The scholarly literature on civil resistance has grown noticeably over the past few years. Influential books, such as Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Chenoweth and Stephan (Citation2011), have stimulated a whole new body of research on the topic. Scholars are increasingly studying civil resistance campaigns from a more empirical, theory-informed and analytical perspective. With this turn, a subject that was previously seen as largely descriptive and sometimes normative began to gain the attention of major journals in political science and related areas (see, for example, the Citation2013 Journal of Peace Research special issue ‘Understanding Nonviolent Resistance’ edited by Chenoweth and Cunningham). Today academics count not only on a diverse array of high-quality historical case studies (e.g. Ackerman & DuVall Citation2000; Bartkowski Citation2013), but also on cross-national datasets (e.g. Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes [NAVCO]) that allow for a more systematic study of the phenomenon. Just to provide an indication of how much traction civil resistance has gained within mainstream academic circles, there were not only individual papers but also over 40 papers and more than 10 panels devoted to discussion of various dimensions of the topic at the 2017 International Studies Association annual convention held in Baltimore.
This special issue enriches this growing literature. Its original contribution stems from its focus on nonviolent struggle in the context of armed conflict — a setting that presents proponents of civil resistance with particular challenges — as well as its examination of the links between this form of nonviolent action and peacebuilding and development when used in conflict-affected areas. To be sure, other bodies of literature have long paid heed to nonviolent struggle (for example, social movements research) as well as to the dynamics and processes that characterise armed conflicts (for example, international relations and peace and conflict studies). This collection of articles and briefings makes important progress in the much-needed task of bridging these fields, which, while studying similar phenomena, use different lenses and varying theoretical and analytical frameworks, often proceeding without engaging each other’s findings. The authors in this volume, in addition to documenting stories of nonviolent resistance in regions as diverse as Africa, South America, the Middle East and South Asia, explore some of the assumptions often made regarding the relationship between nonviolent action and civilian protection, the promotion of peace, good governance, and social justice.
Defining Civil Resistance
One of the pre-eminent challenges in the study of civil resistance is naming and defining the term. In fact, the choice of ‘nonviolence’ versus ‘civil resistance’ or ‘unarmed struggle’ reflects ideological, theoretical, and cultural debates over the meaning of the term. Schock, for example, defines civil resistance as ‘the use of methods of nonviolent action by civil society actors engaged in asymmetric conflicts with authorities not averse to using violence to defend their interests’ and defines nonviolent action as ‘non-routine and extra-institutional political acts that do not involve violence or the threat of violence’ (Schock Citation2015, 29). In contrast, Cortright (Citation2009, 27) notes that ‘an action is nonviolent if it avoids imposing physical harm and if it does not deprive people of necessities or lower standards below subsistence’, thus indicating a socio-economic dimension that might be linked to questions of development.
While such definitions may seem straightforward on paper, evaluating what is required for subsistence and what constitutes harm can be culturally determined. Not only does culture shape the scope of permissible actions for various populations in a society (i.e. men versus women, minorities versus majorities), but culture also impacts on the achievement of campaign goals since in addition to drawing on cultural slogans and symbols, ‘to be successful, nonviolent campaigns must be rooted in the local community structure’ (Hallward & Norman Citation2015, 27). As a result of differing local cultures and contexts, in this special issue, the terms ‘civil resistance’, ‘nonviolent resistance’ and ‘nonviolent action’ are often used interchangeably. Although the authors may vary in their terminology, they share the basic understanding of the phenomenon as the use of unarmed extra-institutional means against an opponent whose power, understood in the traditional sense, is superior. In keeping with its long tradition of examining local-level initiatives for peacebuilding and development, the articles in this issue of JPD explore how civil resistance is conceptualised and enacted in communities affected by war in the Global South and the Global North, and examine the differing dynamics across conflict settings.
Civil Resistance as a Vehicle for Peacebuilding and Development
The study and practice of civil resistance have long been linked implicitly with peacebuilding and development. Mohandas Gandhi engaged in the famous salt march to the sea to protest against economic injustice and sought to build sustainable development practices rooted in Indian traditions even as he protested about British rule. Martin Luther King Jr campaigned for fair housing and other socio-economic development issues as part of the nonviolent struggle of the US civil rights movement. Scholars use the concept of ‘prefigurative politics’ to discuss the ways in which nonviolent movements seek to ‘be the change you wish to see in the world’ through practices such as their linkage of means and ends and tendency toward horizontal rather than hierarchical decision-making (Smith in Hallward and & Norman, Citation2015, 191).
Likewise, civil resistance can instigate a constructive programme, establishing alternative development practices that are more just, such as Gandhi’s encouragement of Indians to weave their own clothes rather than buy British textiles. By incorporating an attention to matters of cultural and structural violence in addition to direct violence, civil resistance movements can help build societies oriented toward inclusive peacebuilding and development practices. While scholars are only beginning to explore the linkages between civil resistance and peacebuilding (Dudouet Citation2017) and little has been written on how civil resistance can be used to foment development, this special issue breaks new ground by underscoring the contributions that civilians can make to peacebuilding and development by engaging in civil resistance in the context of armed conflict.
The Specific Dynamics of Armed Conflict
To date, few works have explored the role of unarmed, organised, ordinary citizens seeking to bring about social and political change through nonviolent means in situations of armed conflict. Many studies of nonviolence and nonviolent mobilisation stem from peace studies and research on social movements, which often look at social dynamics or protest movements rather than violent conflict. While armed conflict has been studied by political scientists, this line of scholarship tends to focus on the dyadic competition between state and non-state armed actors, overlooking civil actors. In turn, the growing literature on civil resistance has generally failed to capture how armed conflicts operate on the ground. Besides interesting preliminary insights about the different drivers of nonviolent campaigns and civil war onset (Chenoweth & Lewis Citation2013), and the inclusion of countries that experienced war in large-N samples for cross-national comparisons, civil resistance scholars have not paid much attention to how the particularities of armed conflict shape the central processes of nonviolent struggle.Footnote2 Further, when civil resistance has been studied in the context of armed conflict, it often fails to capture the micro- and meso-dynamics and processes that impinge on the ways in which individuals and communities behave in conflict-affected areas (Arjona Citation2016; Balcells & Justino Citation2014). This special issue sets out to fill some of these gaps.
A first theme in this issue is that of everyday resistance. In contexts of armed conflict, civil resistance is often enacted as subtle acts of noncooperation at the micro-level. The first three articles in this issue exemplify this. Bruce Stanley’s piece on the urban logic of civil resistance in war-affected cities in the Middle East distinguishes between two forms of violence perpetrated by armed actors within the city — siege and direct occupation — and examines the different ways in which civilians resisted them. He documents ordinary acts that, in the context of armed conflict, become forms of resistance, such as ‘walking home under the sound of the ever-watching zanana (buzzing drone)’ in Gaza or old women and children marching to press Daesh to restore access to water pumps in Syria. Powerful examples of citizens using whatever urban spaces are available to confront siege and occupation illustrate how civil resistance can ‘partially protect, maintain and restore social relations’ and ‘supports cohesion and resilience’, paving the way for peacebuilding and development.
Likewise, in his article exploring the geographies of resistance in Palestine, Timothy Seidel expands the realm of what is considered civil resistance by adding categories of everyday resistance to the categories of nonviolence generally studied in Western and neoliberal approaches to peacebuilding and development. Through a case study of a Palestinian family farm located in a village between the Green Line separating internationally recognised Israel from the West Bank and the Separation Wall built by Israel, Seidel argues that refusing to be enemies, ‘cultivating farmland, herding sheep, and picking olives’ can undermine opponents’ power.
Minoo Koefoed also distinguishes the ‘everyday, low-key activities’ that are part of a constructive programme of civil resistance, from ‘more spectacular, nonviolent resistance practices like civil disobedience campaigns, strikes, protests, marches and demonstrations’. Drawing on two cases of alternative institutions established by the Kurdish movement to resist Turkish assimilation, she shows that this kind of constructive programme contributes to addressing some of the root causes of conflict and can enable oppressed groups to become key actors in their own development process.
A second major theme in this collection is civilian agency. Studies of armed conflicts, in the rare instances they feature civilians, commonly portray them as victims or resources to be plundered. While some scholars do consider civilian agency, they often seek to understand either the determinants of participation in and/or support for armed organisations, or the pathways to violent mobilisation. In contrast, the articles in this special issue demonstrate that there is more to civilian agency than collaboration with and participation in armed groups. Civilians adopt various strategies to navigate through war. Discussing nonviolent strategies in areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where a variety of actors have engaged in armed violence, Carla Suarez discusses the strategies employed by civilians to warn their families and friends regarding possible attacks. She argues that civilians not only learned to cope with and navigate the risky and uncertain setting of war, but effectively exploited these conditions to improve their security situation.
A third, transversal theme in this issue is the difficulty of defining what constitutes civil resistance in situations of armed conflict and what does not. In such settings, certain actions, absent knowledge of intent, may appear to be cooptation or cooperation with adversaries, especially when civil actors are caught between multiple armed groups in a complex array of power relationships. For instance, when two warring parties fight for control over the same locality, civilians’ opposition to one side might imply that they support the other side (Barter Citation2014). Krzysztof Krakowski’s article reflects this issue well. Building on quantitative evidence from the Colombian civil war, he explores how rural communities can resist displacement in the face of threats by armed groups. He finds that social cohesion and the prospect of protection from one faction against another are central predictors of a community’s decision to remain. However, while staying put can be a first-order condition for civil resistance and community cohesion can facilitate the organisation of a civil resistance campaign (Masullo Citation2017), avoiding displacement does not always prefigure civil resistance. In fact, staying put can be a good indication that communities will cooperate with one of the armed factions competing for control of the area (Steele Citation2009). This is especially likely to be the case if, as Krakowski notes, protection from violence by one armed group is one of the factors enabling them to stay.
To deal with this challenge, some authors in this issue (for example Seidel, Suarez, and Koefoed) have used interview data and immersive fieldwork to try to understand intent. Some, for example, investigate why civilians flee conflict zones or, on the contrary, resist displacement. If civilians flee simply to avoid violence, this is not resistance. However, if they do so as protest (a method referred to as hijrat in the civil resistance literature), we can talk of civil resistance. In the same vein, if civilians’ decision to stay put is linked to their intention to collaborate with one armed actor, this is not civil resistance. But if they so decide because they refuse to give in to the diktats of armed actors and subsequently engage in noncooperation, this is civil resistance.
Diversity of Targets and Goals
Although several of the pieces in this special issue explore cases of resistance against non-state actors (see below), much of the literature defines civil resistance as a popular challenge against a state relying on tactics that fall outside the defined and accepted institutional channels (Chenoweth & Stephan Citation2011; Schock Citation2005; Svensson & Lindgren Citation2011). D.B. Subedi and Prakash Bhattarai look at how the alliance between mainstream political parties and the Maoist guerrillas in Nepal promoted and empowered the people’s movement that overthrew the authoritarian monarchy, and underscore how this movement paved the way for a negotiated end to the war. While various authors (e.g. Chenoweth and & Stephan, Citation2011) have found evidence that nonviolent resistance movements against dictatorships are more likely to yield democratic regimes in the future than violent resistance movements, Subedi and Bhattarai point to a different type of legacy in the context of armed conflict: when a civil resistance movement persuades an insurgent group to join it and opt for nonviolent resistance instead of armed revolution, it can pave the way for peace.
A fourth theme emerging in this special issue is the importance of considering non-state and sub-state actors. The briefings by Shane Barter, Abdullah Al-Jabassini and Oliver Kaplan, as well as Suarez’s article discussed above, reveal that the targets of the claims made by civilians living in war zones are commonly de facto authorities other than the state: that is, non-state armed groups. This is to be expected, as a defining feature of internal armed conflict is the fragmentation of space and authority, which leads to non-state actors becoming agents of repression and even governance. Both Barter and Al-Jabassini look at civil resistance against rebel rulers, challenging scholars and practitioners to consider the ways in which civilians engage in civil resistance in areas ruled by non-state armed groups, not simply the state. Barter discusses how civilians navigate their way under rebel rule, and, counterintuitive though it may sound, can shape the behaviour of heavily armed groups by collectively engaging in civil resistance. He conceptualises civilian strategies — which include flight and voicing grievances — and illustrates them with examples from Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Al-Jabassini investigates how civilians resisted forced conscription by the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD) in areas under its control in Northern Syria by engaging in ‘protests, threats of self-immolation, raising rivals’ flags and protest migration’. Additionally, reflecting the above discussion, the author points ‘to the need to consider intent as a key factor to distinguish acts of civil resistance’.
A fifth theme is the importance of objectives that fall far short of the maximalist aims of regime change, ending foreign occupation, or secession, that are often featured in the literature on civil resistance. Although some pieces in the special issue, including the briefing by Benjamin Naimark-Rowse comparing three nonviolent movements in Sudan, discuss maximalist aims, this special issue reminds us not to overlook other goals, such as protection from violence, autonomy from oppressive rule, or the maintenance of community cohesion. Some of these goals are key for peacebuilding and development in the long run. Just as several articles explore lesser-studied forms of civil resistance, the briefing by Oliver Kaplan underscores the power of rhetorical traps to achieve specific (relatively small) goals in comparison to regime change or secession. He asserts that ‘just as insurgents use guerrilla warfare tactics against state forces to avoid disadvantageous conventional engagements, so too can civilians level the playing field against belligerents by using words instead of weapons’. Using examples from the Philippines, Colombia, and Syria, he illustrates and begins theorising one of many tools of resistance available to civilian populations.
Lastly, reflecting the journal’s focus on peacebuilding and development, the papers in this issue reveal that civil resistance is not only relevant because of what it does during war. It can also leave enduring legacies. The experience of civil resistance can better equip communities to actively contribute to peacebuilding, for example through facilitating the social reintegration of former combatants in their areas (Mouly et al. Citation2017), or by assisting displaced communities to return to their homelands (Masullo Citationforthcoming). As Koefoed suggests, civil resistance can reduce civilians’ dependency on oppressive structures, enabling them to become agents in their own processes of social and political change and to build a desirable alternative to the dominant order. Further, as Subedi and Bhattarai point out, it can contribute to a future of peace where guns are no longer necessary to transform the state.
Concluding Remarks: Expanding Our Research Agenda
This special issue makes four significant contributions, and calls for an expansion of our research agenda. First is its emphasis on local-level dynamics contrary to much of the work on civil resistance stimulated by Chenoweth and Stephan, which uses aggregate, cross-national data. Although appropriate for some research questions, aggregate country-level data sacrifices levels of nuance that are central for understanding how armed conflicts unfold on the ground (Justino et al. Citation2014; Kalyvas Citation2008). This is problematic as the central processes of civil resistance in armed conflict commonly play out at the local level. This is why, irrespective of its approach and methodology, each contribution to this issue except one uses a subnational lens. For example, Suarez compares two communities in the Kivu Provinces in the DRC, Stanley analyses how civil resistance unfolds in different cities affected by war across the Middle East, Seidel focuses on the case of one Palestinian family farm, and Krakowski works with a sample of 224 rural communities in 17 municipalities of Colombia.
Second, this collection shows that we can approach the subject successfully from a plurality of perspectives and with different types of data. For example, whereas Suarez takes an interpretivist approach, Krakowski uses a rational-choice framework anchored in game theory and Naimark-Rowse uses a comparative case study. While most papers present first-hand data collected during immersive fieldwork, others employ archival and historical data, as well as survey data.
Third, this special issue refines and broadens existing work on civil resistance in the context of armed conflict by calling for an expanded conceptualisation of what counts as civil resistance. Most of the available scholarship on the topic — including that by us, the guest editors — with few exceptions, focuses on some of the more sophisticated and visible campaigns of nonviolent resistance. Unintentionally, this has raised the bar of what is to be considered civil resistance. Instead, various pieces in this issue reveal that less overt and more subtle responses can constitute forms of civil resistance. This is the case, for example, of civilians deceiving or exploiting armed groups in the DRC that Suarez reports, that of the Nassar family planting trees and picking olives described by Seidel or that of the community of Beit Sahour buying cows mentioned by Stanley. The same goes for civilians’ attempts to strategically and innovatively persuade armed groups to behave differently by using rhetorical traps in Kaplan’s briefing.
Fourth, this issue expands the geographical scope of our empirical base. To date, most case studies of civil resistance in the context of armed conflict stem from Colombia and the Philippines, and more recently Syria. The papers collected here, still featuring these countries, include the DRC, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Nepal, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey and Yemen. Further, the contribution by Naimark-Rowse reminds us that one-third of all campaigns of civil resistance around the world from 1945 to 2006 took place in Africa. This is particularly relevant for the study of civil resistance in armed conflicts, since the majority of armed conflicts are currently concentrated in Africa (Kalyvas & Balcells Citation2010). Thus, reorienting the study of nonviolence to include areas under-studied can open avenues for critical new scholarship on the topic.
MAIA CARTER HALLWARD is Professor of Middle East Politics in the School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding, and Development. Her research interests include the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, human rights, and the role of religion in politics. She has published four books focusing on the topic of nonviolent resistance, including Understanding Nonviolence (Polity Press 2015), co-edited with Julie M. Norman.
JUAN MASULLO holds a PhD from the European University Institute and is a research fellow at the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence, Yale University. His academic interests include civil wars — with an emphasis on civilian agency and civilian protection — collective action, civil resistance and social movements and, more broadly, contentious politics.
CÉCILE MOULY is a research professor specializing in peace and conflict studies at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) Ecuador as well as being a practitioner in the field. She holds a PhD in International Studies from Cambridge University. Her research interests include civil resistance in the context of armed conflicts and the role of civil society in peacebuilding.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
2 Some (very recent) exceptions are: Arjona (Citation2015), Barter (Citation2015), Idler et al. (Citation2015), Kaplan (Citation2013; Citation2017), Masullo (Citation2015; Citation2017), Mouly, Garrido and Idler (Citation2016), and Mouly, Hernández and Garrido (Citation2016).
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