a revolutionary movement for several reasons (Derluguian and Hovhannisyan,
2018). First, the regime had proven itself robust to nonviolent challenges in the past, most
prominently the 2008 protests against the stolen election in which Serzh Sargsyan first became
president (Gogia et al., 2009). Not only had the 2008 movement failed to prevent Sargsyan from
coming to power, but the government’s violent suppression of the movement left many
progressive forces in Armenia feeling that major change through action on the streets was
impossible (Andreasyan et al., 2018).
6
In the months and weeks leading up to the 2018 protests
there was a feeling of inevitability, and a fear that Sargsyan could never be ousted (Abrahamian
and Shagoyan, 2018). The opposition forces that had confronted Sargsyan’s predecessor, Robert
Kocharian, in 2008 had almost completely disappeared. Their successors in the Yelk (‘Way Out’)
opposition alliance had largely been routed in the 2017 parliamentary election, receiving less
than 8 percent of the vote.
This robustness to challenge was evident in the hopeless atmosphere that pervaded the
‘One Step’ march from Gyumri to Yerevan and even the first few days of the protests in Yerevan
(see Chapter 5). When Nikol Pashinyan and his followers entered the city on 16 April after more
than two weeks of marching through the country attempting to rally support less than 200 people
were waiting for them. Members of the party joked that, while the march had accomplished
nothing, at least the hundreds of thousands of steps had been good for their health!
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Second, the regime’s primary patron, Russia, was a repressive autocracy, rather than a
liberal democracy. Close ties to liberal democracies have been argued to be one of the primary
contextual factors facilitating the success of nonviolent resistance movements (Ritter, 2015).
6
Gevorg Ter-Gabrielyan, personal correspondence, 11 January, 2019.
7
Interview with Vahram Ter-Matevosyan, 10 January, 2019.
8
Conversely, connection to a powerful authoritarian patron – or what Steven Levitsky and Lucan
Way refer to as a ‘black knight’ – able to sustain a struggling regime with external support has
been crucial in facilitating the survival of several regimes facing nonviolent revolutions
(Levitsky and Way, 2010). One powerful example of this were the columns of Saudi tanks
rolling across the border to suppress the Arab Spring uprising in Bahrain. Even when
international support does not directly crush a nonviolent resistance movement, external financial
incentives and the mere threat of external support can often keep movements from even getting
started in the first place. In contrast to other movements in the region, the opposition in Armenia
also lacked its own external supporters, with little to no linkage with Western patrons.
Third, the long-running Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan had given rise to a highly-
effective military and state security force, which had been successfully deployed to put down
opposition forces in the past (Way 2008). The security forces were closely linked to Sargsyan
and remained loyal to the regime throughout the uprising. Military fragmentation and defections
are another factor shown to consistently facilitate nonviolent resistance movement success
(Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011; Nepstad, 2011). Without military defection, it is extremely
difficult for nonviolent movements to successfully oust a hostile regime (Nepstad, 2013). While
some small groups of soldiers joined the protests near the end of the movement, the military
leadership severely criticized and punished these actions.
8
Unlike in many other movements, the
fact that the protests were not repressed appeared to be a matter of restraint on the part of the
government, rather than disobedience or shirking on the part of the military.
8
See Agence France Presse, 2018.
9
Certain conditions also favoured the uprising. The Sargsyan regime had grown
increasingly unpopular, with opinion polls indicating very low levels of public support.
9
President Sargsyan’s attempt to remain in power past his two term limits by shifting himself into
an empowered prime ministerial role was a classic mistake that served as a powerful focal point
for mobilization. With few alternatives for legitimately expressing their grievances and expecting
a genuine response, Armenians turned to the streets (Iskandaryan, 2018)
This turn was made easier by over a decade of ‘youth-driven, social media-powered,
issue-specific’ public protest campaigns (Paturyan and Gevorgyan, 2016, p. 2; Ohanyan, 2018).
Other than the failed 2008 movement to prevent Sargsyan from taking office, these had been
primarily on various ‘non-political’ issues such as the Save Teghut Forest movement, the 100
dram civic initiative against raising transport fees, and the 2015 ‘Electric Yerevan’ protests
against increasing electricity tariffs (Avedissian, 2015). Primarily spearheaded by youth activists,
movements to preserve public parks, oppose government price increases, and prevent
environmental degradation had facilitated the growth of activist networks, and trained a
generation of young protesters in creative ways to organize dissent and blunt the impact of
repression. For instance, in the aftermath of the 2008 protests civil society organizations
organized ‘public walks’ as a means to get around a ban on public demonstrations (Ishkanian,
2009, p. 24). These ‘civic initiatives’ largely stayed out of both formal opposition parties and
organized NGOs,
10
both of which were widely discredited,
11
and instead created a vibrant
9
A 2017 poll indicated that only 8 percent of the population believed Armenia was either ‘definitely’ or ‘mainly’
going in the right direction and less than 20 percent of the population fully or partially trusted President Sargsyan
(CRRC, 2017).
10
Though there were informal partnerships between these civic initiatives and formal NGOs (Glasius and Ishkanian,
2015; Paturyan and Bagiyan, 2017).
11
The NGO sector in particular being viewed at least in part as a legacy of artificially-imposed foreign ‘civil society’
structures that had ‘led to the depoliticization and taming of the emancipatory potential of civil society’ (Ishkanian,
2009, p. 10).
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alternative mobilizational space in which the general public could become engaged with political
issues (on this, see Chapter 5 in this volume, and Ishkanian, 2015).
These movements were fueled by the growth of the internet and social media in Armenia.
Internet usage increased significantly in the years leading up to the revolution. When Serzh
Sargysan was first elected President of Armenia only around 6% of Armenians were using the
internet. By the time of the Velvet Revolution that number had increased more than ten times to
nearly 70% (International Telecommunications Union, 2018), and around half the population
subscribed to Facebook (Elliott, 2018). When the revolution broke out, the ubiquity of social
media helped fuel both mobilization and prevent repression as media and activist livestreams
recorded many of the central events. The digital visibility of the movement was particularly
crucial in a country with such a large and politically influential diaspora (Pearce, 2018).
The Sargsyan regime’s poor handling of the April 2016 ‘four-day war’ with Azerbaijan
was another factor that helped the 2018 movement.
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The regime’s inability to resolve the
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in favour of Karabakh Armenians or to provide for their security,
and the high number of Armenian casualties in the 2016 conflict undermined confidence in the
government (Iskandaryan, 2018). A small group of insurgents calling themselves Sasna Tsrer
(the ‘Daredevils of Sassoun’, a reference to a medieval Armenian epic) exacerbated the situation
when they took over a police station and demanded President Sargsyan’s resignation. They failed
to spark a revolutionary uprising, but widespread demonstrations in support of the attack
significantly threatened the government (Silaev and Fomin, 2018). This is another parallel
between the Velvet Revolution and past incidents of nonviolent revolutions. The nonviolent
12
For more on the 2016 conflict, see Broers, 2016.
11
movement that ousted the Argentine military regime in the 1980s was significantly spurred on by
the country’s defeat in the Falklands/Malvinas war in 1982 (Linz and Stepan, 1996).
Several short-term factors also facilitated the movement’s success. Prime Minister
Sargsyan was hesitant to engage in violent repression because of the upcoming Francophonie
summit to be held in Yerevan in October 2018.
13
In addition, the upcoming Armenian Genocide
Remembrance Day may have provided a final push for Prime Minister Sargsyan to step down
rather than have to create public images of peaceful protesters being violently suppressed on a
day of such historic significance for the Armenian people.
Activating unity, strategy and nonviolent discipline
The opposition movement thus certainly had some favourable raw material with which to work.
Yet the unfavourable background conditions meant that bringing these favourable conditions to
fruition was an uncertain enterprise at best. To bring the movement to its successful conclusion
required significant strategic innovation on the part of Nikol Pashinyan and other movement
leaders. This innovation involved the skillful deployment of all three of the key factors
facilitating nonviolent resistance movements’ success: unity, strategy, and nonviolent discipline.
Their deployment of these factors grew out of a process of strategic learning from past social
movements in Armenia, but also represented a clear break from events of the past, something
that indicates innovation and agency, rather than a straightforward following of past tactical
repertoires.
13
Interview with Vahram Ter-Matevosyan, 10 January 2019.
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First, there was a unifying message throughout the protests. The protests included almost
all segments of Armenian society, and in particular were gender-balanced or sometimes even
dominated by women (Makunts, 2018). Opposition and civil society leaders intentionally
encouraged participation from across society, and organized tactics anyone could safely
participate in, even those unable to march or block a street. One of the most prominent of these
was the timed banging of pots and pans at 11 o’clock each evening, a tactic drawn from the
cacerolazo protests against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Huneeus, 2009, p. 198).
Second, there were strong elements of strategic planning and learning from past mistakes.
In the 2008 movement against Serzh Sargsyan’s election, large crowds had gathered in
Yerevan’s central Opera Square. This increased visibility, but decreased their actual disruptive
potential, and also made repression by security forces easier. In 2018, in contrast, activists
employed a dispersed strategy, creating hundreds of small roadblocks throughout Yerevan and
then rapidly redeploying to another road when police arrived to break up the blockade. The fluid,
dispersed nature of the protest strained police capacity and meant that the protests had maximum
disruptive potential. Kurt Schock identifies the ability of nonviolent movements to shift between
tactics of ‘concentration,’ which gather large numbers of people in a single place, and tactics of
‘dispersion,’ which spread people across many different locations, as a key indicator both of
strategic sophistication within a movement and movement’s likely success (Schock, 2005).
When major rallies did take place, the opposition relocated them from Opera Square to Republic
Square, a location without the baggage of past repression, and leaders instructed participants to
disperse when night came to avoid potential violent crackdowns.
Careful strategic choices also influenced the choices of public slogans and chants.
Pashinyan’s slogan: ‘Take a Step,’ later blended with ‘Reject Serzh’ were simple,
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straightforward, and easy for people to rally around. The fact that ‘Reject Serzh’ – in Armenian:
Merzhir Serzhin – rhymes also made it a natural for chanting at rallies (Abrahamian and
Shagoyan, 2018). Simple, easy-to-remember slogans are powerful framing devices that have
been central in many nonviolent resistance movements. For instance, the Serbian youth
organisation Otpor used the slogans Gotov je! (‘He’s finished!’) and Vreme je (‘It’s time’) as
unifying rallying cries in their successful campaign against President Slobodan Milosevic
(Nikolayenko, 2013).
The description of the protests as a ‘Velvet Revolution’ was also carefully chosen. A
more natural choice to describe the protests, based on recent history and regional precedent,
might have been a ‘colour revolution.’ Yet leaders knew that calling on the precedent of the
colour revolutions came with negative emotional salience, evoking Western geopolitical
influence and social division. Hence, they reached back to the more obscure and less divisive
imagery of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia (Iskandaryan, 2018).
Pashinyan and other leaders also emphasized nonviolent discipline and went to great
lengths to keep the protests entirely peaceful. Pashinyan loudly denounced any violence and
threatened perpetrators of violent attacks with expulsion from the movement. This proclamation
came out of a tradition of organizing throughout the years of protests leading up to the 2018
revolution, in which youth activists were careful to: ‘avoid violence…maintain a merry festive
attitude, and generally attract the sympathetic attention of the citizens of Yerevan…no less
importantly, the protesters engaged the police as ‘fellow Armenians,’ making mutual agreements
to abide by the law’ (Derluguian and Hovhannisyan, 2018, p. 458).
The emphasis on nonviolent discipline had many advantages that proved crucial in the
movement’s success. In particular, it bore fruit on 16 April, when police repression of peaceful
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protesters in Yerevan sparked anger throughout the country, leading to a major loss of support
for the Sargsyan regime and an increase in the size of the protests (Abrahamian and Shagoyan,
2018). Most visibly, repression on this day led to Nikol Pashinyan’s bandaged arm, which
became a symbol of the protests for the remainder of the Revolution.
This is a classic example of the ‘backfire’ dynamic in nonviolent resistance struggles,
when the exercise of repression rebounds against the one engaging in it because of the
nonviolent character of the ones repressed (Hess and Martin, 2006). Backfire dynamics tend to
only be triggered when movements are primarily or almost entirely nonviolent. Breakdowns in
nonviolent discipline such as rioting or clashes with security services tend to undermine these
dynamics since authorities can justify repression as necessary for maintaining public order, and
ordinary people tend to be alienated from supporting the movement’s goals.
Therefore, in the Velvet Revolution we see success following the skillful deployment of
unity, strategic planning (and learning) and rigid nonviolent discipline. Of course, one cannot say
with certainty what might have happened had any of these strategic factors been absent. Yet the
parallels with the 2008 movement are illustrative. In both cases, an opposition force sought to
oust an unpopular regime. In the first case, there was limited nonviolent discipline, little strategic
planning, and a message that failed to unify because it focused on a polarizing and largely
discredited former president, Levon Ter-Petrossian. The result was that the government was
empowered to repress the movement, and after several deaths and arrests, the movement failed to
achieve its key goal of preventing Serzh Sargsyan from becoming president of Armenia. In 2018,
with the opposition having learned from its mistakes and a decade of both political and extra-
political protest and mobilization under its belt, they were able to peacefully push Sargsyan from
power and initiate a major political transformation.
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Democratization after nonviolent resistance
What can the nonviolent resistance literature tell us about the likely future of Armenia’s Velvet
Revolution? The initial picture is cautious but encouraging. Nonviolent resistance movements
tend to initiate successful democratic transitions more often than any other form of regime
breakdown (Karatnycky and Ackerman, 2005; Celestino and Gleditsch, 2013), and are
particularly more effective in ushering in democracy than violent rebellions (Chenoweth and
Stephan, 2011). Yet it is not enough to simply usher in democracy. As the literature on
democratic consolidation has highlighted, new democracies face an array of challenges before
their new regimes are likely to endure (Linz and Stepan, 1996; Schedler, 1998; Svolik, 2008).
Similarly, there are several challenges that nonviolent movements face when moving from
opposing an authoritarian regime to establishing new democratic regime structures.
In particular, nonviolent revolutions face the interconnected challenges of maintaining
high levels of mobilization (and thus continuing pressure to push for democratic progress) while
directing that mobilization towards building rather than breaking new political institutions
(Pinckney, 2018). If either of these challenges are not addressed, that is if social and political
mobilization drops off or if mobilization remains high but stays focused on revolutionary,
institution-breaking goals, then democratic progress is unlikely. Yet if this pattern of high, yet
institutionalized mobilization continues through a transitional period until new institutions can be
formalized, then the likelihood of democratization is quite high.
When it comes to these challenges, the first year of transition in Armenia gives
significant grounds for optimism. First, social and political mobilization has remained quite high.
16
Many civil society and activist groups, while they have expressed significant confidence in the
Pashinyan government, have used the opportunity of a more sympathetic ear in Yerevan to
expand rather than contract their public mobilization. This mobilization reflects the interplay of
three distinct trends in Armenian civil society.
14
First, many activists have left civil society to
join the new government. Second, many of the remaining activists have increased their criticism
of government as they represent a more radical remaining fringe. And third, many activists report
that they are holding back from being overly critical of the new government because they are
eager to see it succeed, but also standing ready to hold the new leaders accountable (Andreasyan
et al., 2018, p. 77).
One prominent example of these trends at work is the movement against the Lydian
International Amulsar gold mine. Environmental activists had been engaged in pressure against
the creation of the mine for several years. Yet they had always come up against major roadblocks
from the Sargsyan administration, which was fully committed to moving forward with the mine’s
creation. In the immediate aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, young activists returning from
Yerevan helped spearhead a series of demonstrations and road blockades to stop the mine. Many
attributed their activism directly to the empowering example of the Velvet Revolution and the
new, more sympathetic administration. As one activist said: ‘If we protested during Serzh
Sargsyan’s rule, we would have been arrested right away. Now we, all of us Armenians, have
overcome fear and created a democratic government. We can protect our rights’ (Liakhov and
Khudoyan, 2018, p. 9). As of this writing, the protests have stopped the construction of the mine
14
Thanks to Laurence Broers for pointing these three trends out.
17
and pressured the government to engage in a more systematic review of the mine’s
environmental impact.
Such mobilization no doubt represents a challenge for the Pashinyan government to
address. Indeed, some have referred to the Amulsar protests as Pashinyan’s ‘first major crisis’
(Andreasyan et al., 2018, p. 76). Yet these kinds of mobilization are crucial for continuing to
encourage democratic progress. Democracy relies on political elites knowing that they will be
held accountable for their actions (Schmitter and Karl, 1991). This is particularly true during
transitions, when elites are establishing new norms of political behavior. With civil society and
ordinary citizens pushing back against the government, new political elites know that they must
consider their opinions. Nonviolent revolutions provide a powerful opportunity for increasing the
vertical accountability of new regimes.
15
Yet for this opportunity to be realized, it must become
obvious to new elites that people will engage in political action beyond the revolutionary
moment. The Armenian public seems to be taking this lesson to heart, with encouraging signs for
the future.
There have also been significant moves towards institutionalizing resistance, moving
from the breakdown of old political structures to the creation of new ones. A major emphasis of
Prime Minister Pashinyan and other leaders of the Velvet Revolution from the beginning has
been a ‘legalistic adherence to procedure’ (Iskandaryan, 2018, p. 480), and yet a willingness to
direct extra-institutional mobilization towards achieving revolutionary goals when necessary.
Pashinyan’s road to the Prime Ministership is indicative of these twin emphases. After Prime
Minister Sargsyan stepped down, Pashinyan was focused on achieving power through proper
15
For the classic discussion of the distinction between vertical and horizontal accountability see O’Donnell, 1994.
18
procedure, even though the domination of parliament by the Republican Party of Armenia gave
this long odds. When the parliament rejected his candidacy, he called people back to the streets
to pressure them to give in, but maintained that the goal of the mobilization was to be realized
through institutional channels. The general strike successfully pressured a significant chunk of
the former ruling Republican Party of Armenia MPs to support Pashinyan’s candidacy, and
brought him into power.
Since that point, the call for snap elections and maintaining power through a
parliamentary majority is another positive sign. The coalition of protest leaders, opposition
figures, and technocrats seems ideally placed to further the goals of the revolution and move
Armenia towards a more democratic future. The fact that the 2018 elections enjoyed broad
public confidence and demonstrated compliance with international norms for free and fair
elections is also another positive sign, expressing a new norm of accepting removal from power
on the part of the Republican Party and the legitimacy of the new institutions.
Remaining challenges
Yet while the situation in Armenia gives significant grounds for optimism, it also provides
significant grounds for concern. In addition to the challenges of continuing mobilization and
shifting it towards institutional channels, which Pashinyan and the coalition of the Velvet
Revolution seem to be handling quite well, there are many additional challenges that come with
shifting a patronage-based political system towards one of higher democratic quality. The fight
against corruption is one crucial question here. In particular, it remains to be seen whether the
19
fight against corruption can be institutionalized into a new set of anti-corruption norms laws,
rather than simply punishment of Pashinyan’s former political rivals who are now out of power.
The Russian question also remains highly relevant for Armenia’s future democratic
progress. From the revolution’s beginning, Pashinyan has been clear that the sources of the
Velvet Revolution are entirely domestic, that he and his government value close relations with
Russia, and that a shift to more democratic politics does not herald any kind of pro-Western shift
in Armenia’s foreign relations. Since becoming Prime Minister, Pashinyan has also been a
frequent visitor to the Kremlin, and has gone to great lengths to reassure Russian President
Vladimir Putin of his close alignment with Russia’s interests.
16
Thus, Putin and the Russian
government have largely stayed out of Armenian politics since the revolution, since their greater
concern is less with democracy or autocracy per se and more with geopolitics (Way 2018).
Similar assurances by the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) helped ensure Russian
abandonment of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in that country’s nonviolent revolution
(Bunce and Wolchik, 2011). Yet considering that success in Serbia later rippled through Russia’s
sphere of influence, bringing in several more pro-Western regimes, Russia may be more hesitant
to allow major changes in its geopolitical neighbourhood.
Effective domination of the new parliament by a single party and the near-complete rout
of the old ruling party is also not an unalloyed good when considering Armenian democracy’s
future, particularly when tied with the extensive powers granted to the prime minister in the pre-
revolutionary Armenian constitution. One of the crucial institutions for the growth of a new
democracy is an institutionalized competitive party system (Mainwaring and Torcal, 2006), with
16
See, for example Armenpress, 2018.
20
meaningful competition between political parties and an opposition able to effectively check the
government. Without effective opposition, the example of past nonviolent revolutions shows that
even heroic protest movement leaders may shift in corrupt and authoritarian directions. For
example, in 1991 a nonviolent revolution led by the Movement for Multiparty Democracy
(MMD) ousted Zambia’s long-time single-party regime. The MMD’s won Zambia’s presidency
by a 3-1 margin, and captured 125 out of 150 parliamentary seats, a similar proportion to
Pashinyan’s My Step and its allied Prosperous Armenia party. The lack of any effective political
accountability mechanisms meant that MMD president Frederick Chiluba rapidly consolidated
his own personal power, and engaged in very significant political corruption (Rakner, 2003;
Pinckney, 2018). In contrast, many of the most successful transitions from authoritarian rule
have been those in which authoritarian successor parties continue to serve as an effective
opposition to the new regime (Loxton, 2015). The effective domination of Armenia’s politics by
a single party could also prove problematic should the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with
Azerbaijan heat up once again. Security emergencies are a frequent cause of democratic
backsliding, as governments use the opportunity to crack down on political opponents in the
name of national security.
Finally, there is the challenge of revolutionary disillusionment. The ‘moment of madness’
of the revolution past (Tarrow, 1993), in many nonviolent revolutions there is a painful waking
up to underlying social and economic problems, and the realization that ‘heroic’ activists are
unable on their own to resolve these problems. This can lead to backlash and even to nostalgia
for an authoritarian past. Revolutionary leaders such as Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan must
transition to being politicians. Some leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, acquit themselves well
during that transition. Others, such as Vaclav Havel or Mikheil Saakashvili, do less well.
21
Conclusion
The Armenian Velvet Revolution is the latest in a long line of nonviolent revolutions that have
challenged and frequently defeated authoritarian and quasi-democratic regimes in the twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries. As such, it helps reinforce the insight that nonviolent action can
be a powerful tool to uproot entrenched power structures, even when conditions may be
particularly unfavourable for political change. While revolutions typically seem inevitable when
looked back on ex post, it is important to remember that even close observers rarely predict them
ex ante. The same is true of the Velvet Revolution. In its aftermath, observers have identified
many ‘weaknesses’ of the Sargsyan regime (See Chapter 4 of this volume), but these weaknesses
on their own are insufficient to explain the revolution’s success.
So, what led to the Velvet Revolution’s success? One key element was the skillful
deployment of the three ‘engines’ of nonviolent resistance: unity, strategic planning, and
nonviolent discipline. The movement emphasized the common interests of all Armenians in
ending a corrupt, patronal regime that had overstayed in power. It skillfully planned and
deployed creative nonviolent tactics and framing devices to maximize its impact, incentivize
regime defection, and mute or invert the impact of repression. Moreover, it kept its protests
strictly nonviolent, disincentivizing police repression and shifting public opinion in its favour.
The combination of these three characteristics of successful nonviolent resistance movements
was sufficient to create a massive upswell of popular support for revolutionary change and force
Prime Minister Sargsyan from power.
22
Will the Velvet Revolution result in greater democratization? Civil society is continuing
popular mobilization and holding the new government accountable, while Prime Minister Nikol
Pashinyan and the new generation of leaders now in power in Armenia appear to be skillfully
navigating the political transition. Pashinyan has been careful to keep his pursuit of political
goals within institutional confines, but has emphasized the incompleteness of the revolution thus
far, keeping ordinary Armenians engaged in the political process and with strong reasons to
continue mobilizing. Therefore, while many challenges remain, there are good reasons for
optimism that the transition in Armenia will result in a regime of higher democratic quality.
What does the Velvet Revolution tell us about nonviolent revolutions more broadly? The
revolution has several important implications. First, it shows that it is possible to blend the
diffuse, horizontal ‘networked protest’ of the internet-connected with real institutional change.
The Velvet Revolution was deeply integrated with the tools of digital and social media
(MacFarquhar, 2018). Yet it combined these tools with institutional pressure and integration with
political elites to make not just symbolic but substantive change. This runs counter to a
developing consensus that movements fueled by the internet lack the structures to change long-
term political outcomes (Tufekci, 2017). Armenia demonstrates the possibility of combining the
energy of tech-savvy youth activists with the institutional connections and hierarchy of
opposition parties for a powerful blend of parliamentary and street politics.
The Velvet Revolution also speaks to a debate in the literature on the international factors
necessary for nonviolent revolutions’ success. Scholars have argued that both international
diffusion and a friendly international patron may be necessary factors for the occurrence and
success of nonviolent revolutions (Lawson, 2015; Ritter, 2015). Yet the Velvet Revolution
23
lacked both. Thus, it turns our attention away from external factors back towards domestic
dynamics and the contingent decisions of the regime and opposition.
One thing is certain, we should not be too confident about the endurance of any single
authoritarian regime. The history of nonviolent resistance and of the Velvet Revolution in
Armenia shows that even in unexpected and unfavourable circumstances, the tools of nonviolent
resistance, skillfully wielded, can lead to political transformation.
24
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