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Author Chenoweth, Erica, 1980- author.

Title Why civil resistance works : the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict / Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan
Published New York : Columbia University Press, [2011]
©2011

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Description 1 online resource (xvii, 296 pages) : illustrations
Series Columbia studies in terrorism and irregular warfare
Columbia studies in terrorism and irregular warfare.
Contents pt. I. Why civil resistance works. The success of nonviolent resistance campaigns -- The primacy of participation in nonviolent resistance -- Exploring alternative explanations for the success of civil resistance -- pt. II. Case studies. The Iranian revolution, 1977-1979 -- The first Palestinian intifada, 1987-1992 -- The Philippine people power movement, 1983-1986 -- Why civil resistance sometimes fails: the Burmese uprising, 1988-1990 -- pt. III. The implications of civil resistance. After the campaign: the consequences of violent and nonviolent resistance
Summary For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-278) and index
Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCOhost, viewed July 6, 2020)
Subject Civil disobedience.
Nonviolence.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Violence in Society.
Civil disobedience
Nonviolence
Genre/Form dissertations.
Academic theses
Academic theses.
Thèses et écrits académiques.
Form Electronic book
Author Stephan, Maria J., author.
LC no. 2010037567
ISBN 0231527489
9780231527484
1283261073
9781283261074
9786613261076
6613261076