Civil resistance : comparative perspectives on nonviolent struggle

359 Pages·2015·2.945 MB·English

by  Schock, Kurt

CIVIL RESISTANCE
Social Movements, Protest, and Contention
Series Editor: Bert Klandermans, Free University, Amsterdam
Associate Editors: Ron R. Aminzade, University of Minnesota
David S. Meyer, University of California, Irvine
Verta A. Taylor, University of California, Santa Barbara
Volume 43 K urt Schock, editor, Civil Resistance: Comparative Perspectives
on Nonviolent Struggle
Volume 42 Hwa- Jen Liu, Leverage of the Weak: Labor and Environmental
Movements in Taiwan and South Korea
Volume 41 Swen Hutter, Protesting Culture and Economics in Western
Europe: New Cleavages in Left and Right Politics
Volume 40 Lisa Leitz, Fighting for Peace: Veterans and Military Families in
the Anti– Iraq War Movement
Volume 39 J acquelien van Stekelenburg, Conny Roggeband, and Bert
Klandermans, editors, The Future of Social Movement Research:
Dynamics, Mechanisms, and Processes
Volume 38 Ashley Currier, Out in Africa: LGBT Organizing in Namibia
and South Africa
Volume 37 G regory M. Maney, Rachel V. Kutz- Flamenbaum, Deana A.
Rohlinger, and Jeff Goodwin, editors, Strategies for Social
Change
Volume 36 Zakia Salime, Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and
Sharia Law in Morocco
Volume 35 R achel Schurman and William A. Munro, Fighting for the
Future of Food: Activists versus Agribusiness in the Struggle over
Biotechnology
Volume 34 N ella Van Dyke and Holly J. McCammon, editors, Strategic
Alliances: Coalition Building and Social Movements
Volume 33 S tefaan Walgrave and Dieter Rucht, editors, The World Says No
to War: Demonstrations against the War on Iraq
Volume 32 Rory McVeigh, The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right- Wing
Movements and National Politics
(continued on page 352)
CIVIL RESISTANCE
Comparative Perspectives on
Nonviolent Struggle
Kurt Schock, Editor
Social Movements, Protest, and Contention,
Volume 43
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Portions of the Introduction were previously published as “The Practice and
Study of Civil Resistance,” Journal of Peace Research 50 (2013): 277–90. Portions
of chapter 9 were previously published in Stellan Vinthagen, The Sociology of
Nonviolent Action (London: ZED Books, 2014). An earlier version of
chapter 10 was published in Italian as “Nonviolenza Pragmatica e Nonviolenza
Per Principio: Una Contrapposizione Illusoria,” in Chaiwat Satha- Anand,
Islam e Nonviolenza (Torino: Edizione Gruppo Abele, 1997), 64 –84.
Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Civil resistance: comparative perspectives on nonviolent struggle /
Kurt Schock, editor.
(Social movements, protest, and contention; v. 43)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-9490-7 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-9492-1 (pb)
1. Passive resistance. 2. Nonviolence. I. Schock, Kurt, editor.
HM1281.C58 2015
303.6´1—dc23
2014043031
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: Civil Resistance in Comparative Perspective 1
Kurt Schock
I. Dynamics of Civil Resistance
1. “ We Do Not Work for Peace”: Reframing Nonviolence in
Post- Oslo Palestine 35
Julie M. Norman
2. N onviolent Action as the Interplay between Political Context
and “Insider’s Knowledge”: Otpor in Serbia 59
Janjira Sombatpoonsiri
3. Y outh Mobilization before and during the Orange Revolution:
Learning from Losses 93
Olena Nikolayenko
4. H ow Regimes Counter Civil Resistance Movements:
The Cases of Panama and Kenya 121
Sharon Erickson Nepstad
5. F rom Political Jiu- jitsu to the Backfire Dynamic:
How Repression Can Promote Mobilization 145
Brian Martin
6. S ources, Functions, and Dilemmas of External Assistance to
Civil Resistance Movements 168
Véronique Dudouet
II. Frontiers of Civil Resistance
7. D efending Freedom with Civil Resistance in the
Early Roman Republic 203
Dustin Ells Howes
8. M aking Sense of Civil Resistance: From Theories and
Techniques to Social Movement Phronesis 227
Sean Chabot
9. F our Dimensions of Nonviolent Action:
A Sociological Perspective 258
Stellan Vinthagen
10. O vercoming Illusory Division: Between Nonviolence as a
Pragmatic Strategy and a Principled Way of Life 289
Chaiwat Satha- Anand
11. Civil Resistance in the Twenty- First Century 302
Kurt Schock
Acknowledgments 319
Contributors 321
Index 325
Introduction: Civil Resistance in Comparative Perspective
Kurt Schock
Civilian- based movements and campaigns to promote human rights or social
justice without resorting to violence—o r explicitly refraining from violence—
have occurred throughout history by groups resisting various forms of oppres-
sion and injustice. Over the course of the twentieth century the use of nonvio-
lent resistance increased substantially, and with the Color Revolutions, Arab
Spring, and anti-s tructural adjustment and anti-a usterity protests in the early
twenty- first century, scholarly interest in civil resistance increased. Neverthe-
less, due in part to the great attention paid by scholars to violent resistance
and war, we know relatively little about the practice and dynamics of civil
resistance—that is, the use of methods of nonviolent action by civilians engaged
in acute conflicts with opponents not averse to using violence to defend their
interests. Civil resistance is often employed in asymmetric conflicts where the
challengers are at a decided disadvantage relative to authorities with regard
to influence in institutional politics and access to the means of violence.
Campaigns against oppression and injustice, of course, may be composed
of diverse actors, with diverse ideologies and goals, whose activities transgress
routine and nonroutine politics and involve violent and nonviolent actions.
Nevertheless, in order to understand and explain dynamics of civil resistance
we need to make conceptual distinctions between routine and nonroutine
politics as well as between violent and nonviolent action while recognizing that
in highly charged conflicts resistance is rarely entirely violent or nonviolent.
Routine political action occurs within institutional political and legal
chan nels. By contrast, nonroutine action—w hich may be violent or nonvio-
lent— occurs outside of institutional channels and is therefore indeterminate;
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2 kurt schock
that is, it is not regulated by existing agreements about what action is accept-
able or how the conflict should be prosecuted and resolved (Bond 1994). Of
course, the types of actions defined as routine or nonroutine varies over time
and across contexts. In contrast to routine action, nonroutine action, since it
occurs outside of channels controlled by authorities, is often a direct threat
to authorities and therefore met with violent repression. State repression may
effectively suppress a nonroutine challenge, but not necessarily. With regard
to civil resistance, Brian Martin shows in chapter 5 that under certain condi-
tions violent repression of nonviolent action may backfire by undermining
the legitimacy of the authorities and leading to more widespread mobiliza-
tion and support for the challengers.
Violent and nonviolent political actions are comparable in that they are
both nonroutine. Moreover, violent action as manifested in people’s war shares
similarities with nonviolent action as manifested in people power. April Carter
(2013, 30– 42) maintains that despite crucial differences, people’s war and
people power are similar in that they both involve cultivating majority sup-
port, mobilizing excluded sections of the population, encouraging defections
of military forces, building alternative or parallel institutions from below,
and promoting solidarity and fearlessness. Similarly, Jonathan Schell (2003)
maintains that both people’s war and people power involve cooperative power;
that is, both involve people freely working in concert to attain a common
goal. Cooperative power, when combined with armed violence from below
in a people’s war, can be decisive in political contests against opponents with
superior military capacity, as exemplified by the Vietnamese defeat of French
and American imperialists. Cooperative power manifested through nonvio-
lent resistance, as exemplified in Gandhian thought and campaigns of civil
resistance, may also defeat opponents that are superior with regard to the
means of violence but does so through cooperative power that relies on the
innovative use of nonviolent methods rather than on armed resistance.
Despite some similarities between nonroutine violent and nonviolent
action, violence, obviously, differs from nonviolent action in that violent
action entails intentional and direct but unwanted physical interference with
the bodies of others (Keane 2004, 35– 36). Violent action, such as detaining
people against their will, unwanted bodily injuries or violations, or death, is
intended to alter people’s behavior through its use or threatened use. Vio-
lence, whether undertaken by challengers or the state, may alter the behavior
of people to whom it is applied or threatened or set an example that alters the
behaviors of others. Although the application of direct violence is straight-
forward, the threat of violence or the perception of implied threats of vio-
lence attributed to actors is more complicated. For those challenging the
introduction 3
status quo, a common response by authorities is to label any sort of nonrou-
tine political action, whether violent or not, as violent or potentially violent,
and media coverage is often biased in favor of “law and order.”
While recognizing the possibility of implicit or hidden violence and
(mis)attributions of violent intent, we refer to nonviolent action as non-
routine and extra- institutional political acts that do not involve violence or
the threat of violence (see Sharp 1973; Schock 2010). This does not mean
that opponents, third parties, or bystanders will not be inconvenienced, dis-
tressed, or nonviolently coerced, or that they will not respond with violence,
but it is clear that nonviolent action does not threaten or result in people
being forcefully detained against their will, injured, violated, or killed.
Another way of viewing the difference between violent and nonviolent
action concerns the reversibility of the consequences. The results of violent
actions, such as bombings, that result in injury or death cannot be reversed,
nor can lost time from being imprisoned be recuperated; but the conse-
quences of strikes or boycotts, for example, can be easily reversed through the
reestablishment of cooperative relations. Thus, as opposed to violent action,
nonviolent action is characterized by a “principle of reversibility” (Galtung
1996, 271– 73). The exception is when the goal of nonviolent resistance, for
example, is to eliminate a corporation through boycotts or to eliminate a
state through noncooperation.
Thus, even though violent and nonviolent action may have some simi-
larities and may be used in tandem within campaigns, we argue that they
are different phenomena with different dynamics and consequences. Rather
than assuming that nonviolent action occupies an intermediary position on a
gradual continuum from conventional politics to violence, we maintain that
nonviolent action represents a break from both; not only does implementing
violent and/or nonviolent action in various proportions have consequences
for the dynamics and outcomes of resistance, but clearly differentiating these
forms of action—w hether or not they are differentiated by activists—h as
consequences for how scholars perceive, understand, and explain dynamics
of contention.
The Practice of Civil Resistance
Campaigns of civil resistance have been practiced sporadically throughout
history, at least as far back as the early Roman republic. As Dustin Ells Howes
shows in chapter 7, campaigns of civil resistance in the early Roman repub-
lic, from about 495 BC to 402 BC, promoted the liberty and economic
well- being of plebs. To gain leverage over authorities, on at least two occa-
sions Roman plebs organized general strikes and abandoned the city until