In Ecuador and Bolivia, the countries’ presidents were unable to complete their terms because of growing waves of civil resistance, but also one decisive factor in particular: military defections. This blog post analyzes military defections in a way that hopefully other civil resistance movements worldwide may distill some insights. […]
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Those of us who train and educate movements, whether in informal environments or in the classroom, would like to believe that our curriculum and how we present it directly determines the extent to which our participants thrive. While this may be partially true, these factors are far from being the most important determinants of a participant’s success. […]
The strategy web of vulnerabilities and resiliencies is a tool that, to my knowledge, has not been used in the civil resistance field despite its direct relevance to practitioners’ work, as well as the insight it can provide to movement and campaign analysts. […]
Building a two-way street between civil resistance and social work could have many benefits on individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. What could those benefits look like? Perhaps social workers could be helping clients connect with local groups doing work around issues impacting clients’ lives. […]
Would suffering from Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) symptoms make agents of repression more likely to defect, or less? Do those suffering from PITS find defection to be a good therapy, and if so, is there a way of using this knowledge to encourage defections? […]
When activists start mobilizing to pursue a transition from dictatorship to democracy in their country, they face real risks—perhaps the most serious being lethal repression at the hands of state security forces. If feeling especially threatened, the dictator may choose to deploy the military and order it to throw its weight behind ending the popular challenge. […]
The United States did not begin through the muzzle of a musket against British King George III. Our country was born through persistent nonviolent resistance of tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of residents of the American colonies. […]
From American colonists nonviolently resisting British rule (1765-1775), to the Indian Independence Movement (1920s-1940s), to the Solidarity movement in Poland (1980-89), it is well known that movements engaged in extensive alternative institution-building. Forty-five years after pioneering scholar Gene Sharp’s 198 methods of nonviolent action […]
Given the scale, intensity, and compounding effects of climate change, it has never been more important to defend the environment. To make matters more urgent, resource conflicts are becoming increasingly deadly in the past couple of decades. This is why people refer to environmental activism nowadays as a “suicide mission,” especially in countries that emerge from colonialism with commodity-dependent economies and weak political institutions. […]
People often look to elites to understand whether and how transitional justice will be realized in a society. But a top-down perspective focused on the roles of prominent individuals, institutions, and international power-brokers overlooks a critical driver of transitional justice: the activism of the affected population. A notable example of this is Brazil’s esculachos […]