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In the past quarter century the world has witnessed dramatic social
and political transformations, due in part to an upsurge in civil
resistance. There have been significant uprisings around the globe,
including the toppling of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the
Color Revolutions, the Arab Spring, protests against war and
economic inequality, countless struggles against corruption, and
demands for more equitable distribution of land. These actions have
attracted substantial scholarly attention, reflected in the growth
of literature on social movements and revolution as well as
literature on nonviolent resistance. Until now, however, the two
bodies of literature have largely developed in parallel-with
relatively little acknowledgment of the existence of the other. In
this useful collection, an international and interdisciplinary
group of scholars takes stock of the current state of the
theoretical and empirical literature on civil resistance.
Contributors analyze key processes of nonviolent struggle and
identify both frictions and points of synthesis between the
narrower literature on civil resistance and the broader literature
on social movements and revolution. By doing so, Civil Resistance:
Comparative Perspectives on Nonviolent Struggle pushes the
boundaries of the study of civil resistance and generates social
scientific knowledge that will be helpful for all scholars and
activists concerned with democracy, human rights, and social
justice.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, a wave of "people
power" movements erupted throughout the nondemocratic world. In
South Africa, the Philippines, Nepal, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar),
China, and elsewhere, mass protest demonstrations, strikes,
boycotts, civil disobedience, and other nonviolent actions were
brought to bear on a rigid political status quo. Kurt Schock
compares the successes of the antiapartheid movement in South
Africa, the people power movement in the Philippines, the
pro-democracy movement in Nepal, and the antimilitary movement in
Thailand with the failures of the pro-democracy movement in China
and the anti-regime challenge in Burma. Schock develops a synthetic
framework that allows him to identify which characteristics
increase the resilience of a challenge to state repression, and
which aspects of a state's relations can he exploited by such a
challenge. By looking at how these methods of protest promoted
regime change in some countries but not in others, this book
provides rare insight into the often overlooked and little
understood power of nonviolent action.
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