A brief overview of civil resistance studies

  1. Key terms
  2. Key figures in study of strategic nonviolence
  3. Key civil resistance & mass protest training organizations
  4. Further reading

Key terms:

Adherents of principled nonviolence believe that practicing nonviolence is a form of moral commitment; the idea is close to that of pacifism.

Yet, as This Is An Uprising describes, “many great innovators have arrived at the same conclusion: nonviolence must be wedded to strategic mass action if it is to have true force in the world.” That combination is called strategic nonviolence – in essence, nonviolent tactics purposefully used in a campaign against repressive forces.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a man named Gene Sharp was studying Gandhi’s work in India and found evidence that most participants were using strategic rather than principled nonviolence - they did it because it worked, not out of a deep ethical commitment.

Sharp was troubled by his discovery, but realized it presented a great opportunity – “it meant that large numbers of people who would never believe in ethical or religious nonviolence could use nonviolent struggle for pragmatic reasons” (2003 interview, as quoted in _TIAU _p4).

Finally, in an academic setting, the idea of strategic nonviolence is now more commonly called civil resistance studies - a term coined by academics influenced by Sharp, who himself was moving away from using the term “nonviolence.” In order to break from the school of thought commonly associated with pacifists, he eventually stopped using the word “nonviolence” in favor of adjective forms as in “nonviolent action” or “nonviolent conflict.”

According to Stephen Zunes, a professor at USF and expert in the field, lectures on lectures on nonviolent movements took place almost exclusively in religion and ethics courses before Gene Sharp came along. That topic slowly moved into sociology, and “today, the study of nonviolent conflict and civil resistance is a respectable subfield within political science and strategic studies” (TIAU p16).

Key figures in the study of strategic nonviolence

This is meant to be a basic description of some key milestones and figures in the study of what is now called “civil resistance.” This is by no means a history of all of those figures or the people who actually brought civil resistance into action, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. – who was both mobilizer and student of strategic nonviolence. Primarily, these figures have been the strongest influence on the Ayni Institute’s work.

Mohandas Gandhi

While Gandhi was not the first to employ nonviolent action, his work in India came to shape the usage of strategic nonviolence ever since. “Both King and Sharp saw themselves as standing in his shadow,” the Englers write in This Is An Uprising. “[Gandhi’s campaigns] suggested the enormous potential of a mode of political engagement that was only starting to influence world affairs.” Gandhi sometimes referred to nonviolence as a developing science and titled his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In early 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. met James Lawson, who has studied unarmed resistance in India. King begged Lawson, who was a graduate student, to leave school and join the civil rights movement. It was only by 1963 that King himself had become convinced it was time for a campaign that could be “anticipated, planned and coordinated from beginning to end” using the principles of nonviolent conflict - in Birmingham, Alabama (TIAU p13).

Gene Sharp

In 1953, Gene Sharp had just graduated from a master’s program in sociology at Ohio State University, planning to write a book about Gandhi in New York City, Instead, he ended up serving over nine months in prison for refusing to be drafted into the Korean War. Today, Sharp runs a research group called the Albert Einstein Institution in East Boston, and is known as a prominent social movement theorist.

His 93-page pamphlet, From Dictatorship to Democracy, was written in 1993 to help Burmese dissidents use nonviolent action against the ruling military junta. Then, it played a part in the Serbian student revolution against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. It was spread through circles of activists during uprisings in Georgia and the Ukraine in 2003 & 2004 and downloaded in Arabic during the 2011 protests in Tunisia and Egypt.

In essence, his consequential idea was a simple one: “that nonviolence should not be simply a moral code for a small group of true believers to live by. Rather, Sharp came to argue that nonviolent conflict should be understood as a political approach that can be employed strategically, something that social movements can choose because it provides an effective avenue for leveraging change” (TIAU p3).

The modern field of studies of “civil resistance” came out of Sharp’s new principles.

Sharp also created the list of “198 methods of nonviolent action,” originally presented in The Politics of Nonviolent Action. He started collecting examples of different forms of resistance around 1960, documenting approaches put into practice by others.

Sharp essentially decided to study nonviolent resistance when he saw that activists in different countries and time periods were essentially reinventing the wheel. “No systematic study existed that might illustrate core principles of launching unarmed uprisings” - so he made that his mission (_TIAU _p15).

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan

Dr. Erica Chenoweth is Professor & Associate Dean for Research at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and co-author of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2011).

Co-author Dr. Maria Stefan currently directs the Program for Nonviolent Action at the U.S. Institute for Peace. Earlier, Stephan directed policy and research at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). She simultaneously taught courses on human rights and civil resistance at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and American University’s School of International Service.

Their research surveying campaigns of resistance from 1900 to 2006 produced, according to reviewers, the first major scholarly book that makes a well-supported case that nonviolent resistance is more effective than armed resistance in overthrowing regimes.

Using statistical analysis and case studies, they found nonviolent civil resistance movements that gained at least 3.5% of the population as active supporters were, each time, successful in overthrowing dictatorial regimes. “They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment.”

Mark and Paul Engler

Mark Engler, a writer based in Philadelphia, is an editorial board member at Dissent, a contributing editor at Yes! Magazine, and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books).

Paul Engler is founding director of the Center for the Working Poor, based in Los Angeles. He worked for more than a decade as an organizer in the immigrant rights, global justice, and labor movements. He is a co-founder of the Ayni Institute and the Momentum Training, which instructs hundreds of activists each year in the principles of effective protest.

They are co-authors of This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century (Nation Books, 2016). From protests around climate change and immigrant rights, to Occupy, the Arab Spring, and #BlackLivesMatter, a new generation is unleashing strategic nonviolent action to shape public debate and force political change. When mass movements erupt onto our television screens, the media consistently portrays them as being spontaneous and unpredictable. Yet, in this book, Mark and Paul Engler look at the hidden art behind such outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest.

Carlos and Ayni

To be filled in.

Key civil resistance & mass protest organizations (training & research):

  • James Lawson Institute (domestic training)

    • Note: ICNC is the research origin (international training = Fletcher)

  • Highlander (domestic)

  • Momentum / Ayni Institute

  • Rhize (international & domestic)

  • Canvas (international)

  • Training for change (domestic)

What led us to do this work:

See “why we created this” for more on what led us to create this website as a contribution to students and teachers of civil resistance.

Further reading:

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