Civil Resistance

Civil resistance is political action that relies on the use of nonviolent resistance by civil groups to challenge a particular power, force, policy or regime. Civil resistance operates through appeals to the adversary, pressure and coercion: it can involve systematic attempts to undermine the adversary's sources of power, both domestic and international. Forms of action have included demonstrations, vigils and petitions; strikes, go-slows, boycotts and emigration movements; and sit-ins, occupations, and the creation of parallel institutions of government. Civil resistance movements' motivations for avoiding violence are generally related to context, including a society's values and its experience of war and violence, rather than to any absolute
ethical principle. Cases of civil resistance can be found throughout history and in many modern struggles, against both tyrannical rulers and democratically elected governments.
The phenomenon of civil resistance is often associated with the advancement of democracy. It is not easy to devise a method of proving the relative success of different methods of struggle. Often there are problems in identifying a given campaign as successful or otherwise. In 2008 Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth produced Why Civil Resistance Works, the most thorough and detailed analysis of the rate of success of civil resistance campaigns, as compared to violent resistance
campaigns. After looking at over 300 cases of both types of campaign, from 1900 to 2006, they concluded that "nonviolent resistance methods are likely to be more successful than violent methods in achieving strategic objectives." Their article noted particularly that "resistance campaigns that compel loyalty shifts among security forces and civilian bureaucrats are likely to succeed." The evidence of several of the 2011 uprisings, on the other hand, appears to provide contrasting pathways by which this logic may fail to materialize, with splits in the armed forces contributing towards civil war in Libya and Syria, and a shift in armed forces loyalty in Egypt failing to contribute towards enduring democratic reform.
Criticisms of the central thesis of Why Civil Resistance Works have included forming judgement about whether a campaign is a success or failure is inherently difficult: the answer may depend on the time-frame used, and on necessarily subjective judgments about what constitutes success. Some of the authors' decisions on this are debatable. Similar difficulties arise in deciding whether a campaign is violent or non-violent, when on the ground both strategies may co-exist in several
ways. Regimes transitioning from autocracy to democracy tend to be highly unstable, so an initial success for a movement may be followed by a more general failure. Perhaps, more generally, sufficient account is not taken of the possibility that violence often takes place in circumstances that were already violent and chaotic, stacking the odds against any successful outcome for violence.Some leaders of civil resistance struggles have urged the use of non-violent methods for primarily ethical reasons, while others have emphasized practical considerations. Some have indicated that both of these types of factor have to be taken into account – and that they necessarily overlap. In his chapter on "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" Martin Luther King gave a notably multi-faceted account of the various considerations, experiences and influences that constituted his "intellectual odyssey to nonviolence". By 1954 this had led to the intellectual conviction that "nonviolent resistance was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their quest for social justice." In one of her BBC Reith Lectures, first broadcast in July 2011, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy campaigner, stated: "Gandhi's teachings on non-violent civil resistance and the way in which he had put his theories into practice have become part of the working manual of those who would change authoritarian administrations through peaceful means. I was attracted to the way of non-violence, but not on moral grounds, as some believe. Only on practical political grounds." Furthermore, peaceful resistance to law positively impacts a free society because we the people stand up for our rights.