Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nonviolent resistance is the practice of achieving social goals, including political change, through symbolic protests, civil disobedience, economic or political noncooperation, satyagraha, and constructive program, while refraining from violence and the threat of violence. It is sometimes called nonviolent action or civil resistance.
Mahatma Gandhi is the most widely recognized figure associated with nonviolent resistance; the United Nations marks his birthday, October 2, as the International Day of Non-Violence. Other prominent advocates include Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Martin Luther King Jr., Lech Walesa, Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Nelson Mandela, and Gene Sharp, among many others named in the historical record.
Philosopher Berel Lang argues they are distinct categories. Civil disobedience requires that the act violates a law, is intentional, and that the actor willingly accepts state punishment. Acts of nonviolent resistance need not meet any of those conditions. Civil disobedience also aims at reform within an existing government's authority, while nonviolent resistance can aim at revolution.
From 1966 to 1999, nonviolent civic resistance played a critical role in fifty of sixty-seven transitions from authoritarianism. The Singing Revolution led to the Baltic countries restoring independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and the Rose Revolution in Georgia was brought about through nonviolent resistance in 2003.
The Baltic Way took place on the 23rd of August 1989, when approximately two million people joined hands to form a human chain spanning 675.5 kilometres across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The demonstration marked the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and occurred while all three countries were still under Soviet rule.
The word boycott derives from Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent in County Mayo, Ireland, who was subjected to organized social ostracism by the Irish Land League in 1880 after attempting to evict eleven tenants. Following a speech by Charles Stewart Parnell in Ennis in 1879 proposing shunning as a tactic, Boycott's workers, tradespeople, and the local postman all refused to serve him, and the campaign's success spread the tactic and the term throughout Ireland.