Civil resistance movements occur outside of institutional political channels, which may be non-existent, blocked, or controlled by hostile parties, and involve civilians wielding methods of nonviolent action to promote social change. Methods of nonviolent action are political acts implemented in situations of acute conflict that do not involve violence or the threat of violence against the opponent. Hundreds of methods of nonviolent action have been used in struggles throughout history, including protest demonstrations, marches, boycotts, strikes, occupations of public or private space, and civil disobedience. These methods are an alternative to both violence and passivity. Historically, the impact of civil resistance movements on challenging unjust relationships between citizens and states, and oppressor and oppressed, has been significant.
The roots of modern mass-based civil resistance can be traced back to the struggles for racial equality in South Africa and independence in India led by Mohandas Gandhi in the first half of the twentieth century. In the past quarter century, however, there has been a tremendous increase across the globe in the prosecution of acute conflicts by civilians through nonviolent resistance. In the 1980s and 1990s dozens of authoritarian regimes throughout the world were toppled by civil resistance movements that delegitimized authoritarian rulers and dissolved their bases of support. These include the “people power” movement in the Philippines that toppled the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, the ouster of Pinochet in Chile in 1989, the Polish Solidarity movement that effectively challenged communist rule in the 1980s, and the anti-apartheid struggle that contributed to democratization and racial equality in South Africa in the 1990s. In each of these cases, and numerous others, power shifted hands when civil society was reasserted as citizens organized mass protests, stopped obeying the government, and used nonviolent actions to separate rulers from their sources of power. This form of “war without violence” has produced dramatic results.
In the twenty-first century civil resistance movements have successfully challenged governmental tyranny, corruption, and electoral fraud in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), and Ukraine (2004-05) using demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other methods of nonviolent action in a premeditated and strategic manner. In Lebanon in 2005, nearly one million citizens took to the streets in a remarkable display of nonviolent resistance to demand government accountability and force the withdrawal of Syrian troops. There are ongoing opposition movements engaged in nonviolent struggles for basic human rights and freedoms in Belarus, Egypt, Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, West Papua (Indonesia), Western Sahara (Morocco), Tibet (China), the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and elsewhere.
In addition to democratization and human rights, methods of nonviolent action are increasingly being used by citizens throughout the world to challenge racial discrimination, genocide and violence, to oppose corruption and promote governmental transparency and the rule of law, and to promote labor rights, land reform and sustainable development, environmentalism, and urban reform. While a first-wave of civil resistance research focused on the toppling of authoritarian regimes, an emerging second wave of research is beginning to focus on how civil resistance movements can address these more diffuse and systemic problems and conflicts.
The Program on Nonviolent Action is an interdisciplinary research program designed to deepen and broaden the study of nonviolent action in civil resistance movements. The project has two main components:
A second purpose of the program is to provide training to graduate students through the Division of Global Affairs (DGA) in "Civil Resistance and Conflict.” This training program will be developed by leveraging existing DGA graduate courses. The training will serve graduate and professional students in Global Affairs, Political Science, Public Affairs & Administration, Business, and Law who are interested in issues such as human rights and democratization, civil society and liberalization, governmental corruption and transparency, labor rights, environmental issues and sustainable development, racial and ethnic conflict, nongovernmental organizations and transnational political activism, and alternatives to terrorism, genocide and war.