Rethinking Nonviolent Resistance in an Age of State Violence & Authoritarianism

• In Event: Violent and Nonviolent Resistance: Tactical Choices and Practical Consequences

Abstract

Nonviolent protest enjoys a normative advantage over violent resistance tactics and strategies, and since the pivotal work of Chenoweth and Stephan (2011), scholars and commentators have argued in favor of nonviolent resistance as more effective than violent resistance. Yet there are both normative and empirical concerns about the public claim for nonviolence’s effectiveness and its deployment in critiquing movements or prescribing strategies to them, especially in an age of extreme power disparities between states and societies and rising authoritarianism around the globe. This paper lays out critiques of contemporary arguments for nonviolent resistance, as well as the continuing potential downsides of violent resistance, drawing on political theory and activist, journalistic, and academic accounts of resistance movements around the globe and across the 20th and 21st Centuries, tracing changes in perceptions and advocacy of nonviolent and violent resistance over time.

I develop three key points of critique. First, calls for nonviolence frequently elide or even ignore the strength and violence of the state and its lack of restraint in attacking its opponents. State actors and their supporters will always call opponents violent, and even opposition members may chide or even vilify for throwing a water bottle or breaking a window and undermining calls for nonviolence, while trained state forces attack civilians with chemical, ‘less lethal,’ and military-grade weapons. This is especially important in a time where the heyday of successful nonviolent resistance movements through the end and aftermath of the Cold War has given way to authoritarian repression and military cooptation of resistance movements. Leaders such as Maduro in Venezuela, Ortega in Nicaragua, and Lukashenko in Belarus have shown that repression can allow leaders to maintain power against mostly nonviolent resistance movements, even in the face of massive loss of popularity and economic collapse, by keeping security forces’ support. International pressure or support are considered crucial for nonviolent resistance movement success, yet leaders in the US and Europe have proven increasingly unwilling to forcefully support protest movements, while authoritarian powers like China, Russia, and Turkey help prop up dictators and block action in support of dissidents.

Second, though there are hundreds of options for nonviolent resistance (e.g. Sharp 1973), physical mass protest and resistance in the streets (whether nonviolent or violent) remains the most crucial tactic for resistance movements to demonstrate strength, challenge state control, and create protest cascades through solidarity, convincing bystanders to become participants.

Finally, there is a lack of nuance in discussions of resistance movements and violence. There is a need to make clearer distinctions in academics’ coding and in public discourse between organized armed violence and unarmed collective violence (Kadivar and Ketchley 2018). Movements discussed and promoted as nonviolent, for instance the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan revolution, in fact featured significant lower-level violence with fists, stones, and fire. More broadly, discussing resistance movements as “nonviolent” or “violent” ignores the potential for the violent tactics of ‘radical flanks’ to help more nonviolent actors achieve success and overlooks the nonviolent activities in which armed actors engage.

I acknowledge the significant potential downsides of violent resistance in backfiring and leading to popular revulsion or more extreme state repression; violent actors sidelining advocates of nonviolent resistance in the broader opposition; and the enduring normative appeal of nonviolent tactics. In conclusion, however, I argue that the balance of tactics among actors in a resistance movement should result from an organic, localized process in which neither advocates of nonviolence nor violence necessarily have a greater claim to legitimacy, and that outside actors should exercise caution in discussing the assumptions and limitations behind research or a policy stance and how it does or does not apply in a particular context.

Author

• Kai Massey Thaler, University of California, Santa Barbara