Civil resistance is a form of political action that relies on the use of nonviolent resistance by ordinary people to challenge a particular power, force, policy or regime.Examples of the use of the term "civil resistance" include Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011; Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo, Pluto Press, London, 2000; Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Nonviolent Revolution: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century , Oxford University Press, New York, 2011; Michael Randle, Civil Resistance, Fontana, London, 1994; Adam Roberts, Civil Resistance in the East European and Soviet Revolutions , Albert Einstein Institution, Massachusetts, 1991. Civil resistance operates through appeals to the adversary, pressure and coercion: it can involve systematic attempts to undermine or expose the adversary's sources of power (or pillars of support, such as police, military, clergy, business elite, etc.). Forms of action have included demonstrations, vigils and petitions; strikes, go-slows, boycotts and emigration movements; and sit-ins, occupations, constructive program, and the creation of parallel institutions of government.
Some civil resistance movements' motivations for avoiding violence are generally related to context, including a society's values and its experience of war and violence, rather than to any absolute ethical principle. Civil resistance cases can be found throughout history and in many modern struggles, against both tyrannical rulers and democratically elected governments. Mahatma Gandhi led the first documented civil resistance campaign (using three primary tactics: civil disobedience, marches, and creation of parallel institutions) to free India from British imperialism.This is abstracted from the longer definition of "civil resistance" in Adam Roberts, Introduction, in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (eds.), Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 2–3. See also the short definition in Gene Sharp, Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts , Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, p. 87. The phenomenon of civil resistance is often associated with the advancement of human rights and democracy.See e.g. the report by Peter Ackerman, Adrian Karatnycky and others, How Freedom is Won. From Civil Resistance to Durable Democracy, Freedom House, New York, 2005
Historical examples Civil resistance is a long-standing and widespread phenomenon in human history. Several works on civil resistance adopt a historical approach to the analysis of the subject.Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (eds.), Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, Oxford University Press, 2009. Include chapters by specialists on nineteen movements between 1917 and 2007. Cases of civil resistance, both successful and unsuccessful, include: Mahatma Gandhi's role in the Indian independence movement in 1917–1947 Martin Luther King Jr.'s, James Bevel's, and other activists' roles in the Civil Rights Movement in 1955–1968 Aspects of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement in 1967–1972 a variety of raids on U. S. draft boards to protest the war in Vietnam, 1967-1971 the Revolution of the Carnations in Portugal in 1974–75, supporting the military coup of 25 April 1974 the Iranian Revolution in 1977–1979, before Khomeini's advent to power in February 1979 the Polish Solidarity Trade Union used civil resistance to protest against the Soviet controlled government, even after delegalization and numerous crackdowns. the People Power Revolution in the Philippines in the 1980s that ousted President Ferdinand Marcos the campaigns against apartheid in South Africa, especially before 1961, and during the period of 1983–1994. the mass mobilization against authoritarian rule in Pinochet's Chile, 1983–1988 the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in China the various movements contributing to the revolutions of 1989 in central and eastern Europe the 1988–1990 Singing Revolution that led to the restoration of independence of the three Soviet-occupied Baltic countries the campaign against Serbian domination in Kosovo, 1990–1998, that was followed by war the revolutions in Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, and Ukraine in 2004, all of which involved successful resistance against an incumbent government that had refused to acknowledge its defeat in an election and had sought to falsify the election results the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005, following the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri on 14 February 2005, and calling for Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon the demonstrations, mainly led by students and monks, in the Saffron Revolution in Burma in 2007 the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests following evidence of electoral manipulation in the elections of June 2009
the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, starting in Tunisia in December 2010, and resulting, in 2011, in the fall of rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. In some countries the movements were followed by war (e.g. Syrian Civil War and War in Yemen) or by a return to military rule, as in Egypt in 2013 following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 the 15-M or Indignados movement, which included the peaceful occupation of squares all over Spain in May–June 2011, and a mosaic of other forms of civil disobedience by many of the groups that were created, or strengthened, after the squares occupations. In particular the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, or PAH. the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013, in opposition to urban development plans, and also to government encroachments on freedom of expression and on Turkey's secularist traditions the early phases of the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine in 2013–14, demanding closer integration with European Union countries, and the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovych. Various tactics of unarmed civil resistance were also frequently employed in the Russian-occupied settlements during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. the 2014 Hong Kong protests, also known as "Occupy Central" and the "Umbrella movement", opposing the 2014–15 Hong Kong electoral reform in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Women's marches in USA from January 2017 Women's March onwards to resist President Donald Trump's sexist statements. Extinction Rebellion (XR), established in May 2018. An international nonviolent movement with three climate and ecological emergency demands and 10 Principles and Values. the 2018–2019 Gaza border protests near the Gaza-Israel border, demanding that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to the lands they were displaced from in what is now Israel
Numerous other campaigns, both successful and unsuccessful, could be included in a longer listing. In 1967 Gene Sharp produced a list of 84 cases.Gene Sharp, "The Technique of Non-violent Action", in Adam Roberts (ed.), The Strategy of Civilian Defence: Non-violent Resistance to Aggression, Faber, London, 1967, at pp. 98–104. He followed this with further surveys.See for example his discussion of "Illustrations from the Past" in Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (see article), Porter Sargent, Boston, 1973, pp. 75–97; and his short accounts of numerous cases in Gene Sharp and others, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential, Porter Sargent, Boston, 2005, pp. 69–356. In 2013 Maciej Bartkowski authored a long list of cases in the past 200 years, arranged alphabetically by country."Appendix: Conflict Summaries", in Maciej J. Bartkowski (ed.), Recovering Nonviolent History: Civil Resistance in Liberation Struggles, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, Colorado, 2013, pp. 355–405. The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict's (ICNC) website houses an enormous Resource Library with dozens of case studies and other resources about civil resistance campaigns and movements as well as the dynamics of civil resistance. ICNC's blog, Minds of the Movement, also serves as a thorough compendium of civil resistance campaigns and movements throughout history and today. Swarthmore's Global Nonviolent Action Database is an additional key resource documenting hundreds of civil resistance campaigns and movements.
Effectiveness It is not easy to devise a method of proving the relative success of different methods of struggle. Often there are problems in identifying a given campaign as successful or otherwise. In 2008 Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth produced a widely noted article on "Why Civil Resistance Works", the most thorough and detailed analysis (to that date) of the rate of success of civil resistance campaigns, as compared to violent resistance campaigns. After looking at over 300 cases of both types of campaign, from 1900 to 2006, they concluded that "nonviolent resistance methods are more likely to be successful than violent methods in achieving strategic objectives". Their article (later developed into a book) noted particularly that "resistance campaigns that compel loyalty shifts among security forces and civilian bureaucrats are likely to succeed".Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict", International Security, vol. 33, no. 1 (Summer 2008), p. 42. . (See also their 2011 book, Why Civil Resistance Works, listed below in the bibliography.) These findings have been highly influential within environmental and social movements, although their pertinence to campaigns not involving regime change has been questioned by researchers such as Kyle R. Matthews.
On the other hand, the evidence of several of the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa appears to provide contrasting pathways by which this logic may fail to materialise, with splits in the armed forces contributing towards civil war in Libya and Syria, and a shift in armed forces loyalty in Egypt failing to contribute towards enduring democratic reform.T. R. Davies, "The failure of strategic nonviolent action in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya and Syria: 'political ju-jitsu' in reverse", Global Change, Peace and Security, vol. 26, no. 3 (2014), pp. 299–313. . Criticisms of the central thesis of the book on Why Civil Resistance Works have included: Forming judgements about whether a campaign is a success or failure is inherently difficult: the answer may depend on the time-frame used, and on necessarily subjective judgments about what constitutes success. Some of the authors' decisions on this are debatable. Similar difficulties arise in deciding whether a campaign is violent or nonviolent, when on the ground both strategies may co-exist in several ways.Juan Masullo Jimenez, review of Why Civil Resistance Works on Global Policy website, 29 November 2013. . Regimes transitioning from autocracy to democracy tend to be highly unstable, so an initial success for a movement may be followed by a more general failure.David Cortright, review on E-International Relations website, 17 January 2013. Perhaps, more generally, sufficient account is not taken of the possibility that violence often takes place in circumstances that were already violent and chaotic, stacking the odds against any successful outcome for violence.Adam Roberts, "Terrorism Research: Past, Present and Future", Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, vol. 38, no. 1, January 2015, pp. 62–74.