Performative power in nonviolent tactical adaptation to violence

Abstract

The sociology of the US civil rights movement has emphasized the structural conditions and organizational infrastructures that help account for the movement’s emergence, trajectory, and impact. This chapter focuses on tactical adaptation to counter-violence and shows how nonviolent insurgents responded when assaulted with violence by white supremacist counterforces. Nonviolent collective action is contentious action consisting of strategy and tactics designed for producing social change, “a method for fighting oppression and injustice”. It is a civilian-based form of struggle that activates social, economic, and political power sources without resorting to violence or the threat of violence. Movement strategies are broad, usually long-term methodological plans of action for attaining social change goals. he long-term strategic development of nonviolent praxis in the civil rights movement was crucial to the major take-off in 1960, and also necessary for full understanding of the cases of tactical adaptation.