Implicit in recent scholarly debates about the efficacy of methods of warfare is the assumption that the most effective means of waging political struggle entails violence. Among political scientists, the prevailing view is that opposition movements select violent methods because such means are more effective than nonviolent strategies at achieving policy goals. Despite these assumptions, from 2000 to 2006, organized civilian populations successfully employed nonviolent methods including boycotts, strikes, protests, and organized noncooperation to challenge entrenched power and exact political concessions in Serbia (2000), Madagascar (2002), Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004–05), Lebanon (2005), and Nepal (2006). The success of these nonviolent campaigns—especially in light of the enduring violent insurgencies occurring in some of the same countries—begs systematic investigation. Extant literature provides explanations as to why nonviolent campaigns are effective means of resistance. Little of the literature, however, comprehensively analyzes all known observations of nonviolent and violent insurgencies as analogous resistance types. This study aims to fill this gap by systematically exploring the strategic effectiveness of violent and nonviolent campaigns in conflicts between nonstate and state actors using aggregate data on major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006. To better understand the causal mechanisms driving these outcomes, we also compare our statistical findings with historical cases that have featured periods of both violent and nonviolent resistance Our findings show that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns. There are two reasons for this success. First, a campaign’s commitment to nonviolent methods enhances its domestic and international legitimacy and encourages more broad-based participation in the resistance, which translates into increased pressure being brought to bear on the target. Recognition of the challenge group’s grievances can translate into greater internal and external support for that group and alienation of the target regime, undermining the regime’s main sources of political, economic, and even military power. Second, whereas governments easily justify violent counterattacks against armed insurgents, regime violence against nonviolent movements is more likely to backfiªre against the regime. Potentially sympathetic publics perceive violent militants as having maximalist or extremist goals beyond accommodation, but they perceive nonviolent resistance groups as less extreme, thereby enhancing their appeal and facilitating the extraction of concessions through bargaining. Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom that violent resistance against conventionally superior adversaries is the most effective way for resistance groups to achieve policy goals. Instead, we assert that nonviolent resistance is a forceful alternative to political violence that can pose effective challenges to democratic and nondemocratic opponents, and at times can do so more effectively than violent resistance. The article proceeds as follows. The ªrst section presents our main argument. The second section introduces the data set and reports our preliminary empirical findings. In the third section, we evaluate three case studies of nonviolent and violent campaigns in Southeast Asia. We conclude with some theoretical and policy recommendations derived from these findings. Unclassified military documents from the occupation reveal that the Indonesian occupying forces were remarkably optimistic about the potential for victory in East Timor, while impressing upon their troops that the East Timorese population was complicit in guerrilla warfare. The subsequent in discriminate and repressive counterinsurgency tactics were brutal, producing tacit support for the guerrillas among the domestic population. The violent insurgents, however, were never able to field more than 1,500 active fighters. Their violent reprisals against security forces merely solidified the resolve of the Indonesian military and escalated the conflict. Contrarily, the nonviolent campaign produced some loyalty shifts. Indonesian students led mass mobilization efforts that ultimately led to a shift in support among business elites and members of the security forces. Business elites, still suffering from the economic crisis, lost their enthusiasm for maintaining the occupation, especially due to increasing international pressure to capitulate. Within the Indonesian military, divisions emerged between older members of the officer corps who were benefiting from lucrative business deals and promotions in East Timor and younger officers who called for reforms. The “people power” movement that ousted Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 offers a useful counterexample to the failed opposition uprising in Burma a few years later. Despite scholarly predictions that the Marcos regime would be overthrown violently by either a communist insurgency or a military coup, this is not what occurred. Instead, a broad-based coalition of opposition politicians, workers, students, businesspeople, Catholic Church leaders, and others nonviolently coerced a regime whose legitimacy was al- ready weakening due to widespread corruption, economic mismanagement, and reliance on violent repression. After being reelected president in 1969, Marcos declared martial law in 1972, citing threats posed by communist insurgents and Muslim secessionists from the south as justiªcation. With U.S. backing, Marcos consolidated executive power while amassing great wealth through centralization, state monopolies, patronage, aid from the United States, and loans from international financial institutions. Marcos accused the political opposition of allying with the communists, took away their assets, and imprisoned many of them. belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/IS3301_pp007-044_Stephan_Chenoweth.pdf First, in all three cases, violent campaigns were largely unsuccessful in heightening the political costs of repression. Although some people may sympathize with violent insurgents, none of our cases reflect material support or interna tional sanctions on their behalf. Although the quantitative section revealed little support for the notion that sanctions or external aid assists nonviolentcampaigns, our case studies show that well-timed pressure or withdrawal of support by major international actors changed the course of the campaigns in the Philippines and East Timor. Second, campaigns that fail to produce loyalty shifts within the security or civilian bureaucracy are unlikely to achieve success. Our large n study suggests that nonviolent campaigns are more likely than violent campaigns to succeed in the face of brutal repression, probably because they are more likely to produce backªre. Also in our largenstudy, we found that although security force defections are often crucial to the success of nonviolent campaigns, they do not necessarily occur during nonviolent campaigns. And among our case studies, signiªcant loyalty shifts within the security forces did not occur in Burma. This deviant case provides useful insights into important variables not analyzed in the largenstudy. Three such variables are mass mobilization, campaign decentralization, and media communication strategies. Mass mobilization—particularly mobilization where participation is broad based and the campaign is not dependent on a single leader—occurred in both cases of campaign success. Such mobilization was more common among the nonviolent campaigns than the violent campaigns, whose membership was smaller and more homogeneous. Indeed, in the cases of East Timor and the Philippines, repression against nonviolent resistance backªred to produce mass mobilization, which in turn heightened the political costs of regime repression. In both cases, the regimes paid dearly: security forces shifted their loyalty to the nonviolent resistance campaign, and the international community came down heavily against the regimes. Mobilization may be the critical determinant of success, given that a widespread, cross-cutting, and decentralized campaign may be more effective in raising the political costs of repression because of its operational resilience, mass appeal, and anonymnity. In the backfire model, media coverage reflects the regime’s failure to cover up its most discreditable actions. Our findings also suggest that media coverage is a crucial means of causing backfire, as others have argued.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:30:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015