Nonviolent resistance

• 1. Introduction

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  Nonviolent resistance is the practice of achieving social change through symbolic protests, civil disobedience, economic or political noncooperation, and other methods that deliberately refuse violence and the threat of violence. From 1966 to 1999, nonviolent civic resistance played a critical role in fifty of sixty-seven transitions from authoritarianism. That figure alone raises a set of urgent questions. What is it about refusing to fight that can bring down governments? How did ordinary people, from a small Maori village in New Zealand to a fish market in Liberia, discover that collective defiance without weapons could succeed where armies failed? And where did this tradition come from, stretching back well before the modern era?

• 2. Ancient Roots and Early Precedents

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  The Mohist philosophical school of China, active from around 470 to 391 BCE, formally disapproved of war. Living in a time of warring polities, the Mohists cultivated the science of fortification rather than conquest, a posture that reflected deep ethical objection to offensive violence.

  Around 26 to 36 CE, Jews in Judea demonstrated in Caesarea to protest Pontius Pilate's plan to place Roman military standards, bearing images of the emperor and the eagle of Jupiter, in Jerusalem. Both images were considered idolatrous. When Pilate surrounded the protesters with soldiers and threatened them with death, they replied that they were willing to die rather than see the laws of the Torah violated. He backed down.

  On the Chatham Islands, the Moriori people, a branch of the New Zealand Maori, developed a tradition of resolving disputes nonviolently. Their small population and limited resources made conventional war unsustainable, and nonviolent resolution became customary. In 1835, that tradition proved catastrophic: when 900 Maori invaded, most of the Moriori population of around 2,000 people were killed, their commitment to peace meeting an opponent who held no equivalent commitment.

  These early cases reveal a recurring tension in the history of nonviolent resistance: the refusal to use force can be both a principled moral stance and a practical vulnerability. That tension runs through every era that follows.

• 3. The Word 'Boycott' and Other Innovations

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  In a speech delivered in Ennis in 1879, Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell proposed a new tactic. When dealing with tenants who took farms from which another tenant had been evicted, he argued, neighbors should not resort to violence. Instead, everyone in the locality should simply shun them. The idea moved quickly from speech to practice.

  Captain Charles Boycott, the land agent of an absentee landlord in County Mayo, Ireland, tried to evict eleven tenants from his land. The Irish Land League organized a campaign of social ostracism against him in 1880. His workers stopped work in the fields, stables, and house. Local businessmen stopped trading with him. The local postman refused to deliver his mail. Boycott soon found himself isolated. The success of the campaign spread throughout Ireland and gave the English language a new word: to boycott.

  At Peterloo in England in 1819, a peaceful demonstration of 60,000 to 80,000 people, including women and children, had been organized with explicit rules: a prohibition of all weapons of offence or defence and a call to come armed with no other weapon but that of a self-approving conscience. Cavalry charged into the crowd with sabres drawn. Fifteen people were killed and 400 to 700 were injured. Newspapers expressed horror. Percy Shelley responded with his poem The Masque of Anarchy, glorifying nonviolent resistance, though the British government subsequently cracked down on reform through the Six Acts.

  The Education Act protests in the United Kingdom from 1903 to 1906 showed a different kind of cost. John Clifford, a Baptist minister, led a movement refusing to pay taxes established by the act, which Nonconformists believed unfairly supported Anglican and Catholic denominational teaching in schools. By 1906, over 170 men had been imprisoned for that refusal. The law was not changed. Yet the movement played a large part in the defeat of the Unionist government in the January 1906 election, demonstrating that nonviolent resistance could produce political consequences even when it failed to achieve its immediate goal.

• 4. Gandhi, Khan, and the Making of a Tradition

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  Mahatma Gandhi is the most prominent figure associated with nonviolent resistance. The United Nations marks October 2, Gandhi's birthday, as the International Day of Non-Violence. His leadership of the Non-cooperation movement of 1920 to 1922, and the Civil Disobedience movement of 1930 to 1934, brought mass tactics of boycotting British products, rejecting British-imposed taxes, and organizing strikes under a shared nonviolent discipline. Beyond independence, his nonviolence helped improve the status of Untouchables in Indian society.

  Abdul Ghaffar Khan built one of the most striking nonviolent organizations in history among the Pashtun people of the North Western Frontier Province, beginning in 1929. The organization he founded, Khudai Khidmatgar, meaning Servants of God, recruited over 250,000 unarmed members. They committed to two hours of daily community service and practiced nonviolent resistance to British Raj occupation. The fact that Khudai Khidmatgar came from a region widely associated with warrior culture made the scale of that commitment all the more striking.

  The March 1st Movement in Korea in 1919 became an inspiration for Gandhi's Satyagraha resistance and for many other nonviolent movements across Asia. Each of these movements was shaped by specific conditions, but they were also watching and learning from one another, a cross-pollination that researchers have confirmed: information on nonviolent resistance in one country can significantly affect nonviolent activism in others.

• 5. Ordinary People, Extraordinary Choices

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  In the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon during World War II, two pacifist local ministers, Andre Trocme and Edouard Theis, led the surrounding area's citizens to hide Jews being rounded up by the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy regime. They did this openly, in defiance of Vichy government orders. It is estimated that the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its neighboring areas saved between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews from certain death. A small garden and plaque on the grounds of the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel was dedicated to them.

  In 1942, Gandhi issued his call for immediate Indian independence, launching the Quit India Movement, formally known as Bharat Chhodo Andolan, in August of that year. Norwegian civil resistance during the same war took quieter forms: preventing the Nazification of the educational system, distributing illegal newspapers, and maintaining what resisters called an ice front of social distance from German soldiers.

  In Denmark, after the Wehrmacht's invasion, the Danish government adopted a policy described as negotiation under protest. The unofficial resistance embraced by many Danes included slow production, emphatic celebration of Danish culture, and bureaucratic quagmires.

  In 2003, women in Liberia began praying and singing in a fish market. That gathering grew into the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace and brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War. The movement required no weapons and no formal political structure. It required only the willingness of women to appear together and refuse to stop.

• 6. Singing, Chains, and Revolutions Without Armies

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  On the 23rd of August 1989, approximately two million people joined hands to form a human chain spanning 675.5 kilometres across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Known as the Baltic Way, it marked the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The three countries were still under Soviet rule. In later years, people acted as human shields to protect radio and television stations from Soviet tanks. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia regained their independence without almost any bloodshed.

  The broader Singing Revolution of 1989 to 1991 featured mass demonstrations of spontaneous singing in those same Baltic countries. The movement eventually gathered 4,000,000 people who sang national songs and hymns that had been strictly forbidden during the Soviet occupation, while local rock musicians played alongside them.

  In 2003, demonstrators led by Mikheil Saakashvili stormed a Parliament session in Georgia carrying red roses, giving the Rose Revolution its name and ousting President Eduard Shevardnadze. In 2004 and 2005, a series of sit-ins, civil disobedience, and general strikes marked the Orange Revolution in Ukraine following a presidential election marred by voter intimidation and electoral fraud.

  In Serbia, the civic youth movement Otpor, meaning Resistance, employed nonviolent struggle against Slobodan Milosevic from 1998 onward. Over the course of two years, Otpor spread across Serbia and attracted more than 70,000 supporters. They were credited for their role in the successful overthrow of Milosevic on the 5th of October 2000. Research confirms that these campaigns do not stay contained: nonviolent resistance diffuses spatially across borders as movements observe and borrow from one another.

• 7. Resistance and Its Limits

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  Nonviolent resistance is often confused with civil disobedience, but philosopher Berel Lang argues the two are distinct. Civil disobedience requires that an act violates the law, that it is performed intentionally, and that the actor willingly accepts punishment from the state. Acts of nonviolent political resistance need not meet any of those three conditions. Civil disobedience also aims at reform, not revolution, and typically disputes particular laws while still conceding the government's authority. Nonviolent resistance can aim at revolution and at overthrowing the government itself.

  Research shows that nonviolent movements can maintain broader public legitimacy by refraining from violence, but that public perception is not simply a matter of tactics. Studies found that protests led or dominated by women are generally seen as less violent than those led by men, though the effect depends on whether female protesters conform to or challenge traditional gender norms. The perceived violence of a movement also reflects the identity of its participants, not only what they do.

  The Civil Rights Movement in the United States from 1955 to 1968 demonstrated both possibilities. Studies of that era found that nonviolent activism tended to produce favorable media coverage and shifts in public opinion toward the issues organizers were raising. Violent protests, by contrast, generated unfavorable coverage and public desire to restore law and order. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and James Bevel were prominent leaders of the movement, both of them inspired by Gandhi's example.

  In Northern Ireland, the civil rights movement that ran from 1967 to 1972 used marches, pickets, sit-ins, and protests against discrimination in elections, employment, housing, and policing. After the violence of the Battle of the Bogside, the 1969 riots, and Bloody Sunday in 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association ceased operation and the conflict descended into the Troubles, which lasted until 1998. The history of nonviolent movements is not a history of guaranteed outcomes. It is a history of what people chose, and what that choice cost.