Дисертації з теми "Nonviolent protest"

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, September, 2020
Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 121-129).
Activists often identify violent repression, and ensuing backlash, as a key mechanism through which peaceful protests can successfully achieve political change. This view has been affirmed by a body of research showing that the violent repression of protest can raise awareness of and build support for the protesters. And US history has many examples of these repression backlash benefiting protesters, from the Birmingham bus boycotts to the "Bonus Army" March on Washington, to the Kent State shootings. However, in the United States, and in other western democracies, the probability of violent police repression of protests has varied significantly over time, as a result of a multitude of institutional factors. While the impacts of repressed protest have been documented, how peaceful protests fare in the absence of repression is less well-understood.
This dissertation explores whether the absence of repression impacts protests' ability to capture attention and persuade the public, and whether the absence of repression impacts the types of protests that are successful. To answer these two questions, I draw on a wide array of data sources, including a novel dataset of local protests coded from protest permit applications, geo-referenced Google search data, Wikipedia page-view data, New York Times coverage data, historical archives of an activist group's internal communications. I show that, while repression makes it easier for protests to garner news coverage, command public attention, and persuade the public, it is not a necessary condition. Peaceful protests can achieve these outcomes without repression if they can become newsworthy in other ways, such as by increasing the scale of the protest.
I also show that in the absence of repression, the types of protests that achieve success are similar in background to the protests that achieve success in the presence of repression. Unlike some other forms of political participation, the resources needed to succeed without repression do not appear to be skewed towards individuals or groups with higher socio-economic status. Although the probability of violent repression changes over time, protests continue to serve as an effective tactic for a relatively small group to capture attention and build broader support.
by Nicolas K. Dumas.
Ph. D.
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science

Over the last decades, the world has not only seen an increase in nonviolent campaigns that challenge regimes, but also a dramatic increase in women’s participation in those campaigns. Despite this trend, there are few studies that explain if and how women influence nonviolent campaign outcomes. This study seeks to contribute to this understudied topic by exploring whether female protestors have an effect on the outcomes of nonviolent campaigns. The research question is: Why do some nonviolent campaigns succeed, while others fail? By synthesizing sociological concepts with rational agency-based factors that have proven to produce successful outcomes, I construct three gender-related campaign dimensions: (1) gender framing techniques; (2) gender experiences; and (3) shared gender-equal attitudes, that I argue increase the likelihood of successful campaigns. I evaluate the theoretical arguments in a case study using the method of structured focused comparison on the Sudanese Revolution in Sudan (2018-2019), the Anti-Mubarak Campaign in Egypt (2011), and the Anti-Bouteflika Campaign in Algeria (2011). I find that campaigns that are influenced by gender dimensions also succeed in achieving some or a majority of their goals, while campaigns that are not influenced by gender dimensions fail to achieve their goals.

James Morris Lawson, Jr. grew up in Massillion, Ohio, in a loving Christian home. He became a pacifist at an early age after a memorable encounter with racism. As he matured, he studied nonviolence from the perspectives of Jesus Christ and the great Indian revolutionary, Mohandas Gandhi. After meeting the famous Christian pacifist, A. J. Muste, Lawson became a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and a conscientious objector to war. He spent fourteen months in a federal prison after refusing to be drafted into the U.S. military. After prison, Lawson worked in India as a missionary and learned nonviolent direct action strategies from Gandhi?s followers.Inspired by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Lawson left India and returned to America in 1956 to join the struggle to end racial segregation in America. That same year, Lawson met Martin Luther King, Jr. and upon King?s request, moved to the South to teach nonviolence. Lawson eventually settled in Nashville, Tennessee, to teach nonviolence to a group of young men and women who would become some of the most important ?leaders? in the American Civil Rights Movement. James Lawson made a significant contribution to the student sit-in movement of 1960 by teaching a new idea?nonviolent direct action?to an elite group of student activists. However, his influence has been ignored by most histories of the movement. The following essay brings this elusive figure to the forefront and highlights his impact on the first wave of student activists who spearheaded the nonviolent campaign to overturn segregation.

Political division has plagued Northern Ireland since its partition from the rest of Ireland in the 1920s. Current literature recounts the role of nationalist actors in the violent struggle that erupted in 1969 initiating a 3-decade period of civil strife described as the Troubles. However, very little scholarly coverage exists providing details of nonviolent resistance on the part of some community members. The purpose of this interpretive phenomenological study was to examine the meanings and perceptions evoked from Irish nationalists from Belfast and Derry who chose to challenge security policies through nonviolent actions from 1970 through 1981. Using a chain sampling approach, 14 protesters volunteered to tell their stories. Benet's polarities of democracy unifying model was used as the theoretical framework for the study. The data collected were analyzed using the modified Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen method, which involved a synthesis of meanings generated from respondents. Data analysis revealed 4 major themes that underpinned informant experiences of protest: social identity, coping, perseverance, and empowerment. Data showed in many instances that more aggressive security tactics used against demonstrators incited more intense antistate activities. Public administrators, through a combination of written policy and security personnel training, should, therefore, address sociopolitical grievances in a manner that will promote mediation in an effort to avoid instigation of further and more physical protest actions. State officials, as well as elected legislators who write and analyze public policy, may incorporate the findings of this study to expediate the delivery of more democratic government services and to support and promote nonviolent active citizenry.

This thesis starts from the premise that Geopolitics is performative, an iterative discourse “of visualising global space…reproduced in the governing principles of geographic thought and through the practices of statecraft” (Agnew 1998:11). During the last decade, two dominant discourses have shaped the contemporary geopolitical imagination – the ‘war on terror’ and ‘climate change’. These have steered conceptualisations of security and insecurity - performative iterations of who, where, and what poses a threat. The resulting geopolitical picture of the world has enabled the legitimisation of human and geographical domination – an acceptance of geographical norms that enable the continuation of uneven geographies. The research is concerned with the performative spaces of alternative geopolitics; spaces that emerge where nonviolent social movement activism and geopolitics intersect and the sites through which these are practiced and mediated. The motivations are twofold. The first is a desire to intervene in a critical geopolitical discourse that remains biased toward engagement with violent geographies. The second is to take seriously ‘geopolitics from below’, alternative geographical imaginations. I address the first of these through research that is concerned primarily with the spacing of nonviolence – the performed and performative spaces of nonviolent geographies shaped through a politics of the act. The second is approached through substantial empirical engagement with social movement activists and sites of contention and creation in opposition to dominant environmental geopolitics. ‘Militant’ ethnographic research took place over six months in 2009. It traced the journeys of two groups as they organised for, and took part in, large counter-summit mobilisations. The first was a UK based social movement, the Camp for Climate Action (UK). The second was an intercontinental caravan, the Trade to Climate Caravan. Both groups shared a common aim – to converge on the 16th of December in a mass demonstration of nonviolent confrontation; the ‘People’s Assembly’, to contest dominant discourses being performed inside the intergovernmental United Nations Conference of the Parties 15. Social movement groups from around the world would present alternative narratives of insecurity and offer ‘alternative solutions’ garnered through non-hierarchical forms of decision-making. The research followed the route each group took to the People’s Assembly and the articulations (narrative and practices) of nonviolent action.

The Islamic movement study mostly focused on radical, extremist, violent, or military aspects. The current research was carried out to examine the nonviolent elements of the Islamic movement. Based on the ethnographic photo research conducted in the Ethiopian Muslims Protest, the Islamic movements nonviolent aspect investigated. The Ethiopian Muslims were organized social media-led protests called Let Our Voices be Heard for their religious rights between 2011 and 2015. The study first examined where this Let Our Voices be Heard protest fits in civil resistance studies. Second, it investigated Facebook's role in initiating, organizing, and sustaining the nonviolent Islamic movement in Ethiopia. Using Johnston's defining terms of social movement theory, the Let Our Voices be Heard protest tested. The result shows that the protest well fit with the dimensions and components of social movement theory. The result indicates that the Let Our Voices be Heard protest exemplifies nonviolent Islamic movement in the Eastern Africa region, Ethiopia. The study further shows that Facebook, when used for a common goal, is a robust platform for successfully mobilizing nonviolent Islamic movements.

Ненасильницький конфлікт можна вважати особливим видом соціально-політичного конфлікту. Нормативно-правова база України не готова регулювати даний вид протестів. Інстинктивно люди схильні збиратись у натовпи та захищатись. У натовпі людина піддається психологічним змінам: зниження соціальної відповідальності, зниження когнітивних компонентів в поведінці, діє інфантильно. Конфлікт слід розуміти як вид взаємодії між людьми. Трансформація конфлікту полягає у зміні реальності конфлікту через 3 його виміри: сприйняття, контекст та поведінку. Для трансформації конфліктів існують внутрішні інститути (відділи поліції превентивного впливу (поліція діалогу), Національна служба посередництва і примирення) та міжнародного рівня організації (ООН, ОБСЄ) та фонди (РАХ, Berghoff foundation, Caritas, фонд «Відродження»). Серед методів та інструментв трансформації конфліктів я виділила 3: діалог, фасилітація та медіація. У роботі я описала технологію трансформації конфлікту між групами людей під час ненасильницьких протестів – вулична фасилітація. Вулична фасилітація має такі етапи: намір, моніторинг конфлікту, оцінка та картування конфлікту, моделювання та визначення точок входу, первинний психологічний контакт, контакт. Завершальний етап інтервенції в конфлікт виводить людину на зміну стратегії, поведінки. Вуличний фасилітатор здійснює кризову інтервенцію в умовах ненасилля, в точці активної «сірої маси» та надає голосу мовчазній більшості. Вуличний фасилітатор має розвинуті такі компетенції: комунікабельність, емоційний інтелект, гнучкість, здатність до емпатії та самоемпатії, вміння структурно мислити, розуміння власних кордонів та обмежень.
Nonviolent conflict can be considered a special kind of socio-political conflict. The legal framework of Ukraine is not ready to regulate this type of protest. Instinctively, people tend to gather in crowds and defend themselves. In the crowd a person undergoes psychological changes: reduced social responsibility, reduced cognitive components in behavior, acts infantile. Conflict should be understood as a kind of interaction between people. The transformation of the conflict is to change the reality of the conflict through its 3 dimensions: perception, context and behavior. There are internal institutions (preventive police units (dialogue police), National Mediation and Reconciliation Service) and international level organizations (UN, OSCE) and foundations (PAX, Berghoff foundation, Caritas, “Vidrodgennja” Foundation) for the transformation of conflicts. Among the methods and tools for conflict transformation, I identified 3: dialogue, facilitation and mediation. In this paper, I described the technology of transforming conflict between groups of people during nonviolent protests – urban peacebuilding. Urban peacebuilding has the following stages: intention, conflict monitoring, conflict assessment and mapping, modeling and identification of entry points, primary psychological contact, contact. The final stage of intervention in the conflict brings a person to change strategy, behavior. The urban peacebuilder carries out crisis intervention in conditions of non-violence, at the point of active "gray mass" and gives a voice to the silent majority. The urban peacebuilder has developed the following competencies: sociability, emotional intelligence, flexibility, ability to empathize and self-empathy, the ability to think structurally, understanding their own boundaries and limitations.
Ненасильственный конфликт можно считать особым видом социально-политического конфликта. Нормативно-правовая база Украины не готова регулировать данный вид протестов. Инстинктивно люди склонны собираться в толпы и защищаться. В толпе человек подвергается психологическим изменениям: снижению социальной ответственности, снижению когнитивных компонентов в поведении, действует инфантильно. Конфликт следует понимать как вид взаимодействия между людьми. Трансформация конфликта заключается в изменении реальности конфликта через 3 его измерения: восприятие, контекст и поведение. Для трансформации конфликтов существуют внутренние институты (отделы полиции превентивного воздействия (полиция диалога), Национальная служба посредничества и примирения) и международного уровня организации (ООН, ОБСЕ) и фонды (РАХ, Berghoff foundation, Caritas, фонд «Возрождение»). Среди методов и инструментв трансформации конфликтов я выделила 3: диалог, фасилитация и медиация. В работе я описала технологию трансформации конфликтов между группами людей во время ненасильственных протестов - уличная фасилитация. Уличная фасилитация имеет следующие этапы: намерение, мониторинг конфликта, оценка и картирование конфликта, моделирования и определения точек входа, первичный психологический контакт, контакт. Завершающий этап интервенции в конфликт выводит человека на смену стратегии, поведения. Уличный фасилитатор осуществляет кризисную интервенцию в условиях ненасилия, в точке активной «серой массы» и дает голос молчаливому большинству. Уличный фасилитатор имеет развитые такие компетенции: коммуникабельность, эмоциональный интеллект, гибкость, способность к эмпатии и самоемпатии, умение структурно мыслить, понимание собственных границ и ограничений.

This four article journal-based dissertation builds on Gene Sharp's framework of nonviolent direct action, along with Hess and Martin's repression backfire, in order to deepen our understanding of how state repression impacts protest mobilization and historical processes of social change. After initially problematizing Gene Sharp’s notions of power and consent with aid of political discourse theory, and two case studies of the 1905 Russian Bloody Sunday Massacre and the South African 1976 Soweto Massacre, the dissertation moves onto specifically explain the conditions under which protest mobilization is likely to continue after severe state repression. A causal process model underpins the logic of the dissertation. It identifies generalizable antecedent factors and conditions under which repression backfire is most likely to occur. Numerous mechanisms are also introduced that help explain the operation of this process across different historical eras and political systems. After applying this process model and its mechanisms to the 2013 Turkish Gezi protests, a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 44 different historical massacres is presented in which repression backfired and increased protest in some cases, but not others. Repression backfire is a highly asymmetrical and nonlinear causal phenomenon. I conclude that nonviolent protest strategy has been a salient factor in historical cases of repression backfire and is also vital for the ability of protests to withstand state repression. However, the role of nonviolence is partial and to some degree inadequate in explaining repression backfire if it is not linked to other general factors which include protest diversity, protest threat level, and geographic terrain.

Repression is the expected response to anti-government protest; however, leaders can also accommodate demonstrators. Committing to human rights treaties is considered in this environment, where treaty commitments are conceptualized as a policy concession that leaders can grant dissenters. Past research has shown that top-down domestic pressures, such as new democratic regimes, can influence treaty commitments. This article extends this line of research by considering the influence of bottom-up domestic pressure, arguing that nonviolent, pro-democracy movements can pressure leaders into concessions, as these movements are risky to repress but threatening to ignore. Leaders are expected to seek ‘cheap’ accommodations, and commitments to human rights treaties provide a relatively low-cost concession that also addresses demonstrators’ pro-democracy demands. Using commitments to the nine core UN human rights treaties, results are generally supportive. Governments experiencing a nonviolent, pro-democracy movement are consistently likely to sign human rights treaties. Ratification is also likely but in more limited contexts, and is more closely related to movement success. This suggests that bottom-up pressures can influence commitment to human rights treaties, but there may be little substance behind those concessions. The status quo and cost-averse preferences of leaders lead them to grant accommodations that result in minimal change and cost.

Quality of Government (QoG) peace is a concept gaining some traction alongside more known concepts such as the democratic peace, or liberal (capitalist) peace or the globalist/modernist peace. This study aims to uncover how perceptions of governance quality uncover variation in the number of violent and nonviolent collective and interpersonal events at the sub-national level in Nepal. National survey data is used to operationalise the mechanisms for quality of governance perceptions which are then aggregated at District level. In-country elite level interviews were also completed in order to trace the process in the causal mechanism and control for reverse causality. Results point to a strong negative effect between perceptions of governance quality and the number of events occurring. There was not, however, any causal relationship established between perceptions of governance quality and the ratio of violent to non-violent events. Instead, interviewees related the resort to violence as coming about more strongly from a committed leadership of protest movements (or lack thereof) and moves by the State to instigate violence through repressive tactics against protest events.

Silence, voice and power are the main themes in this essay. The purpose is to analyze how the silence is used as an instrument for control, and how it can be used strategically to take power, but also as a resistance against the power. The novel The Vegetarian by Han Kang and the autobiography novel on verse, brown girl dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson are the core of this essay. This essay focuses on how the characters break the silence, and how they use the silence strategically to find their voice in a society that systematically works to keep women, children and men silent.      The silence works in specific ways in all kinds of situations, to explore the complexity of the power dimensions a comparative analysis allows the themes to emerge and enlighten each other’s diversity. With help from Rebecca Solnit in Alla frågors moder, Audre Lorde in Your silence will not protect you and Michel Foucault’s Diskursens ordning, among other voices, the essay aims to search for how the silence can work as a strategy and what it means to speak. The essay shows how the oppressing silence is broken in brown girl dreaming, and how the voice becomes the power, but also how the silence was used in the African-American Civil Rights Movement as an act of resistance. The essays also analyze the female main character in The Vegetarian, who makes a journey from an oppressed woman where the patriarchal men violate her silence and forcing her to speak, to an existence where silence, life and growth thrives.     The silence has its own language and sometimes, it’s louder than words.

The image of two US athletes with black glove-covered fists raised on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics is iconic. However, despite a number of academic studies, articles, books, lectures and films addressing this moment, the deeper story behind that student-athlete protest at Mexico 68 is little known. It was far from being a merely spontaneous or violent action. In fact, the protest was part of a concerted and largely peaceful effort to highlight several systemic injustices of the late 1960s by a group named the Olympic Project for Human Rights. As will be demonstrated in this thesis, it follows that the deeper story of the student-athlete protests at Mexico 68 are ripe with significance from both: (1) a Peace Studies perspective, focussing on structural injustice, and (2) a Conflict Resolution Studies viewpoint, which upholds value in the constructive settling of disputes. Employing a Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) lens, which keeps both sets of concerns in view, and undertaking descriptive and analytical approaches that bring the voice of the athletes to the fore as much as possible given the limitations of this study, allows for a discussion of remarkable student-athletes interacting not only within the competitive structure of their sport at the Olympics, but also amongst social, institutional, and political contexts. This approach becomes foundational for the conclusion that the athletes involved in protests at Mexico 68 were players (i.e., agents) and not pawns, in relation to complex socio-political forces, which sought to manipulate and oppress them. Moreover, this PACS approach allows for twelve concrete lessons flowing from the stories of the athletes to be delineated for their contemporary relevance in a world where far too many injustices remain. In short, the main protest is herein presented as an awe-inspiring moment, simultaneously as a compass and a key, which when integrated with a PACS perspective serves to guide us towards a fuller understanding of the Olympic Project for Human Rights and it goals, unlocking what is revealed in this study to be a potentially important moment in the history of cultures of peace.

Beginning in December 2010, Tunisian citizens used techniques of protest, resistance and intervention in a struggle for freedom from the systems that had for decades denied them agency, autonomy and dignity. As a result of their resistance, in January 2011 the Tunisian people successfully deposed the authoritarian president Ben Ali after 23 years in power. Though this movement began spontaneously and operated without designated leadership, the role of the national labor union - The Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT) - was vital in mobilizing and directing the uprising. This thesis will interpret the events of the 2011 Tunisian uprising through the framework of civil resistance, as defined by Gene Sharp and Hardy Merriman. Through the use of political defiance and noncooperation, civil resistance employs nonviolent tactics to challenge and remove entrenched political leaders and systems. This study will analyze the Tunisian uprising and the role of the UGTT in the movement using three indicators of civil resistance success: unity, strategic planning, and nonviolent discipline. Despite sporadic incidents of violence, this thesis asserts that the 2011 Tunisian uprising successfully enacted nonviolent civil resistance, and the implementation of nonviolent political action has made the establishment of a genuine and lasting democracy a real possibility for the future. The UGTT were invaluable in the 2011 uprising as facilitators and collaborators with the Tunisian people, and currently function in a pivotal nonpartisan and objective intermediary political role. Though the outcome remains uncertain and the conclusion of the revolution in flux, the 2011 Tunisian uprising has set an example and a precedent for civil resistance to the rest of the world.

The main aim of the master thesis titled "Syria and the concept responsibility to assist: new approach towards conflict resolution?" is to find out whether the extension of the doctrine of responsibility to protect by the concept of responsibility to assist that is based on the support of nonviolent movements could work as a new approach towards conflict resolution and thanks to this it could constitute another way of international assistance and civilian protection in cases when it is the regime that perpetrates the violence against its own population. For this reason the thesis, via the Syrian civil war that offers wide range of internal responses to the violence perpetrated by the regime against civilians, focuses on three different forms of international involvement and assistance. These are the international military intervention under the third pillar of R2P, the backing of domestic violent groups and insurgents and last but not least the assistance to nonviolent movements and civil initiatives in the form of R2A as a potential expansion of the second pillar under the R2P doctrine. These approaches are analyzed with regard to the issues of state sovereignty and moral responsibility to protect civilians that arises from the inconsistency of these two aspects in relation to any kind of...