Istanbul, Turkey
July 26 - 27, 2010
If you would like to view the PowerPoint presentations from the workshop, please send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it offering more details about your professional background and the purpose behind your request. We will then send you an enrolment key that you can use to access ICNC’s E-Classroom: http://civilresistancestudies.org/
The two-day workshop was divided into nine sessions, each covering a different aspect of nonviolent struggle. All sessions were available for remote participation via webinar to 30 academics that were not able to attend the workshop. Sessions included:
1. The Strategic Dynamic of Civil Resistance
Presenter: Jack DuVall
Monday, July 26 / 9:00am - 10:15am
The modern practice of civil resistance sprang from ideas about the underlying nature of political power that began to be framed about 150 years ago. As pioneered by Gandhi and adopted by scores of movements and campaigns for rights and justice in the 20th century, strategies of civil resistance have exhibited a simple common dynamic, propelled historic changes -- and imparted certain political and social properties to the societies they often transformed. The superior record of the effectiveness of these nonviolent strategies in liberating oppressed people, when compared to that of violent insurgency or revolt, has been stunning -- and suggests why political violence could be largely displaced in the future.
2. Power, Consent, Mobilization, Backfire
Presenters: Dr. Kurt Schock, Howard Clark,
Monday, July 26 / 10:30am - 11:30am
These four concepts critical for the understanding of work of nonviolent movements are examined in this session, with examples illustrating the trajectory of organizing and building a diverse, representative mass movement; the way in which broad unity with a range of allies is constructed; and the nature of leadership. This session will also look at the loyalty of security forces to a government as a critical factor for nonviolent movements. What are the circumstances in which civil resistance can reduce the legitimacy of a regime in the eyes of its citizens? What is "backfire" and where has it been used successfully by nonviolent movements? What examples are there of nonviolent movements effectively dividing the loyalties of sections of the security forces?
3. Strategic Planning and Tactical Choices
Presenter: Dr. Maciej Bartkowski
Monday, July 26 / 11:30am - 12:30pm
Strategic planning and tactical choice are essential considerations in effective civil resistance. This session will offer a strategic framework with which to analyze civil resistance movements. It will also examine the diversity of tactics available to civil resisters, and explore issues involved in tactical choice, success and failure.
4. Frames of Civil Resistance: Skills/Agency vs. Conditions/Structure
Presenters: Dr. Kurt Schock, Howard Clark
Monday, July 26 / 1:30pm - 3:00pm
Civil resistance movements are often analyzed from the perspective of conditions and structures that lead to their emergence and influence their trajectories and outcomes. What is often overlooked in this analysis is the role of skills, agency, and strategic choice in determining movement success or failure. This session will explore the role of skills/agency and structure/conditions in impacting the outcome of civil resistance movements, and provide points of intersection and synthesis between these two analytical perspectives.
5. Historical and Contemporary Cases of Civil Resistance
Presenters: Dr. Stephen Zunes, Vanessa Ortiz, Manish Thapa
Monday, July 26 / 3:15pm - 5:00pm
Vanessa Ortiz, Palestinian Popular Resistance
Through the frame of skills and conditions a brief historical overview of Palestinian popular resistance during the First Intifada (1987-1990) will be offered and their strategy and tactics will be compared to today's growing popular resistance campaigns in the West Bank. The practice of resistance is an important part of Palestinian history, and the presentation will help provide some analysis of strategy and tactics (or the lack of) being employed by popular committee leaders against increasingly repressive conditions.
Manish Thapa, From Guns to People’s Power: Transformation of Maoists’ Violent Strategy to Non-Violent Persuasion in Nepal
Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) – Maoists launched a violent insurgency (so called “people’s war”) in 1996 to establish a communist republic but ten years later in 2006 they ended it by accepting multiparty democracy through unarmed civilian resistance; their armed struggle targeted the parliamentary system but they are now working alongside their former enemies. After 10 years of their rural armed insurgency their transformation from a violent revolutionary to nonviolent force helped Maoists achieve all their political ambitions including bringing down the 240 year-old Monarchy, establishment of the republic and their own transformation into a powerful political force capable of standing alongside and sometimes overshadowing Nepal's major established political parties. Nepal’s Maoists are a prominent example of an armed group that has renounced violent strategies and adopted nonviolent actions to fulfill their political goals. This case study will uncover the transition of Maoists from violent revolutionaries to nonviolent politicians.
Dr. Stephen Zunes, Nonviolent Resistance in Bolivia and Philippines
This segment examines two important case studies of successful nonviolent struggle against right-wing U.S.-backed dictatorships in the Philippines and in Bolivia. In Bolivia, protracted nonviolent struggle in the 1977-82 period led by trade unionists, democratic opposition parties, the Catholic Church, along with indigenous and peasants organizations forced the downfall
of three military dictatorships and the restoration of democracy to this poor South American country. In the better-known Filipino case, the dramatic People Power uprising in greater Manila against the Marcos regime in February 1986 toppled that entrenched regime, in a movement led by opposition political leaders backed by the Church and reformist elements in the military and business community, building on years of grassroots nonviolent resistance against policies of the dictatorship.
6. Misconceptions and Controversies
Presenters: Dr. Stephen Zunes, Dr. Kurt Schock, Howard Clark
Monday, July 26 / 5:15pm - 6:45pm
This module examines the major misconceptions and controversies of strategic nonviolent action and civil insurrections. Topics addressed will include the role of charismatic leaders, the degree of influence by foreign governments, as well as the differences between nonviolent action and traditional pacifism, the role of coercion and persuasion, considerations of class, ideology, the nature of the opponent, and the place of civil resistance in conflict transformation (and vice versa).
7. Civil Resistance and Democratic Transition
Presenters: Dr. Maciej Bartkowski, Dr. Stephen Zunes
Tuesday, July 27 / 9:00am - 10:15am
Does the use of civil resistance create long-lasting effects on civil society and political life? Does participation in broad-based nonviolent movements instill democratic values, which make democracy more sustainable after a transition? These and other questions will help explore what kind of social capital may be created by nonviolent movements. The presentations will focus on the cases of the Polish Solidarity movement in communist Poland and anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and their residual effects on the societies and politics in the immediate and long term perspectives.
8. Areas of Research (Part One)
Tuesday, July 27 / 10:30am - 12:30pm
Group One: Radical Flank Effect; Land Reform Movements; Indigenous People's Movements in Latin America
Presenters: Dr. Kurt Schock, Dr. Roddy Brett
Throughout the developing world conflicts over land and resources are intensifying. Historically, this type of conflict has tended to be violent and often escalated into civil war. Significantly, many contemporary struggles attempting to promote a more equitable distribution of land and resources engage in nonviolent resistance. Two important nonviolent resistance movement that have successfully promoted a more equitable distribution of land will be discussed: Ekta Parishad, a Gandhian land rights movement in India and the Landless Rural Workers Movement, an agrarian reform movement in Brazil. o
Over the course of the twentieth century nonviolent resistance developed into a powerful and widespread strategy for promoting political change. Yet our understanding of its dynamics is underdeveloped. One crucial yet under-studied aspect is the impact of simultaneous violent campaigns on the outcomes of campaigns of nonviolent resistance. That is, does a violent movement operating at the same time and in the same country as a nonviolent one increase or decrease the likelihood of success of the nonviolent resistance movement? One argument is that a violent movement may undermine the position of a nonviolent movement because it discredits all regime opponents, provokes widespread repression, reduces third party support, and shifts the struggle to one where the state is likely to have the comparative advantage. Another argument is that a violent movement increases the leverage of a nonviolent one by making it seem less threatening to elites, increasing its support from third parties, or creating a political crisis that is resolved in favor of the nonviolent challengers. We analyze this phenomenon in a cross-national quantitative study using the Nonviolent and Violent Conflict Outcomes (NAVCO) data set, which includes aggregate data on 323 primarily violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006. All campaigns have a major, disruptive, and regime-threatening political objective: toppling a regime, ending foreign occupation, or secession. Generally, we find that the presence of a simultaneous violent movement has no effect on the outcomes of nonviolent resistance movements. Overall, among 56 successful campaigns of nonviolent resistance, 14 had simultaneous violent movements and 43 did not. Of the campaigns of nonviolent resistance that failed, 21 had a simultaneous violent movement while 28 did not.
During the last two decades in Latin America, indigenous peoples have emerged as key political actors. This new protagonism has resulted from struggles that have often been met by severe repression and violence carried out by the State and paramilitaries. This session analyzes the diverse nonviolent strategies that indigenous actors have adopted to confront violence, exclusion, extermination and assimilation, with the key aim of reforming the State and political culture. The session will also examine the tactics used by movements - in particular nonviolent action such as marches, symbolic politics, and street theater - as authoritarian regimes gave way to democratically elected governments, as multiculturalism became widespread, and as mobilization was shifted to the formal political arena.
Group Two: Independence Struggles
Presenters: Dr. Maciej Bartkowski, Jason MacLeod, Howard Clark
The studies of independence struggle are dominated by systemic, war or elite-driven perspectives on the conflict where the emphasis is placed on changing geopolitical context, the way armed insurrections were executed, major decisive battles of the independence wars fought or diplomatic bargaining games between country’s elites and occupying power(s) and strategic allies were played out. Little, if any attention is paid to grassroot civilian-based, nonviolent mobilization and resistance that was often present and played a significant role in the independence struggle and nation formation. This presentation will talk about analytical and empirical challenges present in studying and uncovering civil resistance as part of independence movements and highlight a couple of historical cases of independence struggles to illustrate the role and impact of civil resistance.
Located on the western edge of the Pacific Rim, the struggle for freedom and independence in West Papua is the regions most protracted conflict. This presentation will outline the genesis and trajectory of civil resistance in West Papua. Nonviolent civilian based resistance in West Papua is rarely reported on owing to the territories remote location and the fact that the Indonesian government has closed the province off to foreign journalists and human rights investigators. The presentation will pay particular attention to the relevance of strategic nonviolent conflict theory for independence struggles, using West Papua as an example.
The nonviolent struggle of Kosovo Albanians against the annulment of Kosovo's autonomy and subsequent 're-Serbianisation' of Kosovo is widely perceived as a failure. Ultimately, Kosovo's 'liberation' from Serbian rule was brought about by NATO bombing. Yet it can be argued that the decisive achievements in gaining international support were achieved through nonviolent action while armed struggle has left a costly legacy, even in terms of the struggle for independence.
Tuesday, July 27 / 1:30 - 3:30pm
Groups one and two will switch for this session.
9. Teaching Tools: Game Presentation, Syllabi, E-Classroom, and Classroom Experience
Tuesday, July 27 / 3:45pm - 5:15pm
Presenters: Dr. Maciej Bartkowski, Dr. Serge Pukas, Howard Clark
In the spring semester of the 2009/2010 academic year at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, Poland Dr. Serge Pukas taught, together with Professors Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski and Antoni Kaminski, a course entitled Politics of Nonviolent Resistance. The course was offered among elective courses available for International Relations students at Collegium Civitas. Politics of Nonviolent Resistance proved to be a very interesting course and almost 50 students enrolled on it. The students were supposed to sit a midterm exam, take part in class discussions, and write a final paper. At the end of the semester, Professor Pukas, Professor Wnuk-Lipinski and Professor Kaminski had a meeting at which they analyzed all weaknesses and strengths of the course in question. Dr. Pukas' presentation will try to convey the main conclusions that were reached at this meeting.
Dr. Maciej Bartkowski will present ICNC e-classroom and "People Power": a Computer-based Strategic Exercise on Civil Resistance and elaborate on the way how these tools can be successfully integrated into classroom setting as both teaching and learning resources.
Howard Clark will talk about the process of designing syllabi for courses in the field. He will discuss pedagogical tips, share successful practices, and provide an overview of a variety of classroom resources from readings to documentaries, and on-line resources.
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