People-Powered and Non-Violent Social Movements: Forcing Gradualist Democratic Reforms in Authoritarian Societies

Stephen Zunes

doi:10.3389/fpos.2021.721055

Abstract

Not all successful unarmed civil insurrections against dictatorships take place in a dramatic mass uprising with hundreds of thousands occupying central squares in the capital city. There have also been cases of nonviolent struggles against autocratic regimes that failed to topple the dictatorship in a revolutionary wave, but did succeed in forcing a series of legal, constitutional and institutional reforms over a period of several years that eventually evolved into a liberal democratic order. These more gradualist transitions have taken place across different regions and against different kinds of authoritarian systems. This webinar will tell the story of pro-democracy movements in three of these countries—Brazil, South Korea and Kenya—and how they were able to force, over time, autocratic governments to agree to substantive democratic reforms. By focusing on the role of civil society, this presentation challenges dominant, top-down, institution- and elite-based approaches to democratization.

Highlights

Recent decades have witnessed the power of unarmed civil resistance struggles in bringing down autocratic regimes and ushering in democratic governments along with a concomitant rise in the academic literature examining the phenomenon
Less understood have been the largely nonviolent struggles against autocratic regimes that failed to topple the dictatorship in a revolutionary wave, but did succeed in forcing a series of legal, constitutional, and institutional reforms over a period of several years which eventually evolved into a liberal democratic order
This study looks at pro-democracy movements engaged in strategic nonviolent action and their impact on the democratic transitions in Brazil, South Korea, and Kenya

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Recent decades have witnessed the power of unarmed civil resistance struggles in bringing down autocratic regimes and ushering in democratic governments along with a concomitant rise in the academic literature examining the phenomenon. Kurt Schock (2005) examines successful pro-democracy struggles in South Africa, the Philippines, Nepal, and Thailand as well as the failed pro-democracy movements in China and Burma, and how the use of strategic nonviolent action resulted in regime change in some cases, but not in others He takes a relational approach to nonviolent action, emphasizing the importance of resilience [“the capacity of contentious actors to continue to mobilize collective action despite the actions of opponents aimed at constraining or inhibiting their activities,”. The vast majority of the cases studies in the literature have been movements against authoritarian regimes or occupying powers that were either suppressed, won through a dramatic mass uprising, or—even in cases where the nonviolent struggle was protracted—there was a clear discernable date where a country went from authoritarianism to democracy None of these examine the question in this article regarding transitions from authoritarian rule to democratic governance in which the various significant legal, constitutional, and institutional reforms took place over several years

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DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT