Nonviolent Action Research Articles

Social Ties and the Strategy of Civil Resistance

AbstractThis article examines the impact of social ties on a challenger's ability to initiate a civil resistance campaign. Recent waves of nonviolent uprisings, from the color revolutions of Eastern Europe to the Arab Spring, have sparked renewed scholarly interest in civil resistance as a strategy in conflict. However, most research has focused on the effectiveness and outcomes of civil resistance, with less attention paid to when, why, and how challengers to regime power come to embrace a strategy of nonviolent action in the first place. Drawing upon a longitudinal analysis of challenger organizations and coalitions in Nepal, this article illustrates how social ties inform challengers’ assessments of the viability of civil resistance and consequently shape their strategic behavior. The findings complicate state-centric approaches to contentious politics by showing how diverse actors within the same state face different sets of political opportunities and constraints. They also highlight the indeterminate effects of ideology, as variation in challengers’ social ties drive Gandhians to take up arms and Maoists to lay them down.

From Civil Resistance to Civil War: Nonstrategic Mechanisms of Militarization in the Syrian Uprising

A recurrent logic in most research on nonviolent relative to violent resistance is that groups choose violent or nonviolent means depending on the likelihood of success of each approach. On the contrary, this article analyzes the militarization of the Syrian revolution and argues that it was not a strategic decision by the Syrian opposition, but rather emotional, material, and practice mechanisms that initially paved the way for counter‐violence. Revolutionaries were motivated to take up arms by emotional mechanisms of revenge and fear. Moreover, material mechanisms, in particular the relatively high availability of weapons in Syria, can explain the more militant counter‐response to the ongoing repression. Finally, violent or nonviolent actions were shaped by practice mechanisms, where revolutionaries already experienced in violence (from the beginning of the uprising) argued in favor of and sometimes conducted violent resistance, whereas other groups engaged in nonviolent resistance.

Empowering Nigerian Youth for Peace-building and Nonviolent Action

Empowering Nigerian Youth for Peace-building and Nonviolent Action

Children Leading Nonviolent Action for Peaceful Coexistence

Children Leading Nonviolent Action for Peaceful Coexistence

Exploring Gandhi’s Fasting as a Symbol of Nonviolent Action

Exploring Gandhi’s Fasting as a Symbol of Nonviolent Action

Reflections on the development and use of non-violent activism in the South African Council of Churches : a social movement theory approach

Reflections on the development and use of non-violent activism in the South African Council of Churches : a social movement theory approach

Is politics Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s vocation?

Western human rights activists saw Myanmar’s prominent leader Aung San Suu Kyi as an embodiment of themselves, for which she was awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her non-violent activism. But in the context of the 2017 Rohingya crisis, her international image seemingly changed, from that of Western saint to a demon, because she did not respond to the crisis in the way the Western community expected. Her moral authority was sharply questioned in the international media for her silence on the flight of more than 700,000 refugees from Myanmar to Bangladesh. This paper describes how a conundrum for a crusader of non-violence activism like Aung San Suu Kyi occurred and how a Nobel laureate faced ethical paradoxes between moral conviction and responsibility. It is also an effective way to develop the classical sociologist Max Weber’s definition of a politician from his essay, “Politics as Vocation” to examine whether politics is Aung San Suu Kyi’s vocation.

Violence detection in videos for an intelligent surveillance system using MoBSIFT and movement filtering algorithm

Action recognition is an active research area in computer vision as it has enormous applications in today’s world, out of which, recognizing violent action is of great importance since it is closely related to our safety and security. An intelligent surveillance system is the idea of automatically recognizing suspicious activities in surveillance videos and thereby supporting security personals to take up right action on the right time. Under this area, most of the researchers were focused on people detection and tracking, loitering, etc., whereas detecting violent actions or fights is comparatively a less studied area. Previous works considered the local spatiotemporal feature extractors; however, it accompanies the overhead of complex optical flow estimation. Even though the temporal derivative is a fast alternative to optical flow, it alone gives very low accuracy and scales-dependent result. Hence, here we propose a cascaded method of violence detection based on motion boundary SIFT (MoBSIFT) and movement filtering. In this method, the surveillance videos are checked through a movement filtering algorithm based on temporal derivative and avoid most of the nonviolent actions from going through feature extraction. Only the filtered frames may allow going through feature extraction. In addition to scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and histogram of optical flow feature, motion boundary histogram is also extracted and combined to form MoBSIFT descriptor. The experimental results show that the proposed MoBSIFT outperforms the existing methods in accuracy by its high tolerance to camera movements. Time complexity has also proved to be reduced by the use of movement filtering along with MoBSIFT.

The ethics of conflict resolution in south-east Sierra Leone

Most conflict resolution literature focuses on strategic and tactical considerations, generally leaving aside psychological, and especially ethical, ones. Rapoport's Fights, Games and Debates is the notable exception and will be used to introduce satyagraha as a method of conflict resolution. The literature on law and society and the Gandhian literature are generally interlinked in political theory concerning civil disobedience but not in other areas such as interpersonal conflicts or the role of the legal system as a general mechanism of conflict resolution. This study aims at exploring these areas specifically and to look at the phenomenon of conflict and conflict resolution in the light of Gandhi's moral and ethical thought. The Gandhian technique of conflict resolution is known by its Gujarati name of satyagraha which has variously been interpreted as passive resistance, resistance, direct action, and even as militant nonviolence. Satyagraha, Gandhi explained, is literally holding on to Truth and it means, therefore, Truth-force. Truth is soul or spirit. is therefore known as soul- force. The word coined out of felt necessity. The technique of nonviolent struggle that Gandhi had evolved in South Africa for the conduct of the Indian indentured labourers' disputes with the government originally described by the English phrase passive resistance. Gandhi, however, found that the term was too narrowly constructed, that it supposed to be a weapon of the weak, that it could be characterised by hatred, and that it could finally manifest itself as violence.[1] He decided that a new word had to be coined for the struggle: But I could not for the life of me find out a new name, and therefore offered a nominal prize through Indian Opinion to the reader who made the best suggestion on the subject. As a result, Maganlal Gandhi coined the word Sadagraha (sat: truth; Agraha: firmness) and won the prize. But in order to make it clearer I changed the word to Satyagraha.[2] Satyagraha means, in effect, the discovery of truth and working steadily towards it, thus converting the opponent into a friend. In other words, satyagraha is not used against anybody but is done with somebody. It is based on the idea that the moral appeal to the heart or conscience is . . . more effective than an appeal based on threat or bodily pain or violence.[3] Over the years an enormous body of literature concerning satyagraha has developed. Generally the writings concern themselves with an examination of the various campaigns led either by Gandhi or his disciples, and, in the main, these writings clearly identify the main elements of the technique as truth (satya), nonviolence (ahimsa) and the relationship of ends to means. Most have realized that the use of the techniques of satyagraha as a policy, that is, a method to be brought into play in a given situation where it is considered effective in securing a victory, is contrary to its primary teaching. must be a creed, a way of life, to be truly effective. This work examines the ethics of conflict resolution in south-east Sierra Leone using the Gandhian ethics resolution framework. Chapter One deals with the theoretical framework of conflict, it defines conflict and examines its causes and the way it is generally handled. also illustrates the behavior that leads conflict onto either productive or destructive paths as defined. Chapter Two discusses the analytical framework for resolution generally and satyagraha specifically. further examines satyagraha as a productive method of conflict resolution. Satyagraha is distinguished from other methods of nonviolent action and its main precepts are examined from the standpoint of the individual. Chapter Three gives a background of the research work, giving a geo-linguistics breakdown of the people and the community. This work further examines the practical application of satyagraha in the light of the first two chapters. Chapter Four briefly elucidates Gandhi's philosophy in action in the realm of interpersonal conflict in south-east Sierra Leone, while Chapter Five examines in some depth the possible practical application of satyagraha within our main institutionalised method of conflict resolution, namely the adversary legal system. also examines industrial conflicts from the perspective of satyagraha.

The (Im)possible Embrace: A Search for Non-violent Possibilities in the Aftermath of Violent Uprootedness

In spite of upholding it as an aspiration, a commitment to non-violence in motivation, thought and action is rare. Its realization is contingent on a confluence of complex politico-historical contingencies and psychic possibilities. The actualization of such a historical moment is also contingent on a collective awakening in the consciousness and conscience of a group to reclaim its losses through non-retributive measures. In this article, we will explore a few processes involved in the sustenance of non-violence. By exemplifying from literary excerpts, and also by dwelling on the ongoing Tibetan movement and that of the Zapatista in Mexico, our attempt is to finally reach a preliminary statement on the psychodynamics of non-violent action. In the last section of the article, we offer reflections on the inner world of the practitioner. This writing is at best to be viewed as a collage which brings together diverse impressions from short stories, analytical accounts and illustrative political movements. The reader is invited to journey through various ideas and images without trying to bring them together into a grand synthesis. The different sections of the writing retain a deliberate disjunctive quality as do the pages of a scrap book in which what precedes and what follows is associatively linked but not necessarily in the form of a flowing continuity.

Introducing the Nonviolent Action in Violent Contexts (NVAVC) dataset

Scholarship on civil war is overwhelmingly preoccupied with armed activity. Data collection efforts on actors in civil wars tend to reflect this emphasis, with most studies focusing on the identities, attributes, and violent behavior of armed actors. Yet various actors also use nonviolent methods to shape the intensity and variation of violence as well as the duration of peace in the aftermath. Existing datasets on mobilization by non-state actors – such as the Armed Conflict Events and Location (ACLED), Integrated Conflict Early Warning System (ICEWS), and Social Conflict Analysis Database (SCAD) – tend to include data on manifest contentious acts, such as protests, strikes, and demonstrations, and exclude activities like organizing, planning, training, negotiations, communications, and capacity-building that may be critical to the actors’ ultimate success. To provide a more comprehensive and reliable view of the landscape of possible nonviolent behaviors involved in civil wars, we present the Nonviolent Action in Violent Contexts (NVAVC) dataset, which identifies 3,662 nonviolent actions during civil wars in Africa between 1990 and 2012, across 124 conflict-years in 17 countries. In this article, we describe the data collection process, discuss the information contained therein, and offer descriptive statistics and discuss spatial patterns. The framework we develop provides a powerful tool for future researchers to use to categorize various types of nonviolent action, and the data we collect provide important evidence that such efforts are worthwhile.

‘Arming Black Consciousness’: The Formation of the Bokwe Group/Azanian Peoples’ Liberation Front, April 1972–September 1976

The Azanian Peoples’ Liberation Front (APLF) was a little-known Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) organisation that formed in the mid 1970s as a complement to the rising tide of non-violent internal activism against apartheid oppression in South Africa. Unlike other Black Consciousness (BC) organisations at the time, the APLF embraced armed struggle and acquired training in exile. This turn to armed struggle was motivated by the inability of the banned nationalist movements, the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), to achieve their stated objectives of bringing down apartheid through force of arms. While the APLF disbanded in July/August 1976 without having fully established itself as an armed wing of the BCM, and having conducting no armed operations as far as we know, this article argues that it succeeded as a political project in two ways. Firstly, the attempt to form an armed wing in exile expanded the ways the growing BCM could mobilise against the repression of the apartheid state. With the older liberation movements beleaguered, the APLF temporarily provided an alternative for activists seeking ways to overthrow apartheid beyond non-violent protest and consciousness-raising projects. Secondly, the process of building global support for the APLF enhanced the radical internationalist politics and presence of BC outside South Africa’s borders. Unearthing this hidden topography of struggle demonstrates the dogged determination of black South Africans to fight for freedom independent of the leadership of the ANC/Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) or PAC/Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA). Indeed, for a brief time, the APLF offered a viable alternative for how the struggle against apartheid would or should be fought and who would or should lead it.

Dialogue and Peacebuilding in Colombia: A Dialogic and a Transformative Relationship

This article analyses different initiatives that have emerged from the top-down and everyday bottom-up peace approach after the peace agreement in Colombia and have led to establishing dialogues among different actors to contribute to the peacebuilding process. Three years ago, Colombia signed a peace agreement with the largest guerrilla group in Latin America. After this signature, the big challenge has been the implementation of the deal in the most conflict-affected territories, characterised by poverty, high rates of violence, unemployment, etc. Despite the pitfalls in building positive peace, many communities have started generating spaces by themselves and have created initiatives of peacebuilding through nonviolent actions, the acceptance of differences, active participation and empowerment and the acknowledgement that dialogue is the only way to achieve cooperation and to rebuild another story rather than conflict. This paper seeks to examine the different characteristics that have shaped dialogue-based practices when they are produced with a top-down and a bottom-up approach of peacebuilding. To do this, it is necessary to identify the parties participating in these encounters, their motivations, conditions that have allowed parties to establish a dialogue, and the results. This paper notes that in a post-conflict society, dialogues coming from the top-down will take longer in accomplishing positive peace, rather than the dialogues that have emerged from the bottom up which may be the engine to social mobilisations and the way to capitalise on social skills in achieving justice, truth, and reconciliation.

Is Hizb ut-Tahrir Indonesia Part of Islamic Revival?

This paper is an attempt to academically define Hizb ut Tahrir Indonesia's characteristics before its revocation. Although the Indonesian regime has officially disbanded this transnational organization in July 2017, its existence remains stimulating to discuss. Hizb ut-Tahrir Indonesia's primary objective is to implement Islamic laws in total, which can only be accomplished within a superstate called al-Khilafah al-Islamiyah (Islamic Caliphate) led by a Khalifah (Caliph). Its followers believe that Islam will revive under the caliphate. In Indonesia, Hizb ut-Tahrir actively criticized the government's policies through its articles, preachings, and street rallies. The ideas were conveyed not only through direct campaigning but also via its internal media. We argue, based on this study, that HTI is part of Islamic revival that wants to change the social-political structures through the re-creation of the caliphate by conducting intensive da'wa with nonviolent activities, as well as war of ideas as the strategy.

Conducting Sensitive Research as an Alien Ethnographer in the United States

As a French PhD student, my work focuses on democratic deficits in the United States and explores the evolution of the American Left since 2001. Adopting methodological tools provided by ethnography, I am investigating how activist groups are using civil disobedience and non-violent direct action under the current legal, judicial, and police constraints specific to the post-9/11 era. My research is contingent on structural shifts occurring on the macro-political level, such as a changes in the federal government. But as the incident related above demonstrates, my own status as a foreign ethnographer is also a factor, since I can neither escape nor disentangle myself from my identity. The aim of this reflexive article is to discuss how, within a broader context of state repression and surveillance, my “double condition of alienage” (alien as a non-citizen and alien as an insider/outsider researcher amongst activist groups), is affecting not only how I am conducting my fieldwork, but is also shaping my object of study.

The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation by Joseph R. Fitzgerald

Reviewed by: The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation by Joseph R. Fitzgerald Francis V. Gourrier Jr. The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation. By Joseph R. Fitzgerald. Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. Pp. [x], 341. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-7649-9.) The past two decades have seen a maturation in the study of black women’s leadership in the civil rights and Black Power movements. In particular, [End Page 959] biographies of black women have led the way in transforming the historiography of the black freedom struggle. Joseph R. Fitzgerald’s remarkable biography of Gloria Richardson is a great contribution to this field, as it casts light on one of the movement’s fiercest and most undercelebrated freedom fighters of the twentieth century. What sets this biography apart is Fitzgerald’s ability to lean on Richardson herself to tell her story. To date, she remains one of the few surviving leaders of the civil rights and Black Power movements, and she continues to demand this country live up to its democratic ideals. This fact lends itself to the title of Fitzgerald’s aptly named work: The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation. The book is at once a biography of Gloria Richardson and a local history of black life on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Fitzgerald emphasizes the importance of geography in Richardson’s story, and this analysis is one of the text’s strengths. Most of the story takes place in Cambridge, Maryland, where Richardson led efforts to end racial discrimination in all its forms through her strategy of “creative chaos” (p. 7). This focus on the mid-Atlantic region allows the author to highlight how the Cambridge civil rights movement reflected the broader movement’s southern and northern elements. Inhabiting a border state, black Marylanders were in a unique position, Fitzgerald argues, to make claims for racial justice. With the right to vote already secured, freedom fighters in the Cambridge movement “could concentrate on leveraging black people’s electoral power to gain the most from the political system” (p. 171). These demands included fair housing, quality health care and education, and access to decent jobs and wages. Yet black residents of the Eastern Shore found themselves battling racial segregation and were haunted by the reality of racial terror through lynching. As a young girl, Richardson was affected by the lynching of a black man in nearby Salisbury and again, two years later, in Princess Anne. After the Salisbury lynching, her parents took her to the site of the lynching to make certain she understood the seriousness of the violent event. Richardson’s family history on the Eastern Shore undoubtedly shaped her social and political context. Here, too, the author’s masterful analysis shines as he unravels the interplay of race, class, and gender. Richardson’s maternal ancestors were free people of color who became part of the black business elite. Her paternal ancestors were enslaved. In slavery and in freedom, both sides of her family embodied a racial pride that was reflected in Richardson’s activism. Fitzgerald frames this tradition as “‘race service’” and makes clear that bringing together their pride and commitment to the uplift of the black community is a significant part of Gloria Richardson’s family history (p. 12). This race service followed Richardson from Cambridge to the national stage through organizations like the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and ACT (not an acronym, but a northern-based organization committed to black liberation). Finally, readers will notice Fitzgerald’s use of “black liberation movement” to describe the twentieth-century black freedom struggle (p. 1). When abbreviated, its initials, BLM, remind readers of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. And this is no mistake; as Fitzgerald reminds his audience, “The unjust and oppressive systems [Richardson] fought more than fifty years ago are still with us today” (p. 10). Evinced by the book’s title, Richardson’s [End Page 960] survival and the continuation of black oppression remind us that the struggle continues and, indeed, is eternal. Francis V. Gourrier Jr...

A “Manual” for Escaping Our Vicious Cycles: The Political Relevance of Enemy‐Love

AbstractIn his 2017 World Day of Peace message, Pope Francis made a subtle yet stunning move when he called the Sermon on the Mount the Church’s “manual” for peacemaking at every level. Continuing the “fresh reappraisal” of war that the Second Vatican Council launched, Francis's choice of a term associated with the “Manualist” tradition of natural‐law casuistry signaled the Catholic magisterium’s growing commitment both to rooting its teaching on peace and war in biblical sources instead, and to active nonviolence in pursuit of just peace. Given centuries of dismissal of Jesus’s teaching as irrelevant to real‐world politics by both Catholics and Protestants, reception of Francis’s signal will benefit both from fresh biblical exegesis and new insights into natural law. Informing the biblical side is the groundbreaking work by Glen Stassen on the triadic structure of Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 5‐7, and its practical implications for just peacemaking. Informing the natural‐law side are recent findings from social psychology and neuroanthropology on the role of mimesis in human formation. The two fields join in underscoring the creative power of what Stassen called transforming initiatives for breaking cycles of violence.

Radical Nonviolence, Interracial Utopias, and the Congress of Racial Equality in the Early Civil Rights Movement

Abstract By the early 1940s, activists in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), and pacifist interracial communities such as the Harlem Ashram trained thousands in the tactics of nonviolent direct action. They rejected the gradualism of racial liberalism and the sectarian politics of the Communist Party, calling instead for the immediate end of racial inequality and a socialist future. These activists adopted the methods of earlier utopian communities by living communally and practicing a prefigurative politics that called for immediate change. Most significantly, activists like Bayard Rustin and James Farmer taught nonviolent direct action in hundreds of workshops and race relations institutes. Participants brought these tactics into the streets as they engaged in major desegregation campaigns in northern and western cities. Largely overlooked in the historiography of the long civil rights movement, understanding the contributions of radical pacifists to civil rights campaigns outside the South adds a vital chapter to that history. And their eventual contributions to the southern mass movement helped launch the second Reconstruction in America.

How Can Social Movements Help Defend Democracy?

This piece of “movement writing” is written by the coheads of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies and the cofounders of the Otpor! movement that ousted Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević in 2000. The article discusses the most promising tactics in contemporary prodemocracy activism, drawing on the authors’ considerable experience working with activists across the globe. Popović and Djinovic argue that the efficacy of traditional nonviolent strategies has waned with respect to contemporary prodemocracy struggles—which often seek to defend institutions rather than dismantle them—and advocate for more creative, humorous approach to contention.

Between rebellion and uprising intersecting networks and discursive strategies in rebel controlled Syria

ABSTRACTIn the article I explore how, at the individual level, participation in multiple networks opens up questions regarding the classification of social activism. The central contention is that as mobilization networks increasingly intersect, explicit discursive designations of activism (being ‘political’ or ‘nonpolitical, social’) by individual activists becomes more prevalent. I substantiate this argument with an in-depth exploration of the Syrian uprising. I show that as two distinct networks─one that emerged around nonviolent activism, another that emerged around a violent uprising─increasingly intersected, activists began to use specific discursive strategies. On the one side, a strategy emerged that emphasized the nonpolitical nature of mobilization, distancing activism discursively from intersecting networks. On the other side, a strategy emerged of politicizing collective identities, thereby bridging discursively various mobilization networks. The article thereby adds to existing studies on the intersection between network structure and individual activism. The analysis builds on more than a hundred primary sources from various rebel groups and relevant local actors in addition to thirty interviews with relevant players among activist, rebel and public services organizations.