Nonviolent Campaigns Research Articles

Bombs and Banners: Battlefield Dynamics and Armed Groups’ Use of Nonviolent Tactics in Civil War

Under what circumstances do armed insurgents divert scarce resources to nonviolent tactics? Despite extensive research on the causes and consequences of civil wars and resistance campaigns, our understanding of when rebel organizations add nonviolent tactics to their repertoire is limited. Moving beyond traditional explanations of nonviolent resistance campaigns, we hypothesize that rebel organizations use nonviolent tactics–such as strikes and protest–to capitalize on successes on the battlefield. Rebels have many incentives to use nonviolent tactics, but their opportunity to do so typically depends on their ability to mobilize civilians. Military successes help pave the way for mobilization by shifting civilians’ expectations about the prospects for victory and repression. Using cross-national data on rebel nonviolent contention, including original data on nonviolent tactics in struggles for control over the central government, we find robust support for our argument. Probing potential scope conditions, we show that the association is strongest among rebel organizations with civilian wings and for rebels fighting for control over the government. Our findings provide new insight into the full array of tactics that insurgents deploy, beyond variations in armed activity. They contribute to our understanding of the many forms that contentious action can take, even amidst a backdrop of violence.

U.S. Military Training, External Support, and Security Defections during Nonviolent Resistance

Why do some armed forces remain loyal to the regime while others switch sides during nonviolent uprisings? The existing research predominantly focuses on the roles of domestic actors and dynamics in explaining security defections. We extend this line of research by exploring external factors that might potentially affect troops’ decision to defect. In particular, we suggest a combined effect of U.S. military training and external support for campaigns on defection decisions. Our findings show that substantial Western power involvement in support of campaigns might induce security defections in militaries with which the U.S. military has established ties. We further probe this relationship by disaggregating Western power support into its constituents and find that security defections are most likely to occur when a campaign is backed by both the U.S. and at least one other Western power. This study contributes to an understudied aspect of security force defections during nonviolent campaigns, highlighting how external dynamics might shape militaries’ decisions regarding loyalty and defection.

Expanding Data on Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping

Abstract This article presents recent research on the collection and organization of unarmed civilian peacekeeping (ucp) data and proposes a pathway to the creation of a rich, regularly updated database on ucp. The article sets out by giving an overview of the wealth of data on conventional (military) peacekeeping and related research, and raises the question about the need for a similar data wealth for ucp. Secondly, it describes the inventory of current ucp data, to highlight advances in knowledge as well as data collection challenges and critical information gaps. In the main part, the article then sets out what a more comprehensive data collection on ucp would need to take into account and what such a dataset could look like. To do so, it also draws on databases regarding nonviolent campaigns and other fields (health, aviation) to demonstrate the potential for future data collection methodologies and research, and to consider safeguarding issues. Finally, this article suggests four strategies to better structure existing ucp data in order to collect missing information on various research themes. The benefits of the resulting rich database, it argues, would be greater visibility of ucp, the production of data useful for various research programs, and insights to improve field practice.

The military before the march: Civil-military grand bargains and the emergence of nonviolent resistance in autocracies

This article contributes to growing efforts to explain when nonviolent resistance campaigns emerge in autocratic regimes. Building from a novel framework for distinguishing civil-military relations in autocracies, it contends that regimes in which military and political leaders engage in a ‘grand bargain’ generate opportunity structures that are especially amenable to nonviolent resistance. Militaries in these regimes exhibit distinctive characteristics – they are corporate, cohesive institutions as opposed to fragmented in structure and also wield political influence in regime institutions. Consequently, these militaries are especially inclined to care about their societal reputations and to retain their institutional independence from the regime’s political leaders. These factors together can lessen expectations among activists that the military will repress protests and increase the odds of elite splits in the face of mass movements. They also render the military more receptive to nonviolent protest tactics. We operationalize the concept of grand bargains with indicators from three datasets on civil-military relations and autocratic regimes. We then test the argument quantitatively using data on the onset of nonviolent resistance campaigns, as well as events-level data on nonviolent resistance campaigns. The findings support claims that civil-military grand bargains make nonviolent resistance in autocracies more likely, contributing to scholarship on this vital topic.

Research Note Civil Resistance in the Streetlight: Replicating and Assessing Evidence on Nonviolent Effectiveness

Does civil resistance work? Research emphasizes the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance over violent resistance in achieving campaign goals, with the seminal study Why Civil Resistance Works (WCRW) by Chenoweth and Stephan being the main point of reference to date. I revisit this pivotal finding in three steps. First, I reproduce WCRW's results on nonviolent effectiveness. Second, I discuss how cases may have been over-looked due to a streetlight effect. Third, I quantify the results' sensitivity using simulations. I find that WCRW's main findings on nonviolent effectiveness are highly sensitive to variable selection, under-coverage bias, bootstrapping, and omitted variable bias. As a routine reference in scholarship and the public discourse, assessing the robustness of WCRW's findings is relevant to practitioners and researchers

Is terrorism necessarily violent? Public perceptions of nonviolence and terrorism in conflict settings

AbstractDiscussions of terrorism assume actual or threatened violence, but the term is regularly used to delegitimize rivals' nonviolent actions. Yet do ordinary citizens accept descriptions of nonviolence as terrorism? Using a preregistered survey-experiment in Israel, a salient conflictual context with diverse repertoires of contention, we find that audiences rate adversary nonviolence close to terrorism, consider it illegitimate, and justify its forceful repression. These perceptions vary by the action's threatened harm, its salience, and respondents' ideology. Explicitly labeling nonviolence as terrorism, moreover, particularly sways middle-of-the-road centrists. These relationships replicate in a lower-salience conflict, albeit with milder absolute judgments, indicating generalizability. Hence, popular perceptions of terrorism are more fluid and manipulable than assumed, potentially undermining the positive effects associated with nonviolent campaigns.

Decline in success of nonviolent conflicts

This paper investigates the decline in success of nonviolent conflicts. While nonviolent conflicts are known to have higher efficacy compared to violent conflicts, this disparity has decreased since the 1990s. Previous scholars have divided the causes behind the success of nonviolent conflict into three categories: (1) mobilization; (2) resilience; and (3) leverage. The hypothesis is that one or more of these factors have changed and is the cause behind the decline. The research uses a large-N quantitative method, comparing the two time periods of 1945 – 1999 with 2000 – 2013. The resulting descriptive statistics, regression analysis, and likelihood ratio tests show that mobilization has dropped alongside a decrease in how successfully nonviolent campaigns utilize leverage over their opponents. These findings invite further investigation into why this decline in efficacy of nonviolent conflicts has occurred.

Divided We Fall: Ethnic Cleavages, Movement Cohesion, and the Risk of Escalation to Civil War in Non-Violent Uprisings

ABSTRACT Why do some non-violent uprisings escalate into armed violence while others do not? We suggest that horizontal polarisation contributes to the escalation of non-violent campaigns. We examine the effect of ethnic cleavages between the campaign and its opponent and movement cohesion as explanatory factors for escalation into civil war and non-state violence. Statistical analysis of all major non-violent campaigns (1970–2014) shows that non-violent conflicts with ethnic cleavages have a higher risk of escalating into armed violence in particular, when the conflict takes place over governmental aims. The results also indicate that movement cohesion alleviates the risk of armed escalation.

‘A lot of people still love and worship the monarchy’: How polarizing frames trigger countermobilization in Thailand

This article examines the interplay between nonviolent movements’ use of polarizing issues for mobilization and pro-regime countermobilization. Thailand has been chosen as an explanatory case study because it has a history of political polarization and pro-regime mass mobilization. I focus on polarizing frames that were incorporated into the 2020 nonviolent resistance campaigns, which addressed a taboo subject in the country: the monarchy. In response, the regime applied various forms of repression, including the mobilization of royalists. But the assumption that the regime single-handedly mobilized countermovements is only half of the story. Autonomous elements within countermovements also joined forces when there were sufficient social conditions. By juxtaposing protest event data with an analysis of mobilizing frames (through movements’ Twitter hashtags), I shed light on a two-pronged process that underpins the nexus between framing choice and countermobilization: (a) how a movement’s choice for polarizing frames sustains existing ideological and identity-based cleavages, antagonizing segments of society that perceive their collective identity to be under siege and; (b) how these ideological and identity-based cleavages also provide social sources for countermobilization. I conclude by addressing some implications of this framing choice–countermobilization nexus on repression dynamics and suggest how we can rethink the relationship between strategic framing and nonviolent resistance campaigns in divided societies.

Swords into ploughshares? Why human rights abuses persist after resistance campaigns

Human rights abuse tends to increase during national crises, such as civil wars and mass nonviolent uprisings. Under what conditions does this abuse abate or persist? I argue that violent challenges provoke much more coercive state responses, exposing more personnel within the security forces to extreme forms of repression and priming them (both leaders and followers) to reproduce these behaviors after the conflict has terminated. This effect is mitigated or avoided when challengers rely on nonviolent tactics instead of violence, leading to less post-conflict abuse. I test this argument with several quantitative methods, which establish a positive association between nonviolent resistance campaigns and subsequent freedom from political killings. Results also suggest that democratization can partially – but not fully – counteract the repressive legacies of violent conflict. By choosing to specialize in nonviolent tactics, therefore, resistance leaders avoid a repression trap that not even democratization can fully disarm.

Upping the ante without taking up arms: Why mass movements escalate demands

One of the unresolved puzzles in the civil resistance and contentious politics literatures is why some movements that begin seeking limited redress in a certain policy space escalate their claims to demand the ousting of a national leader or the entire regime, a process the article terms ‘demand escalation’. For instance, in the summer of 2019, thousands took to the streets of Hong Kong to protest about a proposed extradition bill that would allow criminal suspects to be sent to mainland China to face trial in courts controlled by the Communist Party. However, even after Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, announced the formal withdrawal of the controversial bill, protests continued with some calling for greater democracy and others demanding Lam’s resignation. Whereas most of the literature on civil resistance treats demands as fixed and focuses on different methods of struggle to pursue predefined ends, this article shows that demands can change as a result of the state–dissent interaction. The article argues that movements are more likely to escalate their demands when the state responds to the initial nonviolent action with a disproportionate use of force, because such an action intensifies the grievances the protesters have against the state and betrays the remaining trust that people might have had in the government. The analysis of a new quantitative dataset that catalogues both reformist and maximalist opposition campaigns globally supports this claim. By incorporating non-maximalist campaigns into the analysis and not treating demands as fixed, this article adds to our understanding of mass campaigns and highlights an overlooked means by which nonviolent campaigns can up their ante without resorting to violence.

Choosing tactics: The efficacy of violence and nonviolence in self-determination disputes

Disputes over self-determination (SD) have led to many civil wars, and a primary alternative, nonviolent campaign, is rarely successful in this context. Yet, while secession is rare, these movements often achieve more limited successes in the form of concessions from the state. This article provides a new assessment of the efficacy of different tactics – violent, nonviolent and conventional political action. It advances an argument that nonviolent tactics can help SD movements to generate indirect pressure on states that contributes to movement success, including greater autonomy. Nonviolence is used to garner attention from international actors using a human rights frame for their cause. International actors that are receptive to these human rights narratives then incentivize concessions for the SD movements and dis-incentivize repression. This happens through a variety of means, such as public shaming of the host state and withholding inter-governmental organization membership. Statistical analysis of violent and nonviolent tactics in SD movements shows that nonviolence can be effective in successfully obtaining concessions. Movements that use nonviolence are twice as likely to see concessions in any given year compared to those that just make demands but do not use nonviolence or violence. The effect of nonviolence is slightly larger than that of violence, which is also associated an increased chance of concession.

Guest Editors’ introduction: Nonviolent resistance and its discontents

In the past decade, myriad studies have explored the effects of nonviolent resistance (NR) on outcomes including revolutionary success (short-term and long-term) and democratization, and how nonviolent mobilization can play a similar role to violence in affecting social change in some settings. This special issue seeks to advance our understanding of the role of nonviolence by tackling some key assumptions in existing work that are complicated by historical and contemporary realities of deepening polarization worldwide. This issue addresses four key areas within conflict and peace research that limit our ability to make sense of NR: (a) the fragmented nature of civil resistance campaigns in terms of supporters and demands; (b) the increasing prevalence of authoritarian or anti-egalitarian nonviolent campaigns; and (c) the complicated nature of revolutionary success. Cutting across all three of these substantive areas is another key area, which is: (d) the United States as an increasingly salient site of conflict and contention.

Editors’ Note

The current issue features a special section dedicated to the study of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. One would be hard-pressed to identify issues that currently stir more passionate contestation and stronger emotions in academic circles than the BDS campaign in the groves of academe. Views on this issue vary considerably and have been keenly articulated in multiple and diverse outlets. Some view BDS as a legitimate, nonviolent campaign in support of the Palestinians; some find it threatening to academic freedom; and some identify the singling out of Israel as an expression of antisemitism.

Non-violent resistance movements and substantive democracy

ABSTRACT Is the depth of democracy in newly established democratic regimes influenced by their mode of transition? Previous research has focused on violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns’ effects on the durability and formal dimensions of democracy. In this article, I examine whether democracies resulting from nonviolent resistance movements are more successful in deepening democracy than those emerging from violent conflicts or elite-led top-down liberalizations. Combining difference-in-differences (DiD) estimation and kernel matching, I analyse all democratic transitions that occurred between 1900 and 2020, using V-Dem High-Level Democracy Indices for measuring formal and substantive dimensions of democracy, including (1) electoral democracy, (2) liberal democracy, (3) participatory democracy, (4) deliberative democracy, and (5) egalitarian democracy. I find a significant difference in the depth of democracy between democratic regimes forged from nonviolent resistance (NVR) campaigns and those born from violent revolutions and elite-led top-down liberalizations. This effect is statistically significant for up to ten years following the transition. I argue that the engagement and improvement of civil society before and during the transition is a key factor that explains why NVR-induced democracies are more successful in deepening the ideals of democracy and less susceptible to democratic backsliding.

Updating nonviolent campaigns: Introducing NAVCO 2.1

In this article, we introduce an updated version of the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes dataset (NAVCO 2.1), which compiles annual data on 389 nonviolent and violent mass movements for regime change, anti-occupation, and secession from 1945 to 2013. This version of the dataset corrects known coding errors in NAVCO 2.0, adds news cases (including the Arab uprisings), and codes attributes for each campaign year (such as participation size and diversity, the behavior of regime elites, repression and its effects, support from external actors, and campaign outcomes). In addition, NAVCO 2.1 adds several new attributes to each campaign-year, including more precise participation figures, more nuanced data about the scope, intensity, and degree of violent flank behavior and state repression, and further information about the parallel or alternative institutions developed by the campaign. The data reveal four key findings: (1) that the success rate of nonviolent resistance campaigns has declined since 2001; (2) that far more people have participated in nonviolent than violent campaigns in the postwar period; (3) that nonviolent campaigns suffer far fewer per-capita fatalities than armed campaigns; and (4) that incidental violence by dissidents has become a more common feature of contemporary nonviolent campaigns compared with earlier cases. The article concludes with suggestions for further research.

Tactics of resistance and post-conflict judicial independence

Scholars have found that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violence at promoting post-campaign democratization. We explore whether this relationship extends to judicial systems, specifically. Courts have been shown to be important for promoting and protecting economic development and political rights, yet they have been largely ignored in quantitative studies of post-conflict democratization. We posit that leaders who hold power after domestic unrest will be more inclined to use independent courts as a mechanism to prevent future campaigns–but they do so primarily when fearing a significant mobilization threat and when expecting legal action to be an acceptable channel for dispute resolution by dissidents. As such, we anticipate that levels of judicial independence are higher following nonviolent campaigns as compared to violent conflicts. Using quantitative data from violent and nonviolent campaigns globally, we find that judicial independence is indeed higher in the aftermath of nonviolent, as compared to violent, resistance campaigns. Furthermore, a campaign’s outcome does not matter; post-conflict judicial independence appears to be associated with tactics, not dissident success.

Pressures From Home and Abroad: Economic Sanctions and Target Government Response to Domestic Campaigns

What effect do economic sanctions have on target governments’ response to citizen campaigns? We assert that sanctions as a signal of international support for campaigners alter the bargaining environment between a target state and the campaign in ways that will likely draw more support from citizens and defections from the ruling base. This will in turn incentivize target leaders to be more conciliatory toward domestic campaigns with maximalist goals, especially when such campaigns are nonviolent. Results from a time-series, cross-national data analysis indicate that sanctions, particularly when they are enforced by multiple senders or with high cost, are effective in increasing the success rate of nonviolent campaigns. Given the plethora of sanctions research that points to their inefficacy and adverse effects, we show that sanctions could be an effective tool to extract concessions from governments facing nonviolent campaigns.

Glee and Grievance: Emotive Events and Campaign Size in Nonviolent Resistance

AbstractWhile scholars of nonviolent resistance recognize that large-scale campaigns are more likely to be successful campaigns, we currently have little understanding of why some nonviolent protests grow into mass movements while others do not. In this article, we explore campaign size and, in particular, the role of individual and collective motives in facilitating the growth of nonviolent campaigns. We start by assuming that, after campaign onset, barriers to growth emerge because some aggrieved individuals who are sympathetic to the cause are wary of incurring the (opportunity) costs of participating in campaign rallies. On occasion, we argue, organizers respond to this challenge by staging events that generate rewarding emotional experiences for participants and spectators, such as concerts, mass singing, or other collective expressive acts. Since the feelings of empowerment, solidarity, catharsis, or glee that accompany these events can only be enjoyed by those who are physically present at campaign rallies, the provision of such “emotive events” creates an individual-level incentive for passive supporters to mobilize. As this incentive attracts new participants, campaigns can grow—potentially into large-scale phenomena. To assess the plausibility of our argument, we code original data on emotive events and investigate whether the provision of such events in the course of nonviolent campaigns is associated with the size and scale of those campaigns. Finding this to be the case, we conclude that campaigns that are more creative, humorous, cathartic, and/or fun are also more likely to be large-scale campaigns.

Military Conscription and Nonviolent Resistance

Nonviolent campaigns against repressive regimes often turn on the military’s decision to either defend the ruler or make common cause with the ruled. Yet surprisingly little scholarship investigates opposition expectations for the military’s likely response to mass protest. We theorize that some determinants of the military’s willingness to repress are more observable to activists than others. In particular, we identify conscription as a highly salient indicator that soldiers will refuse to fire on protesters and hypothesize that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to materialize against regimes with conscripted armies than those with volunteer forces. We substantiate this theory with two sources of evidence: (1) a survey experiment conducted during the 2019 Algerian Revolution and (2) a cross-national analysis of the positive association between conscription and nonviolent campaign onset from 1945 to 2013.