Why Civil Resistance Works

Author: Erica Chenoweth
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231527489
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 451

Book Description
For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

Civil Resistance

Author: Erica Chenoweth
Publisher: What Everyone Needs to Know(r)
ISBN: 0190244399
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
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.

Civil Resistance and Power Politics

Author: Sir Adam Roberts
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191619175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
This widely-praised book identified peaceful struggle as a key phenomenon in international politics a year before the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt confirmed its central argument. Civil resistance - non-violent action against such challenges as dictatorial rule, racial discrimination and foreign military occupation - is a significant but inadequately understood feature of world politics. Especially through the peaceful revolutions of 1989, and the developments in the Arab world since December 2010, it has helped to shape the world we live in. Civil Resistance and Power Politics covers most of the leading cases, including the actions master-minded by Gandhi, the US civil rights struggle in the 1960s, the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the 'people power' revolt in the Philippines in the 1980s, the campaigns against apartheid in South Africa, the various movements contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989-91, and, in this century, the 'colour revolutions' in Georgia and Ukraine. The chapters, written by leading experts, are richly descriptive and analytically rigorous. This book addresses the complex interrelationship between civil resistance and other dimensions of power. It explores the question of whether civil resistance should be seen as potentially replacing violence completely, or as a phenomenon that operates in conjunction with, and modification of, power politics. It looks at cases where campaigns were repressed, including China in 1989 and Burma in 2007. It notes that in several instances, including Northern Ireland, Kosovo and, Georgia, civil resistance movements were followed by the outbreak of armed conflict. It also includes a chapter with new material from Russian archives showing how the Soviet leadership responded to civil resistance, and a comprehensive bibliographical essay. Illustrated throughout with a remarkable selection of photographs, this uniquely wide-ranging and path-breaking study is written in an accessible style and is intended for the general reader as well as for students of Modern History, Politics, Sociology, and International Relations.

Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle

Author: Gene Sharp
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199829896
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle is a groundbreaking book by the "godfather of nonviolent resistance." In nearly 1,000 entries, the Dictionary defines those ideologies, political systems, strategies, methods, and concepts that form the core of nonviolent action as it has occurred throughout history and across the globe, providing much-needed clarification of language that is often mired in confusion.

Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring

Author: Adam Roberts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191065862
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
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.

Civil Resistance Tactics in the 21st Century

Author: Michael Beer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781943271405
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
Civil Resistance Tactics in the 21st Century belongs on the virtual bookshelf of anyone who is studying or practicing nonviolent action. Scholars: Explore updated categories and tactics that respect and expand on Gene Sharp's landmark work. Teachers & Trainers: Give your participants a brief overview of the whole range of nonviolent tactics used around the world, when and how those tactics work, and how nonviolent tactics differ from, or combine with, other types of civil resistance. Activists: Use this concise guide to expand your toolbox and sharpen your analytical tools for selecting powerful strategies for your campaigns. This book dovetails with two huge online sources (Nonviolence International's Nonviolent Tactics Database and Organizing & Training Archive) so that you can move seamlessly between strategy and implementation.

The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements

Author: Donatella Della Porta
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199678405
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 865

Book Description
The Handbook presents a most updated and comprehensive exploration of social movement research. It not only maps, but also expands the field of social movement studies, taking stock of recent developments in cognate areas of studies, within and beyond sociology and political science. While structured around traditional social movement concepts, each section combines the mapping of the state of the art with attempts to broaden our knowledge of social movements beyond classic theoretical agendas, and to identify the contribution that social movement studies can give to other fields of knowledge.

Nonviolent Revolutions

Author: Sharon Erickson Nepstad
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199778205
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
In the spring of 1989, Chinese workers and students captured global attention as they occupied Tiananmen Square, demanded political change, and were tragically suppressed by the Chinese army. Months later, East German civilians rose up nonviolently, brought down the Berlin Wall, and dismantled their regime. Although both movements used tactics of civil resistance, their outcomes were different. Why? In Nonviolent Revolutions, Sharon Erickson Nepstad examines these and other uprisings in Panama, Chile, Kenya, and the Philippines. Taking a comparative approach that includes both successful and failed cases of nonviolent resistance, Nepstad analyzes the effects of movements' strategies along with the counter-strategies regimes developed to retain power. She shows that a significant influence on revolutionary outcomes is security force defections, and explores the reasons why soldiers defect or remain loyal and the conditions that increase the likelihood of mutiny. She then examines the impact of international sanctions, finding that they can at times harm movements by generating new allies for authoritarian leaders or by shifting the locus of power from local civil resisters to international actors. Nonviolent Revolutions offers essential insights into the challenges that civil resisters face and elucidates why some of these movements failed. With a recent surge of popular uprisings across the Middle East, this book provides a valuable new understanding of the dynamics and potency of civil resistance and nonviolent revolt.

Recovering Nonviolent History

Author: Maciej J. Bartkowski
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781785391538
Category : Civil disobedience
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Ranging from the American Revolution to Kosovo in the 1990s, from Egypt under colonial rule to present-day West Papua and Palestine, the authors of Recovering Nonviolent History consider several key questions: What kinds of civilian-based nonviolent strategy and tactics have been used in liberation struggles? What accounts for their successes and failures? Not least, how did nonviolent resistance influence national identities and socioeconomic and political institutions both prior to and after liberation, and why has this history been so often ignored?

Civil Disobedience

Author: Elizabeth Schmermund
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
ISBN: 1534500650
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
Civil disobedience, the refusal to obey certain laws, is a method of protest famously articulated by philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau believed that protest became a moral obligation when laws collided with conscience. Since then, civil disobedience has been employed as a form of rebellion around the world. But is there a place for civil disobedience in democratic societies? When is civil disobedience justifiable? Is violence ever called for? Furthermore, how effective is civil disobedience?