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Abstract
This paper reports the results of the first cross-national examination of the impact of the geography of nonviolent contention on regime transitions. Nonviolent tactics ‘work’ in part by signalling the preferences of non-participants through the symbolism of participants, unlike violent tactics. This opens the way for nonviolent campaigns to exploit variations in social-spatial meaning to enhance the informativeness of dissent. Capital cities are one such symbolic place and the main prediction of this study is a positive relationship between large protests and regime transitions in the capital, but not elsewhere. I also predict a strong direct relationship between the proximity to the capital of fighting in civil wars, and regime transitions; no relationship to the proximity of nonviolent contention; and that the intensity of violent conflict impacts regime transitions in a way that is largely independent of location. Results from an analysis of episodes of violent and nonviolent conflict from 1990 to 2014 generally support these contentions.
Notes
1. Slater, ”Revolutions, Crackdowns and Quiesence.”
2. A seminal study is Buhaug and Gates; :Geography of Civil War.”
3. Buhaug et al., “It’s the Local Economy, Stupid”; Buhaug and Rød, “Local Determinants of African Civil Wars.”
4. Raleigh and Hegre, “Population Size, Concentration.”
5. Raleigh, “Violence against Civilians.”
6. Buhaug et al., ‘Geography, Rebel Capability.”
7. Schutte, “Geography, Outcome, and Casualties A Unified Model of Insurgency”; Grieg, “Rebels at the Gates.” The exception is when fighting rapidly approaches the capital.
8. Greig et al., “Win, Lose or Draw”; see also Quackenbush, “Centres of Gravity and War Outcomes.”
9. Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works; Celestino and Gleditsch, “Fresh Carnations or all Rose, no Thorn?”; Chenoweth and Ulfelder, “Can Structural Conditions Explain the Onset.”
10. Schock, Unarmed Insurrections.
11. See Tilly, “Spaces of Contention;” see also Martin and Miller, “Space and Contentious Politics”; Zhao, “Ecologies of Social Movements”, Traugott, “Capital Cities and Revolution”; Sewell Jr., “Space in Contentious Politics”; Nichols et al., Spaces of Contention; O’Loughlin, ”Responses: Geography as Space”; Taylor, “Places, Spaces and Macy’s.”
12. Sewell Jr, “Space in Contentious Politics.”
13. Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works.
14. This is similar to Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works, but success can be thought of more broadly. Giugni, “Was it Worth the Effort?”
15. Marshall, Gurr and Jaggers, PolityIV Project, 30.
16. For helpful reviews see Reiter, “Exploring the Bargaining Model of War”; Walter, “Bargaining Failures and Civil War.” See also Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War”; Slantchev, “Principle of Convergence in Wartime Negotiations;” Filson and Werner, “Bargaining Model of War and Peace.” For an application to protest see Ginkel and Smith, “So You Say You Want.”
17. This view of war was most famously articled by Clausewitz, On War.
18. Reiter, “Exploring the Bargaining Model of War.”
19. Slantchev, “Principle of Convergence in Wartime Negotiations”; Powell, “Bargaining and Learning while Fighting.”
20. Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works; Sharp, Waging Nonviolent Struggle.
21. DeNardo, Power in Numbers.
22. Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works; Lichbach, Rebel’s Dillemma.
23. Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works.
24. Landau-Wells, “Capital Cities in Civil Wars”; see also Clapham, Africa and the International System; Jackson, Quasi-States.
25. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa; Clapham, Africa and the International System; Herbst, States and Power in Africa.
26. Gordon, “Planning Twentieth Century Capital Cities.”
27. Kalyvas, “Urban Bias in Studies of Civil War.”
28. Hall, “Seven Types of Capital City.”
29. Cederman, Weidmann, and Gleditsch, “Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War”; Cunningham, “Understanding Strategic Choice.”
30. Landau Wells, “Capital Cities in Civil Wars.”
31. Buhaug, “Dude, Where’s my Conflict?”
32. Greig, “Rebels at the Gates.”
33. Exceptions might include strategic locations where the information contained in the outcome is enhanced.
34. Dahl et al., “Accounting for Numbers.”
35. DeNardo, Power in Numbers.
36. Trauchott, “Capital Cities and Revolution.”
37. Lohmann, “Dynamics of Information Cascades.”
38. Lohmann, “Dynamics of Information Cascades.”
39. Sutton et al., “Explaining Political Jiu-jitsu.”
40. Salehyan et al., “Social conflict in Africa.”
41. Boschee, ICEWS Coded Event Data.
42. Events of nonviolent contention were organised and spontaneous demonstrations, and limited and general strikes. Violent riots and armed attacks were removed.
43. For a discussion of the ICEWS data see Ward et al., “Comparing GDELT and ICEWS Event Data”; and for details of the CAMEO coding framework, see Schrodt, CAMEO Conflict and Mediation Event.
44. The SCAD and ICEWS data reflect differing data collection procedures. SCAD is human coded and relies primarily on Associated Press and Agence-France-Presse, while ICEWS is machine coding of a larger corpus of newswires.
45. Sundberg and Melander, “Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset.”
46. Marshall, Gurr and Jaggers, PolityIV Project.
47. Ibid., 30.
48. Hijmans, Williams, and Vennes, Geosphere.
49. A good example is the Egyptian Revolution.
50. The results remain significant if missing observations are omitted from the analysis.
51. Marshall, Gurr, and Jaggers, Polity IV Project. Democracies are countries scoring 6 or higher on a scale of −10 to + 10.
52. World Bank databank.
53. Carter and Signorino, “Back to the Future.”
54. Imai et al., Zelig; Liefeld, texreg.
55. For the ICEWS data, a ‘big’ protest is one with an average intensity level of 5 or more.
56. Box-Steffensmier and Jones, Event History Modelling.
57. Very similar results are obtained if we restrict the sample to Latin America and Africa for violent conflicts as well. These results were obtained by drawing 1000 simulated expected values in the Zelig package.
58. In a non-democracy with the median infant mortality rate, and no previous transitions.