IT HAS BEEN THREE YEARS SINCE WHY CIVIL RESISTANCE WORKS HIT THE shelves. (1) When Maria J. Stephan and I sent the final galleys into the publisher, we had no idea that the Arab Spring was about to grip the world; that the Occupy movement would reenergize the protest sector in advanced democracies; or that countries as diverse as Turkey, Venezuela, Ukraine, Thailand, and India would be rocked by nonviolent resistance against entrenched authority, lack of economic opportunity, and corruption. While many people have cataloged the global decline in armed conflict, few have noticed that, in the meantime, the use of civil resistance has been on the rise. (2) What Is Civil Resistance? Civil resistance is a method of conflict where unarmed civilians use a variety of coordinated methods--strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, and many other tactics--to prosecute the conflict without directly harming (or threatening to harm) an opponent. Sometimes called nonviolent resistance, unarmed struggle, or nonviolent action, this form of conflict is now a mainstay in the international system. Indeed, without a thorough understanding of civil resistance and its many dynamics and manifestations, one would be hard-pressed to make sense of the world that we live in today. In 1989, the international system was seemingly characterized by the entrenched power of states and the elites that governed them. The end of the Cold War was just beginning, and the outcome of this great unraveling was uncertain. Twenty-five years later the Soviet Union is no more, Eastern European countries having cast off its influence in various civil uprisings. De jure apartheid in South Africa is over. Various postcommunist regimes throughout Europe and Central Asia have fallen during so-called color revolutions. Three Arab dictators have been deposed through primarily peaceful means, and several more have been shaken to the core. All of these developments were driven--in whole or in part--by sustained grassroots civic action. Indeed, much of the third wave of democratization was fundamentally advanced by movements from below that demanded an expansion of political rights and government accountability. Nepal's and Liberia's civil wars ended not through armed groups defeating one another, but rather through nonviolent popular uprisings that rose up against the violence on all sides and forced the combatants to reach negotiated settlements. Civil resistance campaigns have not always ushered in periods of peace and prosperity, however. Certainly, there have been some more sinister developments as well. In Syria, a nonviolent struggle gave way to armed struggle that resulted in the bloodiest civil war of the current century. Russia faced a moderate challenge during the Snow of December 2011--a challenge that Vladimir Putin's government flattened with barely an afterthought. The US-backed monarchy in Bahrain effectively crushed the nonviolent opposition that developed there. And in Ukraine, a people power movement managed to remove Viktor Yanukovich from power in February 2014, but not without provoking Russian annexation of Crimea and further antagonism in parts of eastern Ukraine. Many national histories featured the use of civil resistance before the technique even had a name. Notably, for example, the American Revolution itself began with about a decade of colonists refusing to cooperate with British colonial authorities through a combination of economic boycotts, demonstrations, tax refusals, the building of alternative governance institutions and economic systems, and, finally, the Declaration of Independence-all before armed hostilities commenced in 1776. With his pamphlet on civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau gave a name to the transgressive noninstitutional action he saw as often necessary to restore basic freedoms and liberties. Nonetheless, the rapid diffusion of nonviolent action as a way to prosecute civilian-led conflicts against militarily superior opponents is a fairly recent phenomenon, truly beginning with Mohandas Gandhi. …