Civil Resistance: Theorizing the Force of Nonviolent Action

Abstract

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 emergence of this field, identifying the contributions of key thinkers such as Gene Sharp and Mahatma Gandhi and seminal cases such as the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the anti-Communist uprisings of 1989. The chapter concludes by discussing the relationship between nonviolent action and important areas of social change and presenting some major unanswered questions in the study of nonviolent resistance today.

Full text

Civil Resistance: Theorizing the Force of Nonviolent Action
(Final draft preprint of Chapter 31 in The Routledge Handbook of Social Change. There may be slight
variations between this version and the final published text)
Jonathan Pinckney
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8427-7423
Abstract
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 emergence of this field, identifying the contributions of key
thinkers such as Gene Sharp and Mahatma Gandhi and seminal cases such as the Civil Rights Movement
in the United States and the anti-Communist uprisings of 1989. The chapter concludes by discussing the
relationship between nonviolent action and important areas of social change and presenting some
major unanswered questions in the study of nonviolent resistance today.
Introduction
1
In 594 BC, the Roman Plebeians (the city’s lower social classes) faced a crisis. Wars against Rome’s
neighbours had decimated their numbers. They had requested that Rome’s government, led by the
aristocratic Roman Senate, institute a city-wide debt forgiveness program to ease the costs of war. Yet
the Senate, closely tied with moneylending interests, refused, and instead ordered the Plebeians back
into military service. Many among the Plebeians argued that the appropriate response was a violent
uprising against the Senate, and the assassination of the two Roman Consuls, the heads of the Senatorial
government.
After some deliberation, the Plebeians took a different route. Instead of violently clashing with the
Senate, they withdrew from Rome and camped outside the city, refusing to continue both service to the
state or even the simple patterns of daily life until the Senate granted their demands. The withdrawal
paralyzed Rome, making the Senators fear the city’s vulnerability to foreign attack. After only a few
days, the Senate sent a representative to negotiate with the Plebeians, in the end granting them political
representation in the Senate to protect their interests, an institution that lasted over four hundred years
(Sharp 1973, Howes 2015).
These events from more than two and half millennia ago are one of the earliest recorded examples of
nonviolent action:
2
organised, extra-institutional political action without the use of violence, and they
illustrate the potential of nonviolent action, even in an environment wildly different from modernity, to
achieve meaningful, enduring social change. World history is full of such examples for the close
observer, from the first labour strike in history in Ancient Egypt (Edgerton 1951), to the women of the

Haudenosaunee confederation in North America restricting males’ access to sex and supplies to compel
them to give women veto power over waging war (Steiner 1968).
Nonviolent action has played either a central or secondary role in almost all major political
transformations of recent history, from the American Revolution (Conser et al. 1986) to the Arab Spring
(Roberts et al. 2016). Comprehensive data collection efforts indicate that this trend is only rising, as
violent revolutions become less and less frequent and nonviolent ones become more frequent
(Chenoweth 2015). Yet despite its long history and growing frequency, there have been few attempts to
bring together the knowledge of scholars and activists into systematic analyses of the causes, dynamics,
and consequences of nonviolent action. The scientific study of nonviolent action remains in its infancy,
despite important early contributions from thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi and Gene Sharp (1973,
2005).
In this chapter I examine nonviolent action as a force for social change. I trace the emerging academic
literature on nonviolent action, from its early antecedents in religion and philosophy to a recent
explosion of interest in examining nonviolent action using the tools of social science. I begin by defining
nonviolent action, outline the history of the study of nonviolent action, discuss what we know about
nonviolent action’s capacity to achieve social change, and some areas in which our knowledge of
nonviolent action remains limited.
Defining nonviolent action
Following the literature, I define nonviolent action as a practice constituted by three core elements: It is
the (1) organised application of political force (2) outside the normal avenues of politics and (3) without
the use or threat of physical violence.
3
First, nonviolent action is an organised application of political force. It is action which is intended to
explicitly or implicitly coerce an opponent to do something they otherwise would not do. The
practitioner of nonviolent action, like the Roman Plebeians, withdraws a good that their opponent
would like to retain, or imposes a cost that their opponent would like to avoid. The application of force
can involve economic relationships, as in strikes or boycotts; social relationships, as in shunning or
ostracism; or symbolic or cultural elements, as in most forms of public demonstrations or protest.
Nonviolent action always has communicative elements but is not purely communicative. It directly
imposes costs on its opponent.
Nonviolent action as I am describing it here is also political, meaning it is concerned with a society’s
authoritative allocation of values (Easton 1954). Its typical targets are governments but need not be so.
Political struggles often target corporations, social institutions, or private individuals. What makes them
political is their concern with changing the allocation of social goods in a community larger than the
personal.
Second, nonviolent action takes place outside of the normal avenues of politics. It is often, though not
necessarily, illegal. The key thing separating nonviolent resistance from conventional politics is not that
it breaks laws, but that it challenges regular norms and procedures. It is unexpected and abnormal,

refusing to play by the rules of the current political game, typically because its proponents do not have
faith in those rules to address their grievances. This means that nonviolent resistance is a preferred
tactic of the powerless, or those who face significant disadvantages in their political environment.
4
It stands in contrast to tactics for achieving social change through existing institutional avenues, such as
party politics, political lobbying, or judicial activism. Social movements often employ these institutional
tactics as a complement to nonviolent action, but their strategic logics are distinct.
Third and finally, nonviolent action does not involve the use or threat of physical violence.
5
To be
nonviolent action, a tactic cannot involve the intentional physical harm of another human being.
6
Political violence follows a distinct logic: threats to an opponent’s or their supporters’ bodily integrity
compel the other to meet one’s demands. This logic can operate through both physical harm or the
threat of harm (for instance, by carrying weapons). It rests on manipulating the basic human desire for
physical safety. One can compel power holders to give up power by either killing them or showing one’s
willingness and ability to kill them through killing their soldiers and supporters. The understanding of
power is primarily material.
7
In contrast, nonviolent action rests on an intersubjective understanding of power. Political power is not
a material attribute of certain individuals. Rather individuals and groups gain and maintain power
through their positioning in complex social systems (see Martin 2012, pp. 70–71). The continuation of
these systems – and thus the continuation of any individual’s power – requires that a critical mass of
their participants believe in the system or are afraid of the costs of withdrawing from the system and
thus cooperate in its operation. Even those who are disadvantaged or oppressed by the system almost
always play a crucial role in keeping it functioning.
This theory has been developed specifically in regards to nonviolent action by Gene Sharp in his seminal
work The politics of nonviolent action (1973).
8
Yet similar insights can be found across many social and
political theorists, for instance in Gramsci’s (1971) discussion of hegemony. As Simon (1991, p. 22)
writes in a discussion of Gramsci: ‘Hegemony is a relation, not of domination by means of force, but of
consent by means of political and ideological leadership. It is the organisation of consent.’ This
understanding of power also has important parallels in Foucault (1980) and Arendt (1969). What the
theory of nonviolent action contributes is to take the intersubjectivity of power from the abstract realm
of social theory and propose a set of strategic responses and specific tactics to achieve transformation
available to those facing oppression under specific political and social orders.
Nonviolent action often follows well-known and understood tactical repertoires, such as the protest
march, the labour strike, and the boycott. Yet the range of possible nonviolent action tactics goes well
beyond this. Gene Sharp (1973) has categorized nearly 200 distinct nonviolent tactics, and even this is
simply an empirical tally rather than a theoretically bounded set. As the structures of power in which
nonviolent action take place change, so the tactics through which practitioners of nonviolent action also
change to challenge them. For example, the growth of the internet and the increasing weaving of digital
environments into the structures of power in modern life have led to an entirely new set of digital
resistance tactics (Wray 1999).

Nonviolent action is distinct from pacifism.
9
Pacifism is ‘the ideological assertion that war and violence
should be rejected in political and personal life…the belief that it is morally wrong to participate in killing
for any reason’ (Howes 2013, p. 427-428). Nonviolent action – a set of techniques of political action –
may or may not be motivated by pacifism. While many of the early theorizing on the potential political
efficacy of nonviolent action come from pacifist thinkers (see below) few modern practitioners of
nonviolent action have explicitly invoked pacifism in their struggles.
Nonviolent action is also distinct from any political agenda or ideology. While many of the best-known
cases of nonviolent action have pursued progressive goals such as decolonization, democratization, or
social justice, the same tactical repertoire can also be applied for goals and aims that run counter to the
fashioning of a just and peaceful society (e.g. Sombatpoonsiri 2018). Saying that a movement employs
nonviolent action in this framework is an empirical claim about its primary tactics and should not be
interpreted as an endorsement of its goals.
The study of nonviolent action
The techniques of nonviolent action have almost all developed organically within communities
struggling to achieve political change. Many scholars have examined the nature of warfare in depth, but
historically there have been few dedicated scholars of nonviolent action. Some of the first systematic
attempts to identify and understand nonviolent action emerged in the 19th century with pacifist thinkers
who approached nonviolent action as a moral or religious imperative. Early thinkers such as Thoreau
(1849/2016), Adin Ballou (1910), and Tolstoy (1894) theorized both about the moral necessity of
engaging in nonviolent action and the practical methods through which it might bring about social
change.
Mahatma Gandhi was both the great systematiser of these early insights as well as one of the first to put
them into practice, organizing his various campaigns in South Africa and colonial India around a unified
theory of nonviolent action as satyagraha, or the ‘power of truth.’ Gandhi’s own voluminous writings
(Gandhi 1958) are a gold mine of thinking on the theory and practice of nonviolent action. While Gandhi
did not write a single systematic treatment of his thinking on the subject, many such systematic
treatments have been written by others, both contemporarily with Gandhi and after his death (See, for
example, Shridharani 1939, Bondurant 1958, Iyer 1973).
Gene Sharp is a second touchstone of the modern study of nonviolent action. In his seminal Politics of
nonviolent action, Sharp (1973) laid the theoretical groundwork for a systematic understanding of how
nonviolent action can achieve political change. He drew on many historic political theorists to break
down the ‘monolithic’ theory of power, emphasizing the ability of those made ‘powerless’ by systems of
domination to undermine those systems through non-cooperation. Sharp called for the tactics and
strategies of nonviolent action to be subjected to the same rigorous analytical scrutiny through which
military tactics and strategy have been refined for centuries. He performed some of this early research
himself, for instance by examining the potential for nonviolent resistance against military coups (Sharp
and Jenkins 2003), and in pro-democracy movements in dictatorships (Sharp 1994).

The explosion of social movements in the 1960s, most prominently the US civil rights movements, which
drew on Gandhi, helped spur growth of this area of research. The anti-Communist uprisings in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s and early 1990s then cemented nonviolent action as a core
area of concern for scholars interested in transformative political and social change. Much of the earlier
work on nonviolent action consisted of case study examinations of individual cases, drawing lessons
from the experiences of particular movements (Zunes et al. 1999, Roberts and Ash 2009). Some seminal
works such as Kurt Schock’s (2005) book Unarmed insurrections or Sharon Nepstad’s (2011) Nonviolent
revolutions took this approach a step further, comparing several cases to gain broader insights into the
factors that influenced nonviolent action campaigns’ dynamics and outcomes.
The 2011 publication of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s book Why civil resistance works
significantly expanded the nonviolent action literature’s focus. Chenoweth and Stephan gathered data
on over 300 violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 that had ‘maximalist’ goals of
changing a regime, creating a new state, or ending a military occupation. Their central finding was that
the nonviolent campaigns achieved their stated goals roughly 50% of the time, nearly twice as
frequently as the violent campaigns. The key factor separating the two, Chenoweth and Stephan argued,
was participation. While violent campaigns tended to be relatively small and dominated by young men,
nonviolent campaigns tended to have much higher levels of participation and appeal to all segments of
society. This made it easier for nonviolent movements to induce defections from their opponents,
leading to the breakdown of their opponents’ power structures.
Coming just as the uprisings of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ in the Middle East captured world attention,
Chenoweth and Stephan’s book sparked a major expansion in scholarly interest in nonviolent action.
There was also a methodological shift from the almost exclusively qualitative research that preceded it
to a rich mix of both qualitative and quantitative studies. For example, scholars have used new
datasets
10
on nonviolent action movements to the factors leading to the onset of major nonviolent
action campaigns (Braithwaite et al. 2015, Butcher and Svensson 2016, Karakaya 2016, Thurber 2018,
Dahlum 2019), the dynamics of nonviolent action (Sutton et al. 2014, Pinckney 2016, Belgioioso 2018,
Petrova 2019), and its outcomes (Celestino and Gleditsch 2013, Bayer et al. 2016, Pinckney 2018).
The literature on nonviolent action has remained closely linked with developments in the world outside,
focusing on efforts by politicians, activists, and ordinary people to wield the tools of nonviolent action to
achieve social change. How well has it performed in achieving this?
Nonviolent action and social change
As illustrated by the example that opened this chapter, nonviolent action has long been a force for social
change. Its recent rise to scholarly prominence has more to do with a limitation in the attention and
focus of scholars as well as the active subjugation of such knowledge by cultures and political systems
that valorise the use of violence. Scholars have increasingly recovered the history of nonviolent action’s
role in social change (Bartkowski 2013). This expansive history implies a similarly expansive set of areas
of social change brought about by or connected to nonviolent action. I focus on three areas of impact
from recent history that are well-established in the literature and relevant to central political questions

of our time. The first is the move from dictatorship to democracy. The second is the protection of
human rights. The third is counterweight to the excesses of global capitalism.
The connection between nonviolent action and democratization is the best-known and best studied of
these three. Scholars have long acknowledged that democratic transitions are often driven by popular
pressure (Boix 2003, Acemoglu and Robinson 2005). More recent work has sought to disentangle the
specific effects of nonviolent action by comparing political transitions in which primarily nonviolent
tactics predominated the pre-transition struggle with those in which it did not. The results, robust across
multiple quantitative studies, indicate a strong democratizing effect (e.g. Karatnycky and Ackerman
2005, Johnstad 2010, Bayer et al. 2016, Pinckney 2018). Nonviolent action has played a role in almost all
transitions from authoritarianism to democracy in the 20th and early 21st centuries (Pinckney 2020).
Nonviolent action was at the forefront of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in sub-
Saharan Africa. Countries that achieved independence from their colonial rulers primarily through
nonviolent action have been much more likely to establish long-term sustainable democracies than
those that achieved independence through violent rebellions (Garcia-Ponce and Wantchekon 2017). The
democratizing trend continued through the so-called ‘third wave of democratization,’ beginning with
movements such as the Carnation Revolution in Portugal through anti-military rule movements in Latin
America, anti-Communist movements in Eastern Europe, and the ‘Colour Revolutions’ of the early 2000s
in the former Soviet Union.
The protection and expansion of human rights has also been pushed forward by nonviolent action. The
civil rights movement in the United States is perhaps best-known example of this (McAdam 1982,
Garrow 1986) but there are many more. Women’s right to vote in many Western countries was
achieved through concerted campaigns of primarily nonviolent action (Rosen 1974, Holton 1986). And
bringing about democracy through nonviolent action appears to have a protective effect on freedoms of
expression and association (Bethke and Pinckney 2019).
Nonviolent action has also been at the heart of movements to protect economic rights and push back
against the excesses of global capitalism, and perhaps even ‘the most promising method for moving
beyond capitalism to a more humane social and economic system’ (Martin 2001, p. 7). One of the
foundational tools of nonviolent action is the labour strike, which has its origins in workers’ struggles for
dignity and decent working conditions. Nonviolent action has also been at the forefront of many
struggles for land reform such as the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and Ekta Parishad in
India (Schock 2015). It has also played an important role in many struggles to protect the social safety
net and oppose privatization of essential public resources (Harris 2003).
In addition to these three areas, nonviolent action has played an important role in the environmental
movement, in anti-war movements (Nepstad 2004), and in many other struggles for positive social
change. Nonviolent action is a central tool of any major political struggle by those left behind by
established political systems to fight for greater freedom and justice, though as mentioned above,
nonviolent action is not necessarily connected with such struggles, and its tools have sometimes been
employed for more regressive political change.

The above examples focus on nonviolent action’s demonstrated capability of achieving concrete political
change. Yet it is important to emphasize that the connection between nonviolent action and social
change goes well beyond its ability to bring about political change. Even when political opportunities
may not allow for concrete political changes, nonviolent action can serve an important socialization role,
changing the activists themselves, building new communities, raising awareness of issues and laying the
groundwork for future political change (Nepstad 2008).
New frontiers in the study of nonviolent action
There is still much that we do not know about nonviolent action. I focus on two questions, one that is
currently a significant area of debate and one that is ‘just over the horizon’ of scholarly attention but
likely to become increasingly important in coming years.
Unsurprisingly, nonviolent resistance movements tend to occur at moments of significant social and
political ferment. This means not only that one must tread carefully when making definitive statements
about their causes, but also that they co-occur with numerous other forms of political action. Riots, and
even violent insurgencies frequently take place at the same times and places as nonviolent action
movements, and sometimes even within movements that espouse principles of nonviolence.
There is significant debate over whether this violence is harmful, beneficial, or simply incidental to
nonviolent action. Drawing on Sharp, many have argued that violence alongside nonviolent action harms
movements’ effectiveness by legitimizing repression against them and reducing their participatory
advantage (Ackerman and DuVall 2006). Others have argued that violent or disruptive movement
elements benefit nonviolent action movements (Haines 1984, Kadivar and Ketchley 2018, Case 2019).
And at least some forms of contemporaneous violence, such as concurrent armed insurgencies, appear
to have little to no effect on the success of nonviolent action movements (Chenoweth and Schock 2015).
More research is urgently needed to do the difficult work of teasing apart these relationships. The
choice to engage in violent or nonviolent action may arise contingently, driven by emotional factors or
situational dynamics. Yet many movements actively discuss and choose between primarily violent or
nonviolent action (Thurber 2019), or debate the question of ‘diversity of tactics,’ that is acceptance of a
range of both violent and nonviolent tactics in movements for social change (Conway 2003).
The second question comes from the possibilities that may soon be available to scholars of nonviolent
action. Thanks to improvements in computing power and the wide availability of both traditional and
social media, scholars have increasing access to fine-grained, detailed information on the times and
places in which nonviolent action occurs. These new data, tied with machine learning algorithms able to
parse subtle patterns in massive data sources, may soon give scholars the ability to forecast incidents of
nonviolent action with a high degree of accuracy and specificity, a task that to date has been very
difficult (Chenoweth and Ulfelder 2017), but is becoming increasingly feasible (Pinckney and
RezaeeDaryakenari 2019).
No doubt such advances will significantly increase our understanding of nonviolent action and may
provide as-yet unpredictable insights that will be useful to those seeking to achieve social change. Yet
this ability to forecast raises significant ethical questions. While big data can empower forces of social

change, it can also suppress them. To repressive governments and others interested in suppressing
social change, the ability to reliably forecast nonviolent action will be a significant advantage. Scholars
interested in this question should carefully consider the ethical implications and potential misuses of
their work.
Conclusion
In February 2019, protesters in the Algerian towns of Bordj Bou Arreridj and Kherrata began protesting
their long-time authoritarian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s plan to run for a fifth term in office. The
prognosis for the protesters was not optimistic. Eight years before Bouteflika had skilfully weathered the
political storm of the Arab Spring through a canny mix of repression and liberal distribution of the
country’s oil wealth. While Bouteflika himself had suffered a stroke and was in very poor health his
regime was propped up by long-time political insiders who held tightly to the reins of power. Yet within
weeks protest exploded across the country, growing into demonstrations of millions. Bouteflika tried to
stave off the inevitable, promising not to run for re-election if he would be allowed to finish his term. It
was not enough. On April 2, as he neared his twentieth anniversary of coming to power, Bouteflika
resigned as president of Algeria. Only weeks later, a similar movement in Sudan ended the presidency of
Sudan’s brutal dictator, Omar al-Bashir.
Algeria and Sudan are not exceptional. Indeed, recent years have seen an explosion of nonviolent action
movements, perhaps the largest in world history (Chenoweth 2020). The current time seems ripe for
citizens around the world to use nonviolent action to face the challenges of authoritarian resurgence,
rampant inequality, and environmental degradation. Success is never guaranteed, and any movement
that faces entrenched power structures will face setbacks, yet the testimony from the Roman forum to
the streets of Algiers and Khartoum speaks to nonviolent action’s transformative power even in the
most challenging circumstances. While many questions remain, a growing literature has shown
repeatedly that nonviolent action can play an important role in ending oppressive political systems,
improving the rights and freedoms in nominally democratic systems, and countering some of the worst
excesses of global capitalism. Thus, in any consideration of the forces that can lead to social change,
nonviolent action must play a central part.
Notes
1
The opinions expressed in this chapter are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions
of the United States Institute of Peace.
2
The academic literature and popular discussions of nonviolent action often employ several cognate terms such as
‘nonviolent resistance,’ ‘civil resistance,’ ‘passive resistance,’ or simply ‘nonviolence.’ There are fine-grained
distinctions between these terms, but for the most part they may be used interchangeably.
3
There are several similar definitions in other recent works on the subject. For instance, Gene Sharp defines
nonviolent action as ‘a technique of socio-political action for applying power in a conflict without the use of
violence’ (Sharp 1999, p. 567). See also Chenoweth and Stephan (2011, pp. 11–12) or Roberts and Ash (2009, pp.
2–3). For a contrasting central idea of nonviolent resistance see Vinthagen (2015).

4
This characteristic means the same action may or may not be nonviolent resistance based on context. The same
protest march may be an ordinary part of politics in a developed democracy or a bold act of resistance in a
repressive dictatorship.
5
There is an important level of analysis question here. When one is discussing individual actions, it is fair to apply a
close to absolute standard distinguishing nonviolent from violent, along the lines of what is described in this
paragraph. However, when one is discussing entire social movements or revolutionary uprisings, I argue it is more
reasonable to consider the movement or uprising’s primary method of action. For instance, it is still meaningful to
contrast the primarily violent Maoist revolution in China with the primarily nonviolent Gandhian independence
movement in India even though the Maoists organized actions that would fall into the typical repertoire of
nonviolent action and the Indian independence movement involved many incidents of violence. For more on
parsing this distinction see Chenoweth and Stephan (2011, pp. 11–13) or Pinckney (2016, pp. 16–17).
6
There is debate among scholars and activists to what extent this might extend to damaging property or engaging
in other actions that don’t involve direct bodily harm (Boserup and Mack 1975).
7
Though certain theorists of political violence also focus on the communicative and intersubjective aspects of
violence. Fanon (1963) is the central touchstone here.
8
Gandhi also developed similar insights as inspiration for his campaigns of nonviolent action.
9
Some key sources in the literature on nonviolent action refer to a distinction between ‘principled nonviolence,’
i.e. nonviolent action motivated by pacifism, and ‘pragmatic nonviolence,’ i.e. nonviolent action motivated by a
belief in nonviolent action’s political efficacy (Burrowes 1996, Nepstad 2015)
10
The various iterations of Chenoweth’s Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data project
(Chenoweth and Lewis 2013, Chenoweth et al. 2018) have been the most commonly employed, but others have
leveraged information on peaceful protests in sources such as the Social Conflict Analysis Database (Salehyan et al.
2012) or the mass mobilization database (Clark and Regan 2019).

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