Civil Resistance

Oxford Handbooks Online

Civil Resistance  
Daniel P. Ritter
The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements
Edited by Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani

Print Publication Date: Nov 2015

Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political Behavior
Online Publication Date: Sep 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199678402.013.49

Abstract and Keywords

Civil resistance is a form of contentious politics that eschews violent tactics and
strategies in favor of nonviolent ones. Employing methods likes strikes, boycotts, and
demonstrations, nonviolent activists have often defeated their adversaries, including
highly repressive states. This chapter aims to introduce the reader to civil resistance as a
social phenomenon and a scholarly field of study. In order to do so, the chapter
commences with a discussion of what civil resistance is and what it is not. Next, I briefly
survey the scholarly literature on civil resistance. Third, the chapter explores the
outcomes of civil resistance campaigns. Finally I suggest a few ways in which social
movements scholars can benefit from the insights generated by students of civil
resistance. I conclude that social movement and revolution theorists can benefit greatly
from the civil resistance literature’s heavy focus on collective actors’ strategies and
tactical choices.

Keywords: civil resistance, social movement, nonviolent action, revolution, regime change, protest

DESPITE having been employed for millennia, civil resistance, or nonviolent action, has only
relatively recently begun to attract systematic attention from social scientists. Defined as
the sustained use of “non-routine political acts that do not involve violence or the threat
of violence” (Schock 2013: 277), civil resistance is a social phenomenon closely related to
social movements. But despite obvious theoretical overlaps, the civil resistance literature
has developed in virtual isolation of social movement studies. One of the objectives of this
chapter is therefore to encourage social movement scholars and students of civil
resistance to consider more deliberately the potential for cross-fertilization.

Nonviolent forms of activism can be been traced back as far as 449 BCE, when Roman
workers abandoned the city—in effect inventing the general strike—and refused to return
until their demands for political rights had been met (Schock 2013: 278). Prior to the

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Civil Resistance

twentieth century, civil resistance was mostly employed by individuals and groups
harboring religious convictions that prohibited the use of violence (Solomonow 1981;
Paige, Satha-Anand, and Gilliatt 1993; Arapura 1997; Long 2011; Schock 2013), and the
religious roots of nonviolent action can still be discerned today. Contemporary civil
resistance was shaped by Mohandas K. Gandhi’s South African experience. As a lawyer
hired to represent an Indian company in the then-British colony, the Mahatma-to-be
encountered severe racial discrimination that drove him onto the path of nonviolent
resistance (Gandhi 1928). Inspired by Christian and Hindu thought, including Jesus’
Sermon on the Mount, Leo Tolstoy’s (1984) The Kingdom of God is Within You, and Henry
David Thoreau’s (2002) “Civil Disobedience,” Gandhi eventually concluded that
oppression is most effectively countered with nonviolent means of struggle.

Convinced that violent responses were morally wrong, but that submission was
unsatisfactory as well, Gandhi developed an alternative that aimed to avoid both ills.
Satyagraha (“clinging to the truth”) was his conceptualization of a spiritually inspired
form of resistance. The method, which was eventually applied by the masses in both
South Africa and India, resulted in considerable successes in both countries. Still,
Gandhi’s legacy has since reached far beyond those two countries with activists on
(p. 468) every continent adopting Gandhian tactics to press for democracy, human rights,

independence, and a host of other political goods, ranging from the local level to the
international one. Over the years, however, Gandhi’s emphasis on the moral aspect of
nonviolent resistance has been progressively marginalized (Chabot and Sharifi 2013).
What remains, however, is a powerful method of social and political change.

This chapter aims to introduce the reader to the phenomenon of civil resistance and the
academic research that accompanies it. To that end, I begin by exploring what civil
resistance is. Next, I survey some of the existing research on the subject. Third, I identify
the outcomes generated by movements employing civil resistance. Finally, I speculate on
how greater interaction between civil resistance studies and social movement research
should be able to advance our understanding of both subjects.

What is Civil Resistance?

Civil resistance is a form of contentious politics that eschews violent repertoires in favor
of nonviolent ones. Unarmed mobilization can be employed against virtually any type of
adversary, although the state usually features as the principal antagonist in most episodes
of civil resistance. While few, if any, major nonviolent social movements have managed to
completely avoid the use of violence, it is the clear preference for nonviolent tactics, not
an absolute devotion to them, that characterizes nonviolent mass mobilization. Since
states are sometimes inclined to resort to violence in the face of a sustained challenge
against them, there is always the risk that the civil resisters fail to maintain their

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Civil Resistance

nonviolent discipline and reciprocate state violence. Remarkably often, however,

movements have managed to remain predominantly nonviolent.

Gene Sharp, the most influential scholar on the topic, has defined civil resistance as “a
technique of action by which the population can restrict and sever the sources of power
of their rulers or other oppressors and mobilize their own power potential into effective
power” (2005: 39). Sharp’s understanding of civil resistance is based on a particular,
Gandhi-inspired “pluralistic” conception of power that deems rulers dependent on the
consent of the governed. Sharp’s contention is that no leader, regardless how powerful he
or she may seem, can retain power unless granted the cooperation of key social groups,
the ruler’s “pillars of support” (Sharp 2005: 35). For instance, no leader personally
represses protesters, with that task instead befalling the security forces under the ruler’s
control. Consequently, if the police and other coercive forces decide to withdraw their
support for the regime by refraining from repressing large gatherings, then the leader
has in one stroke lost his or her coercive powers. Civil resisters, the thinking goes, should
therefore seek to unravel the relationships on which the regime depends by compelling
the pillars of support to withdraw their cooperation from the government (Sharp 1973,
2005). This can be done either through acts of omission, that is, the refusal to perform
acts that one usually performs, such as go to work, or through commission, the
performance of acts one usually does not perform or is forbidden to perform, such
(p. 469) as demonstrations and marches (Sharp 2005: 41). Sharp identified 198

nonviolent methods that can weaken a regime through omission, commission, or a

combination of the two (Sharp 1973). The list has become famous in its own right and
suggests the nearly limitless variations of civil resistance–only the activists’ imagination
sets the boundaries for what nonviolent tactics can be devised.

Civil resistance has had a tremendous impact on the world, causing repressive regimes to
fall and allowing people to successfully claim their rights. Despite this the phenomenon
remains misunderstood in a variety of ways (Schock 2003, 2005). First, nonviolent action
is often equated with pacifism or passive resistance. While both of these concepts are
related to civil resistance, they differ in important ways. Most importantly, civil resistance
is neither passive nor conflict evading: civil resisters eschew violence, but they do not
eschew conflict. Indeed, nonviolent resistance is intended precisely to be used in, or even
to instigate, conflict situations. Second, a tactic’s absence of violence does not necessarily
make it an act of civil resistance. Conversing with an adversary is not a nonviolent action,
since it is neither a non-routine nor sustained activity. Also, institutionalized, routine
political actions, such as vote casting, do not qualify as civil resistance despite their
nonviolent character. Third, civil resistance does not require a moral commitment to
nonviolent ideals. On the contrary, many formerly violent activists have turned to civil
resistance for purely pragmatic reasons. There is thus no requirement for nonviolent
activists to be “good people” with just intentions. Finally, nonviolent resistance does not
mean that no violence will occur and that nobody will be hurt or die. On the contrary,
many nonviolent struggles have resulted in relatively large casualty figures for the simple

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Civil Resistance

reason that a movement’s adherence to nonviolent tactics does not guarantee that the
state, or any adversary for that matter, responds in kind (Sharp 1973: 70–71, 2005, 21–
22; Schock 2005: 6–12).

Civil Resistance Research

Although the twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history, it arguably also
witnessed more civil resistance than any preceding it. The diffusion of unarmed struggle
has generated substantial interest in the topic and given birth to an academic subfield.
While researchers have examined a plethora of issues pertaining to civil resistance, they
have been particularly inclined to understand why and how nonviolent movements
succeed.

The scholarship on civil resistance has progressed through several phases (Carter 2009;
Schock 2013). Early scholarship on nonviolent resistance often embraced the “principled”
Gandhian view of the method by accepting the religious/ideological foundations of both
the Indian independence movement and the American Civil Rights Movement.
Furthermore, it was not unusual for writers to focus on Gandhi specifically and,
importantly, on Gandhi’s belief that nonviolence should be used to make the world a
better place, not simply to emerge victorious from conflicts (Gregg 1935; Bondurant
1958; Brown 1972, 1977). The principled approach was however soon overtaken
(p. 470)

by a distinct interest in the political and strategic dimensions of civil resistance that has
since become a dominant feature of the subfield, even though researchers embracing
“principled nonviolence” continue to thrive and criticize the strategic turn (Dalton 1993;
Cortwright 2006; Chabot and Vinthagen 2007; Chabot and Sharifi 2013).

Sharp (1973) revolutionized the field with the publication of his three-volume The Politics
of Nonviolent Action in which he emphasized the strategic and pragmatic dimensions of
civil resistance. The power of nonviolent action, Sharp argued, stems not from its moral
superiority over violence, but rather from the fact that it is a powerful technique of
conflict behavior. Many scholars have since embraced Sharp’s focus on nonviolent
strategy and contributed to its growing prominence. Since the early 1990s, a number of
books and many articles have been published that take civil resistance
“campaigns”—“sequence[s] of strategic interactions in which the participants try to
pursue more or less known objectives” (Ackerman and Kruegler 1994: 10)—as their units
of analysis in order to dissect nonviolent activists’ strategic choices and their
consequences (Ackerman and DuVall 2000; Helvey 2004; Stephan and Chenoweth 2008;
Stephan 2009; Chenoweth and Stephan 2011). The conclusions generated by this strand
of research has largely been that nonviolent struggle can succeed in any political context
as long as the movement employs sounds strategy and manages to mobilize large
numbers of participants. The Sharpian school of civil resistance studies has exercised
great influence not only in academia, but also within the activist camp. Movement

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Civil Resistance

organizers from all over the world, including Burma (Beer 1999), Serbia (Ackerman and
Duvall 2000), and Egypt (Chabot and Sharifi 2013), have read Sharp’s writings and
employed them as civil resistance manuals, often to great effect.

But although nonviolent campaigns are frequently successful, many have also failed to
accomplish their objectives (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011). This outcome divergence has
led social movement and revolution scholars with an interest in nonviolent resistance to
apply insights from these related subfields to the study of civil resistance (Schock 2005;
Nepstad 2011; Ritter 2015). In particular, they have sought to add a structural dimension
to the actor-driven frameworks that dominate civil resistance scholarship. In one of the
earliest attempts to apply social movement theory to nonviolent resistance studies, Kurt
Schock (2005) analyzed six nonviolent campaigns that challenged the national
governments in South Africa, the Philippines, Burma, China, Nepal, and Thailand.
Drawing on political process models, Schock found that although activists’ strategic
choices and tactical execution represent the single most important factor in determining
whether a movement turns out to be successful or a failure, structural factors such as
political opportunities and international contexts matter as well.

Sharon Erickson Nepstad’s (2011) examination of “nonviolent revolutions” in China, East

Germany, Panama, Chile, Kenya, and the Philippines showed that the responses of armed
forces to civil resistance campaigns help explain the fate of unarmed movements.
Nepstad found that when security forces remain coherent and repress activists,
nonviolent movements tend to fall apart. However, if soldiers and police officers refused
to use overwhelming force against the protesters that often signaled that the regime was
in (p. 471) grave danger of collapse. Consequently, Nepstad argues that the use of civil
resistance is a potential explanation for security force behavior, since soldiers tend to be
disinclined to respond with violence unless attacked. Nepstad also shows that
international sanctions, often assumed to be harmful to authoritarian states, may in
actuality be beneficial to dictators as they can undermine the opposition movement’s
narrative and generate domestic support for the regime.

In an important contribution that breaks new ground in the study of civil resistance, not
least methodologically, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (2011) undertook the
immense task of analyzing over 300 violent and nonviolent campaigns for regime change,
the end of foreign occupation, or secession. Whereas research on civil resistance had
previously been almost exclusively qualitative in nature with a heavy emphasis on case
studies, Chenoweth and Stephan employed quantitative methods of analysis. As a result,
they were able to empirically show that nonviolent campaigns are on average more likely
to succeed than their violent counterparts. In fact, their “most striking finding is that
between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as likely to
achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts” (Chenoweth and Stephan
2011: 7). The authors explain the greater success rate of nonviolent campaigns by
pointing to their “participation advantage” over violent movements, concluding that civil
resistance “facilitates the active participation of many more people than violent

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Civil Resistance

campaigns, thereby broadening the base of resistance and raising the costs to opponents
of maintaining the status quo” (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011: 10–11).

Recently, Daniel Ritter (2015) has attempted to explain unarmed revolutionary success in
a more structural manner. Focusing on unarmed revolutions in the Middle East and North
Africa, Ritter draws on revolution theory to argue that both the activists’ use of
nonviolent tactics and certain regimes’ unwillingness to repress can be linked to long-
term historical processes. Authoritarian regimes that are well integrated into the Western
political system of trade, aid, and military collaboration may eventually find themselves
constrained by their rhetorical embrace of Western values, such as democracy and human
rights when challenged nonviolently by domestic opposition coalitions. Trapped by its
discursive, albeit hypocritical, espousal of democratic values, Western-aligned regimes
cannot resort to repression without risking the external, and indirectly internal, support
on which it depends. As a result they vacillate, which allows the revolutionary movement
to grow until it becomes nearly impossible to control.

The Outcomes of Civil Resistance

Civil resistance has been used throughout the world in many different types of struggles.
The most famous Western nonviolent campaign is probably the US Civil Rights
Movement, in which sit-ins, marches, and boycotts eventually put so much pressure on
the American government that it introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (McAdam 2009).
Other Western social movements that have relied primarily on nonviolent (p. 472)
methods of struggle include the women’s movement, the peace movement, and the global
justice movement (Clark 2009; Smith and Wiest 2012; Schock 2013).

While social movements in democratic countries often employ nonviolent methods in their
struggles, much of the academic study on nonviolent resistance has focussed on struggles
for maximalist objectives in non-democratic settings. For instance, Chenoweth and
Stephan’s (2008, 2011) large quantitative study examined movements that strove for
regime change, the end of foreign occupation, or secession. Similarly, Schock (2005),
Nepstad (2011), and Ritter (2015) studied nonviolent movements that either sought to
overthrow authoritarian regimes, or, at the very least, tried to challenge the state’s
monopoly on power.

One of the subjects most frequently addressed by civil resistance scholars is regime
change in non-democratic countries (Zunes 1994). Although unarmed tactics played
important parts in a few such occurrences prior to the late 1970s, for instance in
Guatemala and El Salvador in 1944 (Sharp 2005) as well as in Portugal in 1974–75
(Maxwell 2009), the practice of ousting authoritarian leaders through nonviolent
resistance has proliferated since the late 1970s. Following the example set by the
predominantly unarmed overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last “shah” of Iran, in
January 1979 (Goodwin 2001: 294–295; Foran 2005: 259), dictators and authoritarian

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Civil Resistance

regimes on virtually every continent have met the same fate. In countries like the
Philippines (Zunes 1999; Mendoza 2009), Chile (Huneeus 2009; Nepstad 2011), Thailand
(Satha-Anand 1999; Schock 2005), East Germany (Garton Ash 1990; Maier 2009),
Czechoslovakia (Garton Ash 1990; Ritter 2012), South Africa (Schock 2005; Lodge 2009),
Serbia (Ackerman and DuVall 2000), Ukraine (Bunce and Wolchik 2010), Tunisia, and
Egypt (Nepstad 2013; Ritter 2015), to mention a few of the most spectacular cases,
autocrats have fallen at the hands of unarmed revolutionaries. While these democratizing
movements assumed somewhat different forms due to a variety of contextual factors, they
still looked strikingly similar: Initially small groups of demonstrators helped others cross
the barrier of fear that had kept terrorized populations in check for years or even
decades. Once the crowds in the streets began to grow, so did the pressure on the state,
which eventually caused it to collapse. While the final outcome of these movements were
often disappointing to their protagonists (Chabot and Sharifi 2013)—for instance, Islamic
Iran is arguably more authoritarian than the state the revolution overthrew—the
accomplishment of the movements’ most pressing objectives can hardly be questioned,
and unarmed revolutionary movements have, as noted, more often than not been
successful in accomplishing political change on the national level (Chenoweth and
Stephan 2011).

In addition to their immediate achievements, civil resistance has also changed the face of
contentious politics. Whereas young and violent males have historically been the drivers
of revolutionary movements, nonviolent action has increased the potential for mass-
based, non-institutionalized political participation. Due to the immediate risks associated
with violently attacking the state, participants in such struggles need to be physically
strong and “biographically available,” that is, free of the responsibilities of family life.
Besides any normative concerns one might have with this arrangement, (p. 473) violent
movements have also tended to generate new repressive regimes (Karatnycky and
Ackerman 2005). Since virtually anyone can participate in a nonviolent movement,
regardless of age, gender, or physical ability, such forms of contention permit a greater
number of people to claim ownership of movements for change (Chenoweth and Stephan
2011: 10–11). Often, but not always, this participation advantage has lead to better long-
term outcomes as far as democratization and the spread of political and civil rights are
concerned (Karatnycky and Ackerman 2005).

Contribution to Social Movement Studies

For decades, civil resistance researchers examined their subject in isolation from the
closely related fields of social movement and revolutions studies. Even though students of
nonviolent action in effect examined social movements, the emphasis on a particular form
of resistance seemingly distracted analysts from drawing on the wealth of knowledge
available in the social movement literature. Despite investigating similar phenomena, the
development of unarmed resistance studies and social movement research have in some

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Civil Resistance

ways progressed in opposite directions of one another. Nonviolent action scholars have
only recently begun to broaden their investigations to permit structural factors to
complement the subfield’s heavy emphasis on agency and strategy (Schock 2013). Social
movement studies, on the other hand, have long been criticized for being overly
structural (Mahoney and Snyder 1999; Goodwin and Jasper 2004a, 2004b; Morris 2004).
The political process model that dominates the field emphasizes political opportunities
that make structural conditions primordial in their relationship with human agency. Even
though resource mobilization and framing approaches have mitigated this development,
social movement theory remains dominated by structural perspectives (Schock 2013).
Consequently, both social movement scholars and nonviolent resistance researchers can
learn a great deal from each other’s work. In fact, cross-fertilization seems necessary if
either field is to progress beyond their current states. Social movement studies can
benefit greatly from taking into greater account actors’ choices and tactics, which civil
resistance research has shown impacts a movement’s chances of success (Chenoweth and
Stephan 2011) and its long-term outcomes (Karatnycky and Ackerman 2005).

While these empirical correlations should be enough to entice students of social

movement to take seriously the importance of movement choices and, by extension,
agency in movements, more research is necessary in order to establish how and why
nonviolent tactics pose such a difficult challenge to repressive regimes. Here, it is civil
resistance scholarship that can benefit from insights from the fields of social movement
and revolution theory. Tactical choices certainly do matter, but as social movement
theorists have pointed out, those choices must be analyzed within their broader political
(p. 474) and social contexts (Meyer 2004: 54). It is no more misguided to assume that

humans play no role in social change than to argue that agents of change restructure
society as they please, when they please. A full understanding of civil resistance—or any
form of contentious politics—therefore requires researchers to place the strategic
dimensions of a movement in relation to the structural conditions that encapsulate it.

In addition to addressing the “agency deficit” in social movement studies, civil resistance
research can help counter another common criticism of the former, namely the tendency
to focus on social movement in the Western world. While social movement researchers
have dedicated most of their time to “new social movements” in the United States and
Europe, students of civil resistance have often examined popular mobilization against
repressive regimes in non-Western settings (Zunes, Kurtz, and Asher 1999; Roberts and
Garton Ash 2009; Schock 2005; Sharp 2005; Nepstad 2011; Ritter 2015). A plausible
explanation for the non-Western focus of civil resistance research is that only in non-
democratic setting does nonviolent action constitute deviant, non-institutionalized
behavior. Since peaceful protest is an accepted and routinized response to social
grievances in democratic countries, a radical conceptualization of civil resistance might
suggest that it cannot, by definition, occur in a democratic context. By virtue of being an
acceptable and normalized component of politics, authorized demonstrations are no more
“resistance” or “protest” than voting is. From this perspective, civil resistance can only

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Civil Resistance

occur in countries where such protests behavior is—either explicitly or implicitly—

forbidden.

Conclusion
This brief chapter has described the nature of civil resistance, surveyed the academic
study of the subject, explored its outcomes, and reflected on the subfield’s relationship to
social movement research. Due to its substantial impact on political and social
developments in many parts of the world, civil resistance warrants further research.
Students of social movements may find the literature on civil resistance a fruitful source
of inspiration, and combining the strategy-focus of civil resistance research with the more
structural approach of social movement studies should be of significant benefit to both
sub-disciplines.

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