Abstract
Latin America has been a laboratory for innovative strategic nonviolent action to confront oppression, corruption, human rights violations, and authoritarianism. One of the most salient explanations for why some movements achieve greater scale and effectiveness in meeting their objectives is the skills of movement organizers in unifying the population, planning strategic moves, and maintaining nonviolent discipline. The training and education to improve these skills often requires resources, transnational networks, and information sharing from external actors to complement the contextual knowledge, local legitimacy, and embedded institutional networks of local insiders. This essay proposes a model for international support of nonviolent action training and education that avoids the pitfalls of imposed liberal peacebuilding and colonizing hierarchies that could undermine movement legitimacy and expose activists to greater scrutiny and repression. In order to illustrate how the model works in practice, the essay examines the case of the Regional Institute for the Study and Practice of Strategic Nonviolent Action in the Americas.
Highlights
Nonviolent civil resistance is a powerful approach that has been used to mobilize populations against injustice, repression, and occupation
Some scholars, pointing out the overlap and complementarity between peacebuilding and nonviolent action approaches, have argued that international donors should increase their support of programs and platforms that can combine both, accompanying grassroots actors in their efforts for justice and adding pressure to turn the leverage they gain into negotiations for peace (Dudouet 2011, 2017; Stephan 2016; Stephan, Lakhani and Naviwala 2015)
The reasons were partly a function of the success of the summer institute—demand was far outstripping International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC)’s capacity to meet it, showing a need to scale up—and partly a recognition of the reality that geographic proximity makes subsequent coalition building and mutual support in movement organizing more likely (Gleditsch and Rivera 2017). Those who attend a training together are more likely to collaborate on specific action plans if they are from the same country, or at least the same regional context
Summary
Nonviolent civil resistance is a powerful approach that has been used to mobilize populations against injustice, repression, and occupation. Several studies have employed systematic data collection on a large number of transitions and nonviolent, as well as violent, campaigns and offered empirical support for this argument; they found that conditions do not offer a statistically significant explanation for success (Marchant et al 2008) and that nonviolent more than violent movements succeed across a wide range of political and economic contexts (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011) If this is the case, it follows that capacity building to increase the skill level of organizers and activists in key sectors of a society would be critical in scaling up nonviolent resistance efforts to a level that can mobilize large sectors of the population and achieve enough leverage to influence political outcomes.
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