The Spread of Non-Violent Tactics

• In Event: The Determinants of Violent and Nonviolent Conflict

Abstract

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the color revolutions and the Arab Spring all exemplify how non-violent campaigns tend to spread across countries. While the field has established that there is a general tendency for large-scale campaigns to diffuse across borders (see e.g. Gleditsch and Rivera, 2015), we lack research on the specific micro-mechanisms that explain this diffusion. To this end, we investigate the effect of how specific non-violent tactics (economic noncooperation, protest and demonstration, nonviolent intervention, social noncooperation and political noncooperation) applied by self-determination organizations between 1960 and 2005 diffuse both within and across countries. We present a novel argument showing how tactics diffuse across organizations, and establish that both distance and outcome matters for the size of this effect. We argue that the tendency for organizations to learn and copy from each other, particularly when observing the success of other organizations applying non-violent tactics, partly explains the increase in use of non-violent tactics across self-determination organizations since the 1990s. 

Authors

• Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, University of Maryland, College Park

• Marianne Dahl, PRIO / NTNU

• Anne Christine Fruge', University of Maryland, College Park

• Katherine M. Sawyer, Stony Brook University