This volume covers how regime changes, political movements and nonviolent unrest develop and then shape the political decisions of both civil society and the state. Chapter discussions include the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, youth movements in Post-Communist states, and the efforts of nonviolent INGOs.

This book investigates the decision-making process, rationale and determining factors which underlie the strategic shifts of armed movements from violent to nonviolent resistance. The revival of global interest in the phenomenon of nonviolent struggle since the 2011 Arab Spring offers a welcome opportunity to revisit the potential of unarmed resistance as an alternative pathway out of armed conflicts, in cases where neither military (or counter-insurgency) nor negotiated solutions have succeeded. This volume brings together academics from various disciplinary traditions and offers a wide range of case studies – including South Africa, Palestine and Egypt – through which to view the changes from violence to nonviolence within self-determination, revolutionary or pro-democracy struggles. While current historiography focuses on armed conflicts and their termination through military means or negotiated settlements, this book is a first attempt to investigate the nature and the drivers of transitions from armed strategies to unarmed methods of contentious collective action on the part of non-state conflict actors. The text concentrates in particular on the internal and relational factors which underpin the decision-making process, from a change of leadership and a pragmatic re-evaluation of the goals and means of insurgency in the light of evolving inter-party power dynamics, to the search for new local or international allies and the cross-border emulation or diffusion of new repertoires of action. This book will be of interest to students of security studies, peace and conflict studies, political sociology and IR in general.

This book examines both how and why nonviolent civil resistance campaigns fail, and the diverse category of campaigns that fall short. Civil resistance campaigns are known for their success, for their ability to overthrow central governments or gain territorial independence. There have been a growing number of civil resistance campaigns in recent decades; however, their rate of success has decreased. More unarmed campaigns are now ending without achieving their ultimate political goals. This study moves beyond the success or failure dichotomy to unpack how nonviolent campaigns end, while also paying attention to the processes that encourage conflict demobilization or transformation. Drawing from the fields of political science, sociology, and nonviolence studies, the book develops a continuum of campaign outcomes that includes full and partial success as forms of positive demobilization as well as disbanding and defeat as forms of negative demobilization. It provides an overarching framework that links sources of internal campaign strength to termination types, and then considers each outcome in depth to explore the reasons why and how campaigns demobilize. The work is global in scope, including descriptive statistics, quantitative analyses, and case illustrations spanning a variety of regions and time periods, from East Germany in 1953 to Suriname in 1984 and Togo in 2013. This book will be of much interest to students of civil resistance movements and nonviolence, conflict studies, intrastate conflicts, and International Relations.

In the past quarter century the world has witnessed dramatic social and political transformations, due in part to an upsurge in civil resistance. There have been significant uprisings around the globe, including the toppling of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the Color Revolutions, the Arab Spring, protests against war and economic inequality, countless struggles against corruption, and demands for more equitable distribution of land. These actions have attracted substantial scholarly attention, reflected in the growth of literature on social movements and revolution as well as literature on nonviolent resistance. Until now, however, the two bodies of literature have largely developed in parallel—with relatively little acknowledgment of the existence of the other. In this useful collection, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars takes stock of the current state of the theoretical and empirical literature on civil resistance. Contributors analyze key processes of nonviolent struggle and identify both frictions and points of synthesis between the narrower literature on civil resistance and the broader literature on social movements and revolution. By doing so, Civil Resistance: Comparative Perspectives on Nonviolent Struggle pushes the boundaries of the study of civil resistance and generates social scientific knowledge that will be helpful for all scholars and activists concerned with democracy, human rights, and social justice.

Exploring both historical cases of civil resistance and more contemporary examples such as the Arab Awakenings and various ongoing movements in the United States, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know® provides a comprehensive and engaging review of the current field of knowledge.

Though it defies consensus, between 1900 & 2006 campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as violent struggles. This study combines statistical analysis with case studies to debunk the myth that violence occurs because of structural & environmental factors & is necessary to achieve certain political goals.

From Gandhi's salt march to the US civil rights movement and Occupy Wall Street, nonviolent campaigns to promote democracy, human rights and social justice have long played an important transformative role in local, national and global politics. Some have succeeded, some have failed; but nonviolent action remains a very effective means of achieving significant social and political change. In this authoritative book Kurt Schock expertly guides readers through the changing terrain of nonviolent struggle, exploring the historical roots and development of modern civil resistance and its proliferation in recent decades. Discussing movements against economic and social injustice as well as political oppression, he explains how resistance happens and unpacks the complex interactions between state and non-state actors that affect the trajectories and outcomes of nonviolent campaigns. Drawing on a wealth of empirical data and comparative research, Civil Resistance Today will be an essential "one stop shop" for anyone keen to learn more about the methods, objectives and outcomes of civil resistance in the contemporary world.

Civil resistance, especially in the form of massive peaceful demonstrations, was at the heart of the Arab Spring-the chain of events in the Middle East and North Africa that erupted in December 2010. It won some notable victories: popular movements helped to bring about the fall of authoritarian governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Yet these apparent triumphs of non-violent action were followed by disasters—wars in Syria, anarchy in Libya and Yemen, reversion to authoritarian rule in Egypt, and counter-revolution backed by external intervention in Bahrain. Looming over these events was the enduring divide between the Sunni and Shi'a branches of Islam. Why did so much go wrong? Was the problem the methods, leadership and aims of the popular movements, or the conditions of their societies? In this book, experts on these countries, and on the techniques of civil resistance, set the events in their historical, social and political contexts. They describe how governments and outside powers—including the US and EU—responded, how Arab monarchies in Jordan and Morocco undertook to introduce reforms to avert revolution, and why the Arab Spring failed to spark a Palestinian one. They indicate how and why Tunisia remained, precariously, the country that experienced the most political change for the lowest cost in bloodshed. This book provides a vivid illustrated account and rigorous scholarly analysis of the course and fate, the strengths and the weaknesses, of the Arab Spring. The authors draw clear and challenging conclusions from these tumultuous events. Above all, they show how civil resistance aiming at regime change is not enough: building the institutions and the trust necessary for reforms to be implemented and democracy to develop is a more difficult but equally crucial task.

This book examines transnational civil society-based democracy-promoting resistance activities in Asia in a global era, focusing on the cases of Myanmar and Palestine. The work contributes to our understanding of the nexus between globalization, power and democracy by examining: (i) the ways in which globalization/global governance are influencing various resistance practices of the civil societies in Myanmar and Palestine, and what this means for local democracy promotion; and (ii) the ways in which these two civil societies influence and have a democracy-promoting impact on their respective communities. It is guided by the overarching question of how civil society-based resistance contributes to local democracy in Myanmar and Palestine. The book is structured as follows: both civil resistance cases begin with an overview of each country’s non-violent resistance history, and the findings are then presented for the two cases, i.e., the pro-democracy movements in the Saffron uprising in Myanmar and the Bil’in village struggle against the Israeli Security Barrier plans to build through their farmlands. Then follows a presentation of the life-story interview made with two members from the respective campaigns. A concluding chapter proposes some new theoretical insights for how civil resistance can impact on democracy. The book empirically and theoretically contributes to our understanding of how civil society-based resistance and democracy interrelate in a global era. This book will be of much interest to students of civil resistance, democracy, Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies and international relations in general.

This volume studies nonviolent movements as instruments of change in contemporary global politics. It presents case studies of civilian-led nonviolent efforts in India, Poland, and Turkey and analyzes how they have enabled people’s voices, influenced popular resistance cultures, and pushed for change across the world. The book discusses complex sociopolitical scenarios that challenge democracy, patriotism, and the question of identity across the world. It examines how popular resistance movements have been received by the media, subverted governments across the world, and how they have contributed to the development of new “protest paradigms.” The volume brings together leading experts who explore the significant wave of nonviolent mass movements in contemporary global affairs to understand how these discourses can be leveraged to study peace and conflict today. The authors involve extensive pedagogical discussions, new tools, and techniques to map emerging political discourses to identify and explain how contemporary peace-conflict research can study nonviolent resistance and facilitate the development of new narratives in the future. An invaluable guide to understanding social movements, this book will be a must-read for scholars and researchers of politics, governance and public policy, gender, and human rights.