Erica Chenoweth. Understanding Nonviolent Resistance

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http://jpr.sagepub.com/ Journal of Peace Research

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DOI: 10.1177/0022343313480381

2013 50: 271Journ al of Peace Research Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham

Understanding nonviolent resistance: An introduction

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Introductions

Understanding nonviolent resistance: Anintroduction

Erica Chenoweth

University of Denver & Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)

Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham

University of Maryland & Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)

Abstract 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 scho-lars have largely ignored nonviolent resistance. This issue features new theoretical and empirical explorations of thecauses and consequences of nonviolent resistance, stressing the role that unarmed, organized civilians can play in shap-ing 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 influ-ence which opposition groups use nonviolent resistance, and suggest that the causes of civil war and nonviolent resis-tance often differ. Other pieces highlight the role of public attitudes regarding whether nonviolent resistance andviolence are employed, how experience with activism and repression by the state can shape activists’ perceptions of jus-tice, 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 tacticscan improve security in civil war, and how nonviolent campaigns can influence the stability of autocratic states. Thesecontributions suggest that rigorous empirical study of civilian-based contentious politics (rather than only violent con-tention by armed non-state actors) must be incorporated into the conflict literature. Improved theory and data on thesubject will help researchers and policymakers to shape strategies to support these movements when appropriate, and tomanage changes in the international system that result from the success of nonviolent uprisings.

Keywords

armed conflict, civil conflict, civil resistance, civilians, contentious politics, insurgency, nonviolent resistance,nonviolent struggle, repression

Introduction

This special issue of the Journal of Peace Research focuseson the study of nonviolent resistance – also called ‘civilresistance’ or ‘nonviolent struggle’ (Sharp, 2005) – as a strategy for political change. We define nonviolent resis-tance as the application of unarmed civilian power using nonviolent methods such as protests, strikes, boycotts,and demonstrations, without using or threatening phys-ical harm against the opponent. Civilians challenging thestate through nonviolent struggle employ irregular

political tactics, working outside the defined andaccepted channels for political participation defined by the state. As will become clear from the contributionsof this special issue, ordinary people use nonviolent resis-tance to pursue a wide variety of goals, from challenging entrenched autocrats to seeking territorial self-

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Schauer, 2010). The technological development of openmedia, which brings violence into people’s homes, may also explain growing attention to contemporary violentepisodes. The televised nature of the Rwandan genocide,for example, comes to mind as an instance of how visiblepolitical violence can be to the average person.

This focus on violence, however, obscures the factthat violence is neither the only nor necessarily the mostpotent form of conflict (Ackerman & DuVall, 2000). Infact, all over the world, unarmed civilians routinely pro-secute conflicts without resorting to arms – and they doso extremely forcefully and to great effect at times. A forthcoming book documents the need to recover non-violent resistance as a form of struggle used globally dur-ing many different historical periods (Bartkowski, 2013),suggesting the need to demystify violence and pay moreattention to its real alternatives.

Problems in researching nonviolent resistance

In this issue, Kurt Schock (2013) lays out the origins of the field of civil resistance studies, concentrating on how its applied character has distinguished it from much aca-demic scholarship on social movements and politicalchange (for additional overviews, see Carter, 2010;Roberts, 2010). Researchers may have eschewed the sys-tematic study of nonviolent resistance in part because of practical difficulties in defining, observing, and measur-

ing the concept in accordance with disciplinary stan-dards.2 Therefore, it is perhaps fitting to begin thisissue with a precise definition and description of whatcivil resistance is, and what it is not.

For our purposes, ‘civil resistance’, ‘nonviolent resis-tance’, ‘nonviolent struggle’, and ‘strategic nonviolence’all refer to the same concept defined above. In mostcases, people who wage nonviolent struggle are doing so instrumentally, rather than because of a moral com-mitment to avoid arms. This contrasts with the term‘nonviolence’, which refers to a conceptually differentphenomenon – the eschewing of violent or armed action

because of a moral, philosophical, or principled commit-ment. Nonviolence practitioners are often engaged ininstrumental action as well, but remaining committedto nonviolent means is as important to them for moral

reasons as ‘winning’ the conflict is. Thus, nonviolenceoverlaps with civil resistance in that practitioners of non-violence often engage in civil resistance, but engaging incivil resistance does not require one to accept nonvio-lence in principle. Whereas Gandhi was committed tononviolence as an ethical principle as well as a strategic

asset, for instance, Serbian activists seeking the ouster of Slobodan Milošević saw civil resistance as an effectivemethod of struggle without asserting its morality.

Civil resistance is, by its own definition, transgressiveand non-institutional, whereas a variety of actor strategiesmay be nonviolent, legal, and institutionally sanctioned or recognized, such as participating in elections or engaging in government-sanctioned protest. Therefore, we also dis-tinguish nonviolent struggle from different forms of non-violent institutional action. Cunningham’s article in thisissue demonstrates the benefits of distinguishing between

violent action, nonviolent action, and nonviolent politicalparticipation (often conceived of as ‘conventional poli-tics’), illuminating that the three forms of strategic choiceoften have distinct causes and processes (Cunningham,2013).

A final key characteristic of civil resistance is its organi-zation, coordination, and purposive quality, in which civi-lians bring to bear certain methods toward a particular political, social, or economic goal. Civil resistance oftenhas a ‘civic’ quality to it, meaning that the grievancesexpressed are often widely shared among the general pop-ulation (Roberts, 2010). This may be distinguished frombehavior that is simply not violent – such as certain typesof speech, protest actions, or other contentious perfor-mances that do not do physical harm but are also short-lived, spontaneous, incidental, or not aimed at mobilizing further support. For instance, one may observe a group of people protesting a particular government policy, but theprotest does not endure more than a day and the peopledo not expect to effect long-term policy change. In other words, occasional demonstrations in the streets do notnecessarily mean that a civil resistance campaign is under- way. Most researchers would consider such events as dis-

tinct from civil resistance, which is generally morepurposive, coordinated, and sustained in nature.

In addition to focusing on civil resistance as a distinctform of contention, scholars must then choose a unit of analysis by which to analyze it. Here, the field of civilresistance has been limited by a reliance on aggregate,campaign-level data. This has a number of distinct ben-efits (see Chenoweth & Lewis, 2013, for a discussion of these) but sacrifices important levels of nuance about thedynamics of contention. In this issue, we see multiplelevels of analysis employed to identify causal processes

2 There is also debate about measurement standards for the study of violence, but there are at least a few points of convergence regarding the number of fatalities that mark a ‘war’ (see Uppsala Conflict Data Project and the Correlates of War). Even within violent conflict, weare seeing a more nuanced approach, such as Nordås & Cohen’s(2012) project on sexual violence.

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related to nonviolent struggle. The articles included var-iously study individuals (Davenport & Trivedi, 2013),events (Shellman, Levey & Young, 2013), organizations(Asal et al., 2013), country-years (Chenoweth & Lewis,2013; Cunningham, 2013; Rivera Celestino & Gle-ditsch, 2013), and combinations of micro-level quantita-

tive and qualitative data (Kaplan, 2013). The issue alsoincludes articles whose analysis of comparative cases gen-erates new hypotheses for further inquiry (Nepstad,2013; Dudouet, 2013). Much like conflict scholarshipin general, we are hopeful that such methodologicaldiversity will enhance the richness of the empirical study of nonviolent conflict.

Finally, scholarship on nonviolent resistance is daunt-ing because of concerns about underreporting. Althoughall scholarship on conflict suffers from underreporting concerns, the problems with studying nonviolent action

may be particularly acute because of the lack of attentionto such issues in open source media reports – the mostcommon source of information for data collection –compared with media attention to violence. The chal-lenges associated with this problem can be met, in part,by gathering data from primary sources, such as eyewit-ness reports, on-the-ground interviews, and surveys. Thisspecial issue uses state-of-the-art data, including data col-lected locally through primary sources (Davenport &Trivedi, 2013; Kaplan, 2013), and explores systemati-cally the causes, dynamics, and outcomes of nonviolentresistance. It also features a dataset that will allow researchers to better understand the conditions under which nonviolent mass mobilization erupts and succeeds(Chenoweth & Lewis, 2013).

An additional reason that nonviolent resistance hasreceived little attention by conflict scholars may berelated to connotations. For instance, some observersmay equate the concept of nonviolent resistance withactivism (Schock, 2003, 2005). Because of norms of neutrality in the field, scholars typically eschew topicsthat connote ‘activism’ (Martin, 1998). Others may seethe study of violence as more inherently interesting or

more of a priority given the state of the world.Recent research shows, however, that nonviolent

resistance is neither passive nor weak. Those who rigor-ously study nonviolent resistance need not embracepacifism, nor must they become activists – although thetendency to marginalize pacifists in the scholarly andpolicy debate is in itself an interesting and odd trend.In fact, if more conflict scholars take civil resistance seri-ously and engage in rigorous empirical research on itscauses, dynamics, and outcomes, we may see less skepti-cism about the power of nonviolent resistance as a viable

alternative to violence and as a force for change in the world. We hope that this special issue will demonstratethe value of bridging the divide between scholars of con-flict and scholars of civil resistance.

Issue contributionsThe articles in this issue each seek to push forward our understanding of the use of nonviolent strategies andtheir relationship to the use of violence. After a rich over-view of civil resistance research (Schock, 2013), the issueproceeds in four substantive parts: explaining the typesand use of nonviolent action in different strategic con-texts (Part I), the dynamics of contention (Part II), out-comes (Part III), and a special data feature (Part IV). Within these larger themes, the articles focus on a multi-tude of issues, including the different methods of non-

violent contention available to dissidents (Shellman,Levey & Young, 2013), the determinants of the choiceto use nonviolent or violent resistance (Asal et al.,2013; Chenoweth & Lewis, 2013; Cunningham,2013; Dudouet, 2013), the determinants and conse-quences of participation in nonviolent resistance(Davenport & Trivedi, 2013), explaining defection of security forces to nonviolent resistance (Nepstad,2013), the effects of nonviolent resistance on authoritar-ian stability (Rivera Celestino & Gleditsch, 2013), andthe reasons why armed insurgencies abandon violencein favor of nonviolent resistance (Dudouet, 2013). Thearticles feature a diverse array of quantitative and qualita-tive articles, with a number of articles featuring large-Nstatistical analysis and others featuring comparative casesin the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The contributors also represent a diverse set of scholars from a variety of related fields, resulting in dis-tinct perspectives on the topic.

In Part I, Cunningham (2013) explores why self-determination groups choose irregular political strate-gies, and what determines whether these tend towardsviolence or nonviolent campaigns. She finds a variety

of contextual factors to be important predictors. Asalet al. (2013) highlight the importance of ideational fac-tors such as organizations’ orientation toward womenin determining when violent or nonviolent tactics areused.

In Part II, Shellman, Levey & Young (2013) demon-strate that the dynamic processes of conflict between stateand non-state actors and mass attitudes toward dissidentstrategies strongly influence when dissident groups chooseviolence. Nepstad (2013) suggests that security forcedefections, a potentially key factor for the success of any

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Erica Chenoweth. Understanding Nonviolent Resistance