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Nonviolent Resistance, Social Justice, and Positive Peace
... What constitutes civil resistance also differs across autocratic and democratic contexts, with implications for tactical effectiveness (Pinckney 2021). For example, public condemnations of government actions carry far greater risk, and therefore greater symbolic meaning and potential impact, under an autocratic regime than in a democracy where freedom of speech is the norm. ...
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, rather than democratic backsliding. To fill these gaps, we collect and analyze data on actions by resistance campaigns and four key pillars of support in a random sample of democratic backsliding periods. We find that civil resistance is associated with democracy protection, but success rates are lower than in campaigns against autocracies; that quiet diplomacy and relationship-building by activists are most effective in shifting pillar loyalty; and that noncooperation tactics by pillar actors are particularly successful. We further support these findings with an illustrative case study of the 2004 Ukrainian “Orange Revolution.”
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 Western influence (linkage and leverage) are positively associated with the onset and success of unarmed revolutions because liberal patrons encourage the creation of "façade democracy" that open up space for opposition, and constrain autocratic clients from violently repressing nonviolent challengers. However, this theory has yet to be tested on a global sample. In this research note, we conduct the first quantitative global test of the effects of US patronage on the onset and success of unarmed revolutions. We leverage updated data on unarmed revolutions and new data on formal bilateral influence capacity (FBIC) from 1960 to 2019. We find that though U.S. patronage is significantly associated with higher risk of unarmed revolution onset during the Cold War, there is no such effect in the post-Cold War era. And U.S. patronage is associated with revolutionary failure, not success, though this effect too holds only in the Cold War era.
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 paper, we address this gap by analyzing the effect of NVR on the quality of democracy, using the Polyarchy index from the Varieties of Democracies project and its sub-components: (1) elected executive; (2) free and fair elections; (3) freedom of expression; (4) associational autonomy; and (5) inclusive citizenship. Using kernel matching and differences-in-differences estimation we find that initiating a democratic transition through NVR improves democratic quality after transition significantly and substantially relative to cases without this characteristic. Our analysis of the Polyarchy index’s sub-components reveals that this positive effect comes about primarily owing to improvements in freedom of expression and associational autonomy. This finding speaks to the strength of NVR in promoting expressive dimensions of democracy.
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 strategic logic of civil resistance presents high barriers to entry for politically excluded ethnic minorities. Constraints on these groups’ ability to activate mechanisms central to an exclusively nonviolent strategy either prevent them from getting a civil resistance campaign off the ground or deter them from ever attempting to do so. Using original data on the ethnic composition of nonviolent and violent campaigns, I show that nonviolent campaigns are less likely than violent ones to include participants from politically disadvantaged ethnic groups and also less likely to feature ethnic political claims. Furthermore, I find that political exclusion and small group size reduce the likelihood that members of an ethnic group will initiate a campaign of civil resistance.
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 the liberal world system, as well as coloniality's effects on nonviolent action, and emerging subjugated knowledges. We propose going beyond these limitations by learning from social movements focusing on human dignity, material self-sufficiency, and local autonomy, especially in the Global South. Our essay examines two classic decolonizing thinkers (Gandhi and Fanon) and two contemporary decolonizing struggles (the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Abahlali in South Africa). Each emphasizes coloniality, constructive over contentious resistance, transformations in political subjectivity, and emancipatory visions that go beyond Western ideals. We call for further research on the many different stories of civil resistance across the worldwide coloniality line.
What is the relationship between how a war ends and the post-war political order? Civil wars that end in rebel victory follow distinct war-to-peace transitions compared to the more often analyzed cases of negotiated settlement and internationally supported peacebuilding. In the cases of Uganda, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, the insurgents used the war-to-peace transition to transform their military institutions into authoritarian political parties and to consolidate power. It is not surprising that the winning military party becomes the post-war ruling party, but it is less obvious why victorious insurgents so often become powerful authoritarian parties. Using the cases of Uganda, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, this article argues that the legacies of protracted civil war and the imperatives of the war-to-peace transitions following victory provide the mechanism that links victory by insurgents to the creation of strong authoritarian parties.
Research suggests that nonviolent resistance (NVR) campaigns are more successful in deposing dictators than armed rebellions. However, ousting dictators is only the first step in the process of democratization. After deposing an autocratic regime, societies enter a transition phase where they must learn to consolidate the gains of democracy and bargain about the new rules of the democratic regime. But even if free, fair, and competitive elections are held, indicating a successful transition to democratic rule, uncertainty about its stability remains salient. In the period that follows, either democracy survives and proves to be resilient, or an autocratic backslide occurs. In this article, we analyze the effect of NVR campaigns on the survival of democratic regimes. Building on the literature on modes of transitions and nonviolent resistance, we argue that those democratic regimes that come into being as a result of a NVR campaign are less prone to democratic breakdown. The main mechanism which produces this effect is that the organizational culture of NVR campaigns spills over to the subsequent democratic regime fostering conditions favorable for democratic survival. We test the effect of NVR campaigns on democratic regime survival using survival analysis and propensity score matching. The results show that democratic regimes that experience NVR during the transition phase survive substantially longer than regimes without NVR.
A growing research field examines the conditions under which major nonviolent resistance campaigns—that is, popular nonviolent uprisings for regime or territorial change—are successful. Why these campaigns emerge in the first place is less well understood. We argue that extensive social networks that are economically interdependent with the state make strategic nonviolence more feasible. These networks are larger and more powerful in states whose economies rely upon organized labor. Global quantitative analysis of the onset of violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1960 to 2006 (NAVCO), and major protest events in Africa from 1990 to 2009 (SCAD) shows that the likelihood of nonviolent conflict onset increases with the proportion of manufacturing to gross domestic product. This study points to a link between modernization and social conflict, a link that has been often hypothesized, but, hitherto, unsupported by empirical studies.
This paper reviews the key aspects of general strikes and analyses the economic cost of such
strikes in Nepal. Data analysis shows that average direct cost of general strikes stood at NRs. 1.8
billion per strike day and NRs. 27 billion per year at current prices during 2008-2013. The lost
output per year accounted for 1.4 percent of the annual gross output. The total accumulated
output loss due to general strikes in the five-year period amounted to NRs. 117 billion. With such
losses, general strikes decelerated annual GDP growth rates in a range between 0.6 percentage
point and 2.2 percentage points during the study period. The impact of general strikes was quick
and significant on inflation and tourist arrival rates. The monthly inflation rate jumped to over 9
percent as a result of two-day general strike while the strike called for three or more days led to
an inflation of more than 10 percent. Similarly, tourist arrival declined over a lag. However, gross
fixed capital formation and foreign direct investment appeared to be less affected by general
strikes, which might be due mainly to their bottomed out levels.
Whereas optimists see the so-called Arab Spring as similar to the revolutions of 1989, and likely to bring about democratic rule, skeptics fear that protest bringing down dictators may simply give way to new dictatorships, as in the Iranian revolution. Existing research on transitions has largely neglected the role of protest and direct action in destabilizing autocracies and promoting democracy. We argue that protest and direct action can promote transitions in autocracies, and that the mode of direct action, that is, whether violent or nonviolent, has a major impact on the prospects for autocratic survival and democracy. We present empirical results supporting our claim that nonviolent protests substantially increase the likelihood of transitions to democracy, especially under favorable international environments, while violent direct action is less effective in undermining autocracies overall, and makes transitions to new autocracies relatively more likely.
The events of the Arab Spring of 2011 have made clear the importance and potential efficacy of nonviolent resistance, as well as the field’s inability to explain the onset and outcome of major nonviolent uprisings. Until recently, conflict scholars have largely ignored nonviolent resistance. This issue features new theoretical and empirical explorations of the causes and consequences of nonviolent resistance, stressing the role that unarmed, organized civilians can play in shaping the course of conflicts. Contributors demonstrate the importance of treating nonviolent and violent strategies, as well as conventional politics strategies, as alternative choices for engaging the state, show how gender ideology can influence which opposition groups use nonviolent resistance, and suggest that the causes of civil war and nonviolent resistance often differ. Other pieces highlight the role of public attitudes regarding whether nonviolent resistance and violence are employed, how experience with activism and repression by the state can shape activists’ perceptions of justice, and how the perceptions of resistance leaders can influence strategic choices. Moreover, several articles examine the key role that security force defections can play in the success of nonviolent resistance, how micro-level nonviolent tactics can improve security in civil war, and how nonviolent campaigns can influence the stability of autocratic states. These contributions suggest that rigorous empirical study of civilian-based contentious politics (rather than only violent contention by armed non-state actors) must be incorporated into the conflict literature. Improved theory and data on the subject will help researchers and policymakers to shape strategies to support these movements when appropriate, and to manage changes in the international system that result from the success of nonviolent uprisings.
This study explores popular challenges against the state through nonviolent means. Although previous research has started to examine the effect of these ‘unarmed insurrections’, the relationship between challenging the state apparatus (vertical legitimacy) and the state identity (horizontal legitimacy) has not been adequately addressed. We argue that unarmed insurrections are most likely to be successful when challenging the vertical, rather than the horizontal, legitimacy of the state. Studying data for 287 years of protests in 57 non-democratic countries during the period of 1946–2006, we find support for three implications of this proposition: 1) campaigns that demand governmental regime change are more successful than campaigns for territorial changes; 2) success is less likely when the identity of the insurgents and the government is split along ethnic lines; and 3) success is less likely when society is highly polarized along ethnic lines rather than being ethnically homogeneous. Thus, when the community is divided, the efforts to withdraw consent will be less effective. The study discusses the implications of these findings for policymakers and scholars interested in nonviolent strategic action.
Since 1990, negotiated settlements have become the preferred means for settling civil wars. Historically, however, these types of settlements have proven largely ineffective: civil wars ended by negotiated settlement are more likely to recur than those ending in victory by one side or the other. A theoretical and statistical analysis of how civil wars end reveals that the type of ending influences the prospects for longer-term outcomes. An examination of all civil war endings since 1940 finds that rebel victories are more likely to secure the peace than are negotiated settlements. A statistical analysis of civil wars from 1940 to 2002 and the case of Uganda illustrate why rebel victories result in more stable outcomes. Expanding scholarly and policy analysis of civil war termination types beyond the current default of negotiated settlement to include victories provides a much larger set of cases and variables to draw upon to enhance understanding of the conditions most likely to support long-term stability, democracy, and prosperity.
This article attempts to explain why some countries experience civil wars while others do not. It argues that renewed war is likely to have less to do with the attributes of a previous war, as many people have argued, than with current incentives individual citizens have to rejoin a rebel group. Civil wars will have little chance to get off the ground unless individual farmers, shopkeepers, and potential workers choose to enlist in the rebel armies that are necessary to pursue a war, and enlistment is only likely to be attractive when two conditions hold. The first is a situation of individual hardship or severe dissatisfaction with one’s current situation. The second is the absence of any nonviolent means for change. An analysis of all civil wars ending between 1945 and 1996 suggests that a higher quality of life and greater access to political participation have a significant negative effect on the likelihood of renewed war. Countries that provide higher levels of economic well-being to their citizenry and create an open political system are less likely to experience multiple civil wars regardless of what happened in a previous conflict.
The historical record indicates that nonviolent campaigns have been more successful than armed campaigns in achieving ultimate goals in political struggles, even when used against similar opponents and in the face of repression. Nonviolent campaigns are more likely to win legitimacy, attract widespread domestic and international support, neutralize the opponent's security forces, and compel loyalty shifts among erstwhile opponent supporters than are armed campaigns, which enjoin the active support of a relatively small number of people, offer the opponent a justification for violent counterattacks, and are less likely to prompt loyalty shifts and defections. An original, aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 is used to test these claims. These dynamics are further explored in case studies of resistance campaigns in Southeast Asia that have featured periods of both violent and nonviolent resistance.
The replacement of authoritarian rule by democracy in both South Africa and El Salvador poses a puzzle: why did the powerful, anti-democratic elites of these countries abandon death squads, apartheid, and the other tools of political repression and take a chance on democracy? Forging Democracy From Below shows how popular mobilization--in El Salvador an effective guerilla army supported by peasant collaboration and in South Africa a powerful alliance of labor unions and poor urban dwellers--forced the elite to the bargaining table, and why a durable settlement and democratic government were the result
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 which do not. This book presents a theory of democratization in transitions initiated by nonviolent resistance based on the successful resolution of two central strategic challenges: maintaining high transitional mobilization and avoiding institutionally destructive maximalism. I test the theory, first, on a data set of every transition from authoritarian rule in the post–World War II period and, second, with three in-depth case studies informed by interviews with key decision-makers in Nepal, Zambia, and Brazil. The testing supports the importance of high mobilization and low maximalism. Both have strong, consistent effects on democratization after nonviolent resistance.
Poland is the only country in which popular protest and mass opposition, epitomized by the Solidarity movement, played a significant role in bringing down the communist regime. This book, the first comprehensive study of the politics of protest in postcommunist Central Europe, shows that organized protests not only continued under the new regime but also had a powerful impact on Poland’s democratic consolidation. Following the collapse of communism in 1989, the countries of Eastern Europe embarked on the gargantuan project of restructuring their social, political, economic, and cultural institutions. The social cost of these transformations was high, and citizens expressed their discontent in various ways. Protest actions became common events, particularly in Poland. In order to explain why protest in Poland was so intense and so particularized, Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik place the situation within a broad political, economic, and social context and test it against major theories of protest politics. They conclude that in transitional polities where conventional political institutions such as parties or interest groups are underdeveloped, organized collective protest becomes a legitimate and moderately effective strategy for conducting state-society dialogue. The authors offer an original and rich description of protest movements in Poland after the fall of communism as a basis for developing and testing their ideas. They highlight the organized and moderate character of the protests and argue that the protests were not intended to reverse the change of 1989 but to protest specific policies of the government. This book contributes to the literature on democratic consolidation, on the institutionalization of state-society relationship, and on protest and social movements. It will be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, historians, and policy advisors.
I offer a conceptual framework for assessing the normative legitimacy of coercive disobedience—involving threats, disruption, force, and deceit—by social movements. A standard liberal view is that while coercion may be required to resist authoritarian regimes, it is illegitimate in a democratic state since it conflicts with majority rule and mutual respect. In restricting disobedience to a form of moral persuasion, this perspective neglects how social power and material interests can distort the conditions for open, fair deliberation. I offer a principled defense of coercive disobedience, not only in repressive states but in plausibly democratic societies. I argue that coercion can be justified on democratic republican grounds as a means to collectively contest objectionable forms of political domination. The use of coercion can be justified as a surrogate tool of political action for those who lack effective participation rights; as a remedial tool to counteract the dominating influence of powerful actors over the process of democratic will formation, and as a mobilizational tool to maintain participation and discipline in collective action. I conclude by proposing democratic constraints on the use of coercive tactics designed to offset the potential movements themselves become a source of arbitrary power.
This study investigates whether protest movements consisting of students and educated protesters are more likely to (a) use nonviolent rather than violent resistance and (b) successfully reach their goals. Extant literature suggests that education is negatively linked to violent conflict, and the commonly assumed mechanism is that educated groups are less likely to resort to violence. Moreover, many argue that education is a force for regime change and democratization, by inducing successful protest movements. This article is the first to systematically test implications of these mechanisms at the protest level. The empirical analysis builds on original data on the educational background of participants in all protest campaigns aiming for regime change from 1900 to 2006 identified in the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes Dataset 1.0. I find robust evidence that protest movements with a high degree of involvement by students and graduates are more likely to turn nonviolent. Moreover, there is some (although weaker) evidence that these movements are more likely to achieve their goals, but only due to their nonviolent dispositions. This adds to the literature explaining why some movements resort to nonviolence (and succeed), by establishing that the identity and socioeconomic background of protesters matter.
Previous studies find a strong relationship between armed conflict and gender equality, but only compare armed conflict to no armed conflict onset. However, opposition movements use different means to challenge governments, such as nonviolent or armed strategies. This study explores this variation and poses the question: How does the level of gender equality affect the onset of nonviolent campaigns and armed conflicts? It makes two contributions. First, I quantitatively test the impact of gender equality on different forms of conflict onset, and second, I propose a comprehensive gendered mobilization argument based on strategic choice theory. Nonviolent campaigns rely on mass participation, and the nonviolent conflict literature claims that they are open to a wider array of participants, including women, compared to armed conflicts. I argue that gender norms affect movements’ expectations of mobilization (mass or limited) as well as conflict norms (nonviolent or violent) in society, and subsequently, the choice of conflict strategy. I hypothesize that higher levels of gender equality, measured by fertility rate and female-to-male primary school enrolment ratio, increase the likelihood of nonviolent campaign onset, compared to both armed and no campaign onset. This study analyses country-year data from the UCDP and NAVCO datasets between 1961 and 2006 and finds that increases in gender equality are, on average, associated with an increased likelihood of nonviolent conflict onset.
A firsthand account and incisive analysis of modern protest, revealing internet-fueled social movements' greatest strengths and frequent challenges. To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti-Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today's social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests-how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change. Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul's Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture-and offer essential insights into the future of governance.
Why do organizations choose to use nonviolence? Why do they choose specific nonviolent tactics? Existing quantitative work centers on mass nonviolent campaign, but much of the nonviolence employed in contentious politics is smaller-scale nonviolent direct action. In this article, we explore the determinants of nonviolence with new data at the organization level in self-determination disputes from 1960 to 2005. We present a novel argument about the interdependence of tactical choices among nonviolent options in self-determination movements. Given limitations on their capabilities, competition among organizations in a shared movement, and different resource requirements for nonviolent strategies, we show that organizations have incentives to diversify tactics rather than just copy other organizations. The empirical analysis reveals a rich picture of varied organizational resistance choices, and a complex web of interdependence among tactics.
An examination of mass mobilizations to promote land rights of the landless and near-landless by Ekta Parishad in India and the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil identifies a similar strategy of rightful radical resistance that incorporates key elements of rightful resistance but also transcends it. The comparable strategy is due to similarities in context: India and Brazil are semiperipheral countries with relatively high-capacity states and representative democratic political structures, but have inequitable distributions of agricultural land despite constitutional principles and laws that embody equitable land distributions. However, given the substantial variation across India and Brazil in culture, geography, and demography, the specific forms assumed by rightful radical resistance vary. This study contributes to the social movements and civil resistance literatures by explicating the strategic logic of the mass mobilizations, explaining similarities and differences across the two cases, and illustrating the potential of civil resistance for challenging the structural violence of land dispossession and inequality.
Scholarly interest in the topic of nonviolent resistance has recently increased as a result of the worldwide spread of nonviolent campaigns such as the Arab Spring. Yet causal factors that facilitate the emergence of nonviolent resistance campaigns remain underexplored. This paper comparatively analyzes the causal factors of nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns in the world for the period 1976–2006 by utilizing NAVCO 2 data. This paper argues that increasing levels of globalization lead to a preference for nonviolent campaigns over violent ones. The findings confirm that increasing levels of globalization are positively associated with the emergence of nonviolent campaigns, while negatively influencing the probability of violent campaigns. Integration into the world increases the popularity of peaceful alternatives to achieve political goals.
As the nuclear arms race exploded in the 1980s, a group of U.S. Religious pacifists used radical nonviolence to intervene. Armed with hammers, they broke into military facilities to pound on missiles and pour blood on bombers, enacting the prophet Isaiah's vision: “Nations shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks”. Calling themselves the Plowshares movement, these controversial activists received long prison sentences; nonetheless, their movement grew and expanded to Europe and Australia. In this book, Sharon Erickson Nepstad documents the emergence and international diffusion of this unique form of high-risk collective action. Drawing on in-depth interviews, original survey research, and archival data, Nepstad explains why some Plowshares groups have persisted over time while others have struggled or collapsed. Comparing the U.S. Movement with less successful Plowshares groups overseas, Nepstad reveals how decisions about leadership, organization, retention, and cultural adaptations influence movements long-term trajectories.
Chenoweth and Stephan's award-winning book, Why Civil Resistance Works, boldly claims that political protest is more successful than armed conflict. This finding is novel in its design and innovative in its defense. This essay, however, suggests that civil disobedience fails just as often as violence in toppling authoritarian regimes. Moreover, my review of several important books on political protest, autocracy, and regime change concludes that the choices made by dictators shape whether the opposition remains peaceful or becomes violent. Deepening our understanding of democratization requires integrating the analysis of the nature and impact of political protest with the study of regimes, their dynamics, and how and when they split.
Why do some national movements use violent protest and others nonviolent protest? Wendy Pearlman shows that much of the answer lies inside movements themselves. Nonviolent protest requires coordination and restraint, which only a cohesive movement can provide. When, by contrast, a movement is fragmented, factional competition generates new incentives for violence and authority structures are too weak to constrain escalation. Pearlman reveals these patterns across one hundred years in the Palestinian national movement, with comparisons to South Africa and Northern Ireland. To those who ask why there is no Palestinian Gandhi, Pearlman demonstrates that nonviolence is not simply a matter of leadership. Nor is violence attributable only to religion, emotions, or stark instrumentality. Instead, a movement's organizational structure mediates the strategies that it employs. By taking readers on a journey from civil disobedience to suicide bombings, this book offers fresh insight into the dynamics of conflict and mobilization.
Violent domestic conflicts spread between countries via spillover effects and the desire to emulate events abroad. Herein, we extend this emulation logic to the potential for the contagion of nonviolent conflicts. The spread of predominantly nonviolent pro-democracy mobilizations across the globe in the mid-to-late 1980s, the wave of protests in former Soviet states during the Color revolutions in the 2000s, and the eruption of nonviolent movements across the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring in the early 2010s each suggest that the observation of collective action abroad encourages a desire to emulate among potential challengers to domestic autocrats. However, the need to emulate varies. Potential challengers with a recent history of protest at home are less dependent (than are those without similar experience) upon foreign exemplars to mobilize the participants and generate the resources required to make emulation practicable. By contrast, where the domestic experience of protest is absent, opposition movements are more reliant upon emulation of foreign exemplars. We test the implications of this logic using a series of multivariate logistic regression analyses. Our tests employ data on nonviolent civil resistance mobilizations that occurred across the global population of autocratic states between 1946 and 2006. These tests, along with post-estimation analysis, provide evidence consistent with our conditional logic of emulation.
Despite the prevalence of nonviolent uprisings in recent history, no existing scholarship has produced a generalized explanation of when and where such uprisings are most likely to occur. Our primary aim in this article is to evaluate whether different available models—namely, grievance approaches, modernization theory, resource mobilization theory, and political opportunity approaches—are useful in explaining the onset of major nonviolent uprisings. We assemble a reduced list of correlates based on each model and use each model’s out-of-sample area under the curve and logarithmic score to test each theory’s explanatory power. We find that the political opportunity model performs best for both in- and out-of-sample cases, though grievance and resource mobilization approaches also provide some explanatory power. We use a culled model of the predicted probabilities of the strongest-performing variables from all models to forecast major nonviolent uprisings in 2011 and 2012. In this out-of-sample test, all models produce mixed results, suggesting greater emphasis on agency over structure in explaining these episodes.
This article argues that patterns of civil society in post-authoritarian democracies are the result of divergent pathways to democracy. Through a comparison between contemporary Portugal and Spain, it is shown that revolutionary pathways to democracy have a positive impact on the self-organizing capabilities of popular groups. Two mechanisms contribute to this. First, the fact that the masses are the key actor in the revolutionary process results in greater legal recognition and institutional embeddedness between civil society organizations and the state. Second, as a consequence of changes in the social and economic structure, revolutions engender more inclusive democracies. This all leads to greater opportunities and resources for the civic action of the common people during the subsequent democratic regime.
In recent months, the worldwide struggle for democracy has gained increased prominence in international affairs. In late March 2005, mass demonstrations helped topple Kyrgyzstan's authoritarian president. On March 14 th , approximately one million Lebanese took to the streets in a remarkable display of nonviolent civic power to press for democracy and demand an end to Syria's military presence in their country. In November-December 2004, the international community was surprised by the scale and perseverance of nonviolent civic resistance in Ukraine, as millions of citizens successfully pressed for free and fair elections in what became known as the Orange Revolution. But Ukraine's Orange Revolution was only the latest in a series of successful "people power" revolutions that include the Philippines in 1986; Chile and Poland in 1988; Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia in 1989; the Baltic States in 1991; South Africa in 1994; Serbia and Peru in 2000; and Georgia in 2003. The proliferation and success of such civic resistance movements in effecting political transitions is spawning increased international discussion of the mechanisms by which democracy replaces tyranny. World leaders are taking notice. In his January 2005 inaugural address, U.S. President George W. Bush focused on global trends that are contributing to the spread of freedom and democracy. That speech and statements by other leaders, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the European Union's Foreign Affairs Commissioner Javier Solana, have helped place on the front burner the question of how best to promote democratic change and to build the infrastructure of stable democratic life.
We study effects of wartime violence on social cohesion in the context of Nepal's 10-year civil war. We begin with the observation that violence increased levels of collective action like voting and community organization—a finding consistent with other recent studies of postconflict societies. We use lab-in-the-field techniques to tease apart such effects. Our causal-identification strategy exploits communities' exogenous isolation from the unpredictable path of insurgency combined with matching. We find that violence-affected communities exhibit higher levels of prosocial motivation, measured by altruistic giving, public good contributions, investment in trust-based transactions, and willingness to reciprocate trust-based investments. We find evidence to support two social transformation mechanisms: (1) a purging mechanism by which less social persons disproportionately flee communities plagued by war and (2) a collective coping mechanism by which individuals who have few options to flee band together to cope with threats.
this paper, can be ordered along their level of inclusiveness in ways that matter to preventing ethnic conflict. Several intervening variables such as the strength of local or regional governments, the independence of the judiciary, the ethnic affiliation of partiesshould also be important in determining the level of effective political participation in any system. Similarly, the effects of religious polarization (as captured by the two indices used in this paper) may be moderated by controlling for the degree of secularism of different societies the political implications of religious divisions must be different in secular states as compared to theocracies. More research into these questions is clearly necessary. Reynal-Querols paper is a springboard to a promising research agenda that 8 goes beyond the use of blanket proxy variables and distinguishes between various types of war, using more refined measures of potentially significant variables. Our focus now shifts from war onset to war duration as we turn to Patrick Regan s paper. Regan brings international relations into the study of civil war by analyzing the impact of external intervention on civil war duration. He uses an important new data set on civil war interventions (military or economic) and asks whether or not they have the desired effect (of ending the violence). Regan utilizes duration models to estimate econometrically the hazard of continuing war and finds that interventions usually prolong civil war
In this classic work of sociology, Doug McAdam presents a political-process model that explains the rise and decline of the black protest movement in the United States. Moving from theoretical concerns to empirical analysis, he focuses on the crucial role of three institutions that foster protest: black churches, black colleges, and Southern chapters of the NAACP. He concludes that political opportunities, a heightened sense of political efficacy, and the development of these three institutions played a central role in shaping the civil rights movement. In his new introduction, McAdam revisits the civil rights struggle in light of recent scholarship on social movement origins and collective action. "[A] first-rate analytical demonstration that the civil rights movement was the culmination of a long process of building institutions in the black community."--Raymond Wolters, Journal of American History "A fresh, rich, and dynamic model to explain the rise and decline of the black insurgency movement in the United States."--James W. Lamare, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Like many major revolutions in history, the East European Revolution of 1989 caught its leaders, participants, victims, and observers by surprise. This paper offers an explanation whose crucial feature is a distinction between private and public preferences. By suppressing their antipathies to the political status quo, the East Europeans misled everyone, including themselves, as to the possibility of a successful uprising. In effect, they conferred on their privately despised governments an aura of invincibility. Under the circumstances, public opposition was poised to grow explosively if ever enough people lost their fear of exposing their private preferences. The currently popular theories of revolution do not make clear why uprisings easily explained in retrospect may not have been anticipated. The theory developed here fills this void. Among its predictions is that political revolutions will inevitably continue to catch the world by surprise.
Nonviolent Action and Its Misconceptions: Insights for Social Scientists - Volume 36 Issue 4 - Kurt Schock