civil resistance and power politics the experience of non-violent action from gandhi to the present nov 2009

First and foremost we thank all our colleagues on the Oxford University projecton ‘Civil Resistance and Power Politics: Domestic and International Dimensions’,which was established in 20

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Civil resistance has become an increasingly salient feature of international politicsover the last half-century, from the US civil rights movement and Czechoslovakia

in the 1960s to the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in eastern Europe and Burma’s

‘moment of the monks’ in the 2000s We believe that the phenomenon of violent action deserves more study than it has so far received, and that it should

non-be examined in a broader comparative context of international relations, politics,and contemporary history

At the heart of this book are nineteen case studies of major historical episodes

in which civil resistance played an important part Each chapter is the work of anindividual author, with his or her own distinctive approach, style and specialinterests Bibliographical references and all but the most familiar abbreviationshave been spelt out at Wrst mention in every chapter, so that each can be read onits own We have, however, gone to considerable lengths, both in the originaldesign and in the detailed editing of this book, to try to ensure a commonintellectual agenda Carefully chosen documentary photographs are reproduced

at appropriate points in each chapter Extended captions, written by the editors inclose consultation with individual authors, both explain the particular circum-stances and highlight the illustrations’ relevance to larger themes

This is the Wrst major publication of the Oxford University Project on CivilResistance and Power Politics We print below a list of seventeen questionsaddressed to contributors at the start of the project Of course not all are relevant

to or can be answered in each case, and others have emerged as research hasprogressed These questions exemplify the project’s concern to explore, rigorouslyand sceptically, the historical roles played by civil resistance, and to clarify therelationship between civil resistance and other elements of power That relation-ship turns out to be more multifaceted than many proponents of civil resistance,

or indeed of power politics, might have expected Some of these connections arefurther teased out in the editors’ introductory and concluding chapters

A.R., T.G.A.Oxford,

March 2009

First and foremost we thank all our colleagues on the Oxford University project

on ‘Civil Resistance and Power Politics: Domestic and International Dimensions’,which was established in 2006 The project held an international conference atOxford on 15–18 March 2007 This was attended not only by academic experts onparticular cases of civil resistance, but also by participants in the campaigns,journalists and writers who had reported on them, and oYcials who had in oneway or another been involved in responding to them

Our deepest thanks go to Dr Thomas Richard Davies, who served from January

2006 to March 2008 as Research Associate of the project, and whose contributions

to the project, from the March 2006 workshop to the March 2007 conference, andthen to this book, were all outstanding Without his work, which combinedeYciency, deep understanding, and helpfulness toward all involved in this enter-prise, we could not have reached the Wnishing tape of publication so soon

We also owe a special debt of gratitude to our fellow members of the project’sOrganizing Committee, Judith Brown, Peter Carey, Rana Mitter, Alex Pravda, andJan Zielonka, all of whom played a central role in guiding the project as a whole,selecting contributors, and subsequently helping to edit the chapters in thisvolume

We are indebted to Sir Martin Gilbert for preparing the endpaper map In thesearch for photographs we had talented assistance from Daniel Hemel at OxfordUniversity, and from Steve York and Ragan Carpenter of York Zimmerman Inc.,Washington, DC While every eVort was made to contact the copyright holders ofmaterial in this book, in some cases we were unable to do so If the copyrightholders contact the author or publisher, we will be pleased to rectify any omission

at the earliest opportunity

Ensuring that chapters in a wide-ranging book such as this have elements ofcommon structure and style, and are clear to non-specialists, is no simple task

We are grateful to Kate Upshon for some exceptionally judicious subediting; toMałgorzata Gorska for invaluable assistance in commenting on and revisingseveral chapters; to Mary-Jane Fox for rigorous comments on the Introductionand the project as a whole; and, at Oxford University Press, to our editor,Dominic Byatt, to members of the editorial staV, especially Lizzy SuZing, LouiseSprake, and Aimee Wright; and to the copy-editor, Tom Chandler

Most of the chapters are based on papers presented at the March 2007conference, which were always intended for publication In this volume we haveincluded revised texts of those papers that dealt with particular cases rather thanwith more general or abstract themes, and we have added a new chapter, on theevents in Burma in 2007 We have also included three chapters (the Wrst two andthe last) exploring how civil resistance and power politics interact, and situating

the themes pursued in this volume in the context of other literature on civilresistance and political change.

The chapters have been greatly enriched by the comments and reXections of theparticipants in the conference, and we would especially like to thank for theircontributions the other conference speakers: Peter Ackerman, Alan Angell, Wil-liam Beinart, Kenneth BloomWeld, Stephen Bosworth, Richard Caplan, MartinCeadel, Paul Chaisty, Thomas Richard Davies, Mient Jan Faber, James Fenton,Lars Frede´n, Carlos Gaspar, David Goldey, Adrian Guelke, Hydajet Hyseni,Mkhuseli Jack, Konrad Jarausch, Mary Kaldor, Mary King, Monika Mac-Donagh-Pajerova´, Michael McFaul, Abbas Milani, Grazina Miniotaite, EdwardMortimer, Ghia Nodia, Lucy Nusseibeh, Bhikhu Parekh, Chris Patten, Minxin Pei,Frank Pieke, Srdja Popovic´, Dmytro Potekhin, Bob Purdie, Janusz Reykowski,Berel Rodal, Zita Seabra, Jacques Semelin, Gene Sharp, Patricio Silva, JonathanSteele, Ed de la Torre, Samuel Valenzuela, Wang Juntao, David Washbrook,Laurence Whitehead, Harris WoVord, Steve York, and Zarni For the smoothrunning of the conference, we are especially grateful to Denise Line of theEuropean Studies Centre, and to Emily Speers Mears and Małgorzata Gorska,the graduate student assistants For their participation in the preparatory work-shop for the conference, we would like to thank Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, CathCollins, Richard Crampton, Michael Freeden, Alan Knight, Teresa Pinto Coelho,William Smith, Marc Stears, and Sherrill Stroschein

The project on Civil Resistance and Power Politics is run under the auspices ofthe Centre for International Studies in Oxford University’s Department of Pol-itics and International Relations and the European Studies Centre at St Antony’sCollege, Oxford: we are very grateful for the support of the Directors of theseinstitutions, Andrew Hurrell, Neil MacFarlane, and Kalypso Nicolaı¨dis We alsoowe special thanks to Esther Byrom for her handling of numerous researchfunding applications

Without the support of a number of generous funders, this book would nothave been possible We would like to thank particularly: Peter Ackerman andBerel Rodal at the International Center on Nonviolent ConXict in Washington,DC; Judy Barsalou, April Hall, Steve Riskin, and Trish Thomson at the UnitedStates Institute of Peace; Markus Baumanns and Michael Go¨ring at the ZeitFoundation; Kristian Netland at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign AVairs;Stephen Heintz and Hope Lyons at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; MaciekHawrylak and JeV Senior at the Canadian Department of Foreign AVairs andInternational Trade; Joan Link and Matthew Preston at the British Foreign andCommonwealth OYce; and the Research Grants staV of the British Academy

List of Illustrations xi

6 The Dialectics of Empire: Soviet Leaders and the Challenge

of Civil Resistance in East-Central Europe, 1968–91 91Mark Kramer

7 Civil Resistance in Czechoslovakia: From Soviet Invasion to

13 The Interplay of Non-violent and Violent Action in the

Movement against Apartheid in South Africa, 1983–94 213Tom Lodge

14 The Intersection of Ethnic Nationalism and People

Power Tactics in the Baltic States, 1987–91 231Mark R Beissinger

15 The 1989 Demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and Beyond:

Merle Goldman

16 Civil Resistance and Civil Society: Lessons from the Collapse

of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 260Charles S Maier

17 The Limits of Prudence: Civil Resistance in Kosovo, 1990–98 277Howard Clark

18 Civil Society versus Slobodan Milosˇevic´: Serbia, 1991–2000 295Ivan Vejvoda

19 Georgia’s ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003: Enforcing Peaceful Change 317Stephen Jones

20 Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004: The Paradoxes of Negotiation 335Andrew Wilson

21 The Moment of the Monks: Burma, 2007 354Christina Fink

22 A Century of Civil Resistance: Some Lessons and Questions 371Timothy Garton Ash

1.1 Prague, August 1968: a woman remonstrates with invading Warsaw

1.2 US government provides armed protection of non violent civil rights

demonstrators Montgomery, Alabama, March 1965 151.3 Vietnamese Buddhist monks at Xa Loi Pagoda in Saigon

1.4 On 24 March 1999 President Clinton announces the start of

2.1 Playwright and impresario of civil resistance, Va´clav Havel, at the launch

2.2 Burmese pro democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi 352.3 In Kathmandu, capital of Nepal, tens of thousands celebrate the

ending of the period of royal rule and martial law, 27 April 2006 413.1 Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 6 July 1946 48

4.1 Police dogs and water cannons used against peaceful civil rights

demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963 694.2 Martin Luther King with US Attorney General Robert

F Kennedy, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and US Vice President

Lyndon B Johnson outside the White House, 22 June 1963 714.3 Martin Luther King at the huge March in Washington, during

which he gave his ‘I have a dream’ speech, 28 August 1963 735.1 Civil rights march in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast,

July 1970, three months after the Wrst major confrontation

between Catholics and British soldiers in Belfast 785.2 Bernadette Devlin, a key Wgure in the civil rights movement

5.3 Two children in the predominantly Catholic Markets area of Belfast

re enact the shooting of four men the day before, August 1971 846.1 Alexander Dubcˇek, First Secretary of the Czechoslovak communist

party, at a meeting in Bratislava of the leaders of six communist

6.2 Newly appointed leader of the Soviet communist party, Mikhail

Gorbachev, and Erich Honecker, the long time leader of East Germany’s

communist party, at its 11th party congress in East Berlin in April 1986 101

6.3 Boris Yeltsin reads a statement from atop a tank in Moscow,

19 August 1991, as he urges people to resist the attempted

7.1 A road sign broken by Czechoslovak citizens to prevent the

invading Warsaw Pact forces from Wnding their way,

7.2 Wenceslas Square, in the centre of Prague, is deserted as a

one hour general strike begins at midday on 22 August 1968 1187.3 Josef Smrkovsky, President of the Czechoslovak Parliament,

explains the results of Moscow negotiations to MPs during

an informal meeting in Prague, 27 August 1968 1237.4 A vast crowd in Wenceslas Square, Prague, during a two hour

8.1 Vast crowds turn out to listen to the Polish Pope, John Paul II,

on his extraordinary pilgrimage to his native land in June 1979 1308.2 Strike leader Lech Wałe˛sa waits to make his confession to a

Catholic priest during the historic strike in the Lenin shipyard

8.3 Prime Minister and army general Wojciech Jaruzelski and

Solidarity leader Lech Wałe˛sa, March 1981 1378.4 The large round table ready for the televised formal opening

of the ‘round table negotiations’ pioneered by Poland from

9.1 Huge crowds Wll the streets of Lisbon in celebration of the

young military oYcers who had overthrown one of Europe’s

longest lasting dictatorships in a coup d’e´tat on 25 April 1974 1459.2 Dealing with the secret police, Portugal, late April 1974 1489.3 Portuguese soldiers read a newspaper in late April 1974 to Wnd

out the latest on the ‘Revolution of the Carnations’ 15510.1 A crowd estimated at one million marches through the streets

of Tehran in January 1979, demanding the return from exile

10.2 Iranian women show support for Ayatollah Khomeini at

Tehran University, two days after his triumphal return

10.3 US President Jimmy Carter on a brief visit to Tehran,

11.1 Filipino opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr lies dead on

the tarmac at Manila Airport, 21 August 1983 18011.2 Cory Aquino, widow of Benigno, campaigning on

21 January 1986 for the presidential election held on 7 February 18311.3 Demonstrators gather around eYgies of Philippine President

Ferdinand Marcos and US President Ronald Reagan, 3 February 1986 187

11.4 A Filipino youth slashes an oil painting of Philippine dictator

Ferdinand Marcos with a stick, February 1986 19312.1 A riot policeman Wres tear gas at demonstrators in Santiago,

12.2 Chilean dictator General Pinochet welcomes US Secretary

of State Henry Kissinger on a visit to Santiago, 8 June 1976 20812.3 Demonstrators in Santiago celebrate Pinochet’s defeat in the

plebiscite held on the previous day, 5 October 1988 21113.1 At a funeral on 7 September 1985 members of the

UDF aligned United Women’s Organization serve as a guard of honour 21713.2 At a Cape Town funeral on 1 July 1985, Bishop Desmond

Tutu pleads with the crowd to spare the life of a suspected

13.3 South Africans at a funeral on 7 September 1985 for nine

people who had died during riots in Guguletu, a black

13.4 Frederik Willem de Klerk, the former South African president,

shaking hands with his successor, President Nelson Mandela,

14.1 At the ‘Baltic Chain’ demonstration on 23 August 1989,

placards symbolizing the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact are

burned in Tallinn, capital of Estonia 23314.2 Inhabitants of Tallinn hold hands as part of the

‘Baltic Chain’ demonstration on 23 August 1989 23614.3 The parliament building in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital,

is protected by concrete and barbed wire barricades, 18 January 1991 23815.1 A student in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square wears the US civil

rights movement’s classic slogan, ‘We Shall Overcome’,

15.2 A lone demonstrator seeks to block the path of a tank

convoy leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing, 5 June 1989 25516.1 After prayers for peace at St Nicholas’s Church in Leipzig,

demonstrators calling for peaceful change inside the

German Democratic Republic march around the city’s

16.2 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev embraces Erich Honecker,

East German communist leader, during the celebration of

the fortieth anniversary of the GDR’s creation, East Berlin,

16.3 East Germans queue up to pass through the Wall to West Berlin,

17.1 Ethnic Albanian students hold banners saying

‘Kosova university now tomorrow will be late’ in Kosovo’s

17.2 Serbian police beat ethnic Albanians during demonstrations

17.3 Ibrahim Rugova, long time leader of Kosovar Albanians’

civil resistance, meets UN Secretary General KoW Annan

on 1 June 1998, at UN headquarters in New York 28818.1 Serbian students marching in Belgrade face the police

cordon on Knez Mihajlova Street, 27 December 1996 30118.2 ‘He’s Wnished!’ Slogan being stuck on a policeman’s

riot shield outside the Belgrade parliament, 5 October 2000 30918.3 Bulldozer in front of the Yugoslav Federal parliament building

in Belgrade on 5 October 2000, the day the building was

occupied and Slobodan Milosˇevic´ compelled to resign 31318.4 A demonstrator waves a banner bearing the face of

opposition leader Vojislav Kosˇtunica on the steps of

parliament in Belgrade, 5 October 2000 31519.1 Interior ministry servicemen greet opposition leaders in

the parliament yard in the Georgian capital Tbilisi,

19.2 Georgian opposition supporters wave national Xags as they

stand on an armoured vehicle, celebrating the resignation

of President Eduard Shevardnadze, 23 November 2003 32819.3 Georgian opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili after a

meeting with President Eduard Shevardnadze in the

president’s residence, 23 November 2003 33320.1 Thousands of orange balloons cover supporters of Ukraine’s

opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko

during a rally in Kiev’s Maidan square, 2 December 2004 33620.2 Millionairess and politician Yuliia Tymoshenko, talking at

a press conference in Kiev, 26 December 2004 34420.3 The round table at which Ukraine’s two rival presidential

candidates met on 26 November 2004, for the Wrst time

21.1 A protest by some 20,000 Buddhist monks and citizens in Rangoon,

22.2 The vast turnout to welcome Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran

on his return from exile, 1 February 1979 378

22.3 Mohandas Gandhi as a young man, before he became the ‘Mahatma’ 38122.4 Va´clav Havel and Alexander Dubcˇek toast the resignation of the

ruling politburo on the stage of the Magic Lantern theatre in Prague,

headquarters of the Velvet Revolution, 24 November 1989 383The endpaper map was prepared by Sir Martin Gilbert

Ervand Abrahamian is Distinguished Professor of History at City University ofNew York He is the author of Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton UniversityPress, 1982); The Iranian Mojahedin (Yale University Press, 1986); Khomeinism:Essays on the Islamic Republic (University of California Press, 1993); TorturedConfessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (University of Cali-fornia Press, 1999); and A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press,2008).

Mark R Beissinger is Professor of Politics at Princeton University, specializing inRussian and post-Soviet politics He has written extensively on issues of nationalidentity and nationalist movements in the post-Soviet region His works includeNationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2002) and The Nationalities Factor in Soviet Politics and Society (West-view, 1990)

Judith M Brown is Beit Professor of Commonwealth History at Oxford sity and Professorial Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford She is the author ofGandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics 1915–1922 (Cambridge University Press,1972); Gandhi and Civil Disobedience The Mahatma in Indian Politics 1928–34(Cambridge University Press, 1977); Modern India: The Origins of an AsianDemocracy (Oxford University Press, 1984); Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (YaleUniversity Press, 1989); Nehru: A Political Life (Oxford University Press, 2003);and The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford University Press, 2008).April Carter is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Peace andReconciliation Studies, Coventry University Her most recent books are: ThePolitical Theory of Global Citizenship (Routledge, 2001) and Direct Action andDemocracy Today (Polity, 2005) She also compiled (with Howard Clark andMichael Randle) People Power and Protest Since 1945: A Bibliography of NonviolentAction (Housmans Bookshop, 2006)

Univer-Howard Clark is Chair of War Resisters’ International and Visiting ResearchFellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University

He is the author of Preparing for Nonviolent Direct Action (CND Publications,1984) and Civil Resistance in Kosovo (Pluto, 2000) He compiled (with AprilCarter and Michael Randle) People Power and Protest since 1945: A Bibliography

of Nonviolent Action (Housmans Bookshop, 2006) and edited People Power:Unarmed Resistance and Global Solidarity (Pluto, 2009)

Richard English is Professor of Politics at Queen’s University His publicationsinclude History of Ireland (Gill and Macmillan, 1991); Armed Struggle: TheHistory of the IRA (Macmillan, 2003), which won the 2003 UK Political Studies

Association Politics Book of the Year Award; and Irish Freedom: The History ofNationalism in Ireland (Pan, 2007), which won the 2007 Christopher Ewart-BiggsMemorial Prize and the 2007 Political Studies Association of Ireland Book Prize.Christina Fink is a Lecturer at the International Sustainable Development StudiesInstitute in Chiang Mai, Thailand She obtained her Ph.D in social/culturalanthropology from UC Berkeley in 1994 She wrote Living Silence: BurmaUnder Military Rule (Zed Books, 2001) and co-edited Converging Interests:Traders, Travelers, and Tourists in Southeast Asia (University of California atBerkeley, 1999).

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at the University ofOxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and aSenior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University As a ‘historian of thepresent’ he witnessed a number of the episodes of civil resistance discussed in thisvolume His books include The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (3rd edn., YaleUniversity Press, 2002); The Magic Lantern: The Revolutions of ’89 Witnessed inWarsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (3rd edn., with a new Afterword, Vintage,1999); In Europe’s Name (Jonathan Cape, 1993); History of the Present (Penguin,2000); Free World (Penguin, 2004); and Facts are Subversive (Atlantic Books,2009)

Merle Goldman is Professor Emerita at Boston University and Associate at theFairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University She is the author ofseveral books, including Literary Dissent in Communist China (Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1967); China’s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent (Harvard UniversityPress, 1981); Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the DengXiaoping Decade (Harvard University Press, 1994); and From Comrade to Citizen:The Struggle for Political Rights in China (Harvard University Press, 2005).Carlos Huneeus is Professor of the Institute of International Studies at theUniversity of Chile and Executive Director of Corporation CERC His publica-tions include: Chile, un paı´s dividido: la actualidad del pasado (Catalonia Ltda.,2003); El re´gimen de Pinochet (Editorial Sudamericana, 2000); Los chilenos y lapolı´tica: cambio y continuidad bajo el autoritarismo (ICHEH, 1987); Para vivir lademocracia: dilemas de su consolidacio´n (Editorial Andante, 1987); and Los cami-nos a la democracia: los casos de Argentina, Espan˜a, Grecia y Portugal (EdicionesAconcagua, 1978)

Stephen Jones is Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Mount HolyokeCollege He has written over fifty articles and chapters on Georgian history andpolitics His books include Third World Countertrade: Analysis of 1,350 DealsInvolving Developing Countries, 1980–1987 (Produce Studies, 1988); Socialism inGeorgian Colors: the European Road to Social Democracy, 1883–1917 (HarvardUniversity Press, 2002); and Georgia: A Political Life: 1985–2007 (I B Tauris,forthcoming 2009)

Mark Kramer is Director of the Harvard Cold War Studies Project at HarvardUniversity and a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian andEurasian Studies Professor Kramer is the editor of the Journal of Cold WarStudies, published by MIT Press four times a year, and of the Harvard ColdWar Studies Book Series, published by Rowman & LittleWeld.

Tom Lodge is Professor of Peace and ConXict Studies at the University ofLimerick He has considerable personal experience of life and politics in SouthAfrica in the last years of apartheid, having been a member of the Department ofPolitical Studies at the University of Witwatersrand between 1978 and 2005 He isthe author of Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (Ravan Press, 1983) andMandela: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Doug McAdam is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University He is the author

or co-author of eight books and more than sixty articles in the area of politicalsociology, with a special emphasis on the study of social movements and revolu-tions His works include Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency,1930–1970 (University of Chicago Press, 1982); Freedom Summer (OxfordUniversity Press, 1988); and Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001)

Charles S Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at HarvardUniversity where he teaches European and international history His most recentbooks include The Cold War in Europe: Era of a Divided Continent (MarkusWiener, 1996); Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of EastGermany (Princeton University Press, 1997); and Among Empires: AmericanAscendancy and its Predecessors (Harvard University Press, 2006)

Kenneth Maxwell is Director of the Brazil Studies Program at Harvard sity’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and a Visiting Profes-sor in the Department of History His publications include: ConXicts andConspiracies: Brazil and Portugal 1750–1808 (Cambridge University Press,1973); The Making of Portuguese Democracy (Cambridge University Press,1995); and The New Spain: From Isolation to InXuence (Council on ForeignRelations Press, 1994) He is a regular contributor to the New York Review ofBooks, World Policy Journal, and Folha de Sa˜o Paulo

Univer-Amado Mendoza Jr is Associate Professor in Political Science and InternationalStudies at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City He hasedited two books, Debts of Dishonor (Philippine Rural Reconstruction Move-ment, 1991) and From Crisis to Crisis: A Historical Analysis of the RecurrentBalance of Payments Crisis in the Philippines (National Economic ProtectionismAssociation, 1987) He has written many articles on Philippine politics andeconomics

Adam Roberts is President of the British Academy; Emeritus Professor of national Relations, Oxford University; and Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College,Oxford His books include: as editor, The Strategy of Civilian Defence: Non-violent

Inter-Resistance to Aggression (Faber, 1967); with Philip Windsor, Czechoslovakia 1968:Reform, Repression and Resistance (Chatto & Windus, 1969); Nations in Arms: TheTheory and Practice of Territorial Defence (Chatto & Windus, 1976); and as jointeditor, The United Nations Security Council and War: The Evolution of Thoughtand Practice since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Aleksander Smolar is Chairman of the Board of the Stefan Batory Foundation inWarsaw and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre National de la RechercheScientiWque in Paris His publications include, as editor: La Grande Secousse:Europe de l’Est 1989–1990 (CNRS, 1990); Globalization, Power, and Democracy(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and De Kant a` Kosovo (Presses deSciences Po, 2003)

Ivan Vejvoda is Executive Director of the Balkan Trust for Democracy He hasedited several books including Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation,Despair and Rebirth (Longman, 1996) and Democratization in Central and EasternEurope (Continuum, 2002)

Kieran Williams is Instructor in Politics at Drake University His publicationsinclude: The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970(Cambridge University Press, 1997); Security Intelligence Services in New Democ-racies: The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania (Palgrave, 2001); and Slovakiaafter Communism and Mecˇiarism (University College, School of Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies, 2000)

Andrew Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the School of Slavonicand East European Studies at the University College London His recent publi-cations include Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (Yale University Press, 2005) andVirtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World (Yale University Press,2005)

1 Were the reasons for the use of non-violent methods derived from anabsolute rejection of all political violence, or from more particularstrategic, moral, cultural, and other considerations?

2 To the extent that a non-violent movement was able to operate eVectively,was this in part due to particular favourable circumstances in the overallpower situation, both domestic and international? How important aremethods of civil resistance as opposed to the conditions within which itoperates?

3 Has civil resistance demonstrated a particular value as one instrument(alongside other instruments such as external election monitors) forchallenging fraudulent election processes and ensuring a free and fairoutcome?

4 Can an international legal/normative regime provide a favourablebackground for civil resistance?

5 To what extent did the non-violent movement succeed in undermining, orthreatening to undermine, the adversary’s sources of power and legitimacy(military, economic, psychological, organizational, etc.)?

6 Was any force or violence used alongside non-violent methods, and if sowhat were its eVects?

7 What has been the role of external actors of all kinds (government, non-governmental organizations, NGOs, diasporas) in assisting orattempting to inXuence civil resistance?

quasi-8 Is there evidence of agents provocateurs being sent in by the state, or ofother eVorts to discredit the movement by depicting it as violent?

9 How has the development of technologies, especially information technology(e.g fax, email, internet), aVected the capacities of civil resistance?

10 Was there any implicit or explicit threat of a future use of force or violence

to carry forward the non-violent movement’s cause if the movement didnot achieve a degree of success, or if extreme repression was used against it?

11 If there was such a threat, was it from the leaders of the movement itself,from potential allies among its ‘constituency’ of support, or from outsideforces such as, for example, the governments of neighbouring states orinternational bodies?

12 In cases where outside governments or organizations supported themovement, did they understand and respect the reasons for avoiding theuse of force or violence? Should rules (possibly in the form of a draft code

of conduct) be established regarding the character and extent of suchexternal support?

13 Was civil resistance in one country instigated or assisted by another state as

a mere instrument for pursuing its own ends or embarrassing anadversary? If accusations of this kind were made, did they have anycredibility?

14 Overall, can the movement be viewed as a success or failure? Howadequately do these labels reXect outcomes that may be highlyambiguous, especially with the beneWt of hindsight?

15 In what time-frame should the eVectiveness of civil resistance be judged?

16 Has experience of civil resistance had an impact on the way in which civilsociety groups have subsequently operated? If they entered intogovernment, did the leaders and exponents of civil resistance show anydistinctive approach to the management and use of military and policepower by their state?

17 Is there a connection between the practice of civil resistance and liberaloutcomes (such as democratic government and respect of minorityrights)? If yes, what is the nature of that connection, and what lessonsmight be learned?

These seventeen questions were drawn up in 2006–7 by the Organizing Committee

of the Oxford University Project on ‘Civil Resistance and Power Politics:Domestic and International Dimensions’ Authors of chapters were encouraged toselect and adapt those that were pertinent to the particular subject at hand

2003 and Ukraine in 2004—where subsequent political developments have appointed many of the hopes of the demonstrators.

dis-There is a large and increasingly sophisticated body of writing about civilresistance, admirably surveyed by April Carter in Chapter 2 below One intellec-tual tradition within that literature has made large claims about the possible futureroles of civil resistance: that it could provide an eVective means of resisting alltyrannical regimes; that it could progressively replace violence in all its numerousmanifestations; and that it could be the sole basis of the defence policies of states.Such claims need to be tested by a rigorous examination of the record Thechapters of this book are intended to add to the body of general knowledgeabout the uses of civil resistance, and to help identify some observable trends

In its Wrst year the Oxford University Project on Civil Resistance and PowerPolitics identiWed seventeen questions that it sought to explore.1 These were not arigid frame to be imposed on the contributors to this book, who were invited tofocus on those questions most pertinent to the cases which they addressed Theirrichly varied answers to these questions point towards the conclusion that whilecivil resistance can be an alternative to the use of force, the two can also have asubtle and complex relationship.

This book sets out to provide, not a theory of civil resistance, but rather accounts

of its causes, courses and consequences, locating these as accurately as we could inthe broader stream of history This chapter initiates this book’s exploration in Wvestages First, it oVers a deWnition of civil resistance, and suggests why it is anappropriate term to describe the phenomena under investigation Second, it indi-cates how the term ‘power politics’ is understood in this study, and how thephenomena it describes—though often viewed as discredited—have proved endur-ing and have inXuenced the development of civil resistance Third, it looks critically

at three intellectual and political traditions that see civil resistance as replacing force

in many or all of its forms Fourth, it outlines some of the ways in which civilresistance, rather than being a total alternative to force, has had a complex relation-ship with it Fifth, it discusses the hazards of ‘universalism’—i.e seeing civilresistance as a panacea, or else as a universal threat—and supports a view of it aslocally rooted, but able to draw strength from international inXuences and norms

of widespread and sustained activities that challenge a particular power, force,policy, or regime hence the term ‘resistance’ The adjective ‘civil’ in this contextdenotes that which pertains to a citizen or society, implying that a movement’sgoals are ‘civil’ in the sense of being widely shared in a society; and it denotes thatthe action concerned is non military or non violent in character

Civil resistance, precursors of which can be found throughout history, hasbeen used in many types of struggle in modern times: for example, againstcolonialism, foreign occupations, military coups d’e´tat, dictatorial regimes, electoral malpractice, corruption, and racial, religious, and gender discrimination Ithas been used not only against tyrannical rule, but also against democraticallyelected governments, over such issues as maintenance of key elements ofthe constitutional order, preservation of regional autonomy within a country,

1 Above, xx xxi.

defence of minority rights, environmental protection, and opposition to involvement in certain military interventions and wars.

Civil resistance operates through several mechanisms of change These are notlimited to attempts to appeal to the adversary They can involve pressure andcoercion by increasing the costs to the adversary of pursuing particular policies,weakening the adversary’s capacity to pursue a particular policy, or even undermining completely the adversary’s sources of legitimacy and power, whetherdomestic or international An aim of many campaigns is to bring about dissensionand defections in the adversary’s regime and in its basis of support Forms of actioncan be very varied, and have included demonstrations, vigils, and petitions; strikes,

go slows, and boycotts; and sit ins, occupations, and the creation of parallelinstitutions of government Campaigns of civil resistance involve strategy i.e.projecting and directing the movements and elements of a campaign

There is no assumption that the adversary power against which civil resistance isaimed necessarily avoids resort to violence: civil resistance has been used in somecases in which the adversary has been predisposed to use violence Nor is there anassumption that there cannot be various forms of understanding or cooperationbetween civil resisters and certain governments or other entities with a capacity touse force Often the reasons for a movement’s avoidance of violence are related tothe context rather than to any absolute ethical principle: they may spring from asociety’s traditions of political action, from its experience of war and violence, fromlegal considerations, from a desire to expose the adversary’s violence as unprovoked, or from calculations that civil resistance would be more likely than violentmeans to achieve success in the particular situation that is faced.2

The term ‘civil resistance’ has frequently been used in connection with sometypes of non-violent campaign Gandhi used it on many occasions, including in

an article in the weekly paper Young India in 1921—one of a series in which he setout his ideas for resisting British rule in India.3 One post-Cold War survey of thesubject was entitled simply Civil Resistance.4

Why use the term ‘civil resistance’ rather than one of its many near-synonyms?Civil resistance is one type of the broader overall phenomenon of ‘non-violentaction’ Many have seen ‘non-violent action’ as the over-arching concept, whichfamously encompasses a vast array of types of activity.5 Other near-synonyms forcivil resistance that have been used commonly have included not only thosealready mentioned in the deWnition, but also ‘passive resistance’, ‘civilian resist-ance’, ‘civil disobedience’, and ‘satyagraha’ Each of these terms has its own

2 This is simply one attempt at a deWnition It draws on a wide variety of sources, including suggestions and published work by Peter Ackerman, April Carter, Michael Randle, Jacques Semelin, and Gene Sharp.

3 Mohandas K Gandhi, ‘The Momentous Issue’, Young India, 10 Nov 1921 Reprinted in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG) (Delhi: Government of India, CD version, 1999), vol 25, 76 8 On 18 Mar 1922 Gandhi was tried for three inXammatory articles in Young India in

1921 2, but this particular article was not one of those singled out in the charge sheet.

4 Michael Randle, Civil Resistance (London: Fontana, 1994) He deWnes the concept at 9 10.

5 The classic exposition of the variety of forms of non violent action is Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973) Based on his 1968 Oxford D.Phil thesis, it began as a study of non violent resistance against totalitarian regimes.

particular uses and connotations However, ‘civil resistance’ is the most tory general term to cover the broad range of cases addressed in this book: mostcases were ‘civil’ in the senses that they had a civic quality, relating to the interestsand hopes of a society as a whole; in some cases the action involved was notprimarily disobedience, but instead involved supporting the norms of a societyagainst usurpers; and the generally principled avoidance of the use of violencewas not doctrinaire.

satisfac-DeWnitions of all these terms leave certain questions unanswered The mostobvious problem is that certain campaigns that might on the surface appear to benon-violent in character are not necessarily perceived as such when the context istaken into account In Northern Ireland in May 1974, the Protestant majorityorganized an impressive fourteen-day general strike, but the purpose, and eVect,

of this non-violent action was to bring down a power-sharing executive whichhad been established in an attempt to bring peace to the troubled province Otherexamples of strikes that are non-violent in themselves, but involve a risk of violentconsequences, might include a strike by hospital staV with no alternative arrange-ments for the patients; or a strike, without notice, by air-traYc controllers,creating immediate risks to aircraft in Xight Such possibilities prove the prop-osition that deWnitions of abstract nouns may be excellent at capturing the core ofparticular concepts, but always involve problems at the periphery

P OW E R P O L I T I C S

Against the background of the carnage of the First World War, PresidentWoodrow Wilson spoke in 1918 of ‘the great game, now forever discredited, ofthe balance of power’.6 He oVered a vision of a world in which policies based onthe pursuit of power would be replaced by policies based on justice and democ-racy Attractive as his vision was, it was not borne out by subsequent events.Concerns about power and power balances—and more speciWcally about how touse military means to defend a social order, guard against potential dangers, orgain advantages over actual or potential adversaries—have proved to be anenduring feature of politics both domestic and international While forms ofarmed conXict and military power constantly change, and much has beenachieved in reducing their role in human aVairs, attempts to eliminate theirroles entirely have perennially run into trouble.7

6 ‘Address of President Woodrow Wilson at a Joint Session of the Two Houses of Congress’, 11 Feb.

1918, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918, supplement 1, The World War, vol I (Washington DC: US Government Printing OYce, 1933), 112.

7 On evolving views of the role of power in international relations over the centuries, and the emergence of a beneWcent deadlock between major powers, see F H Hinsley’s masterly survey, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), esp the conclusions at 366 7.

The term ‘power politics’ has long been used as a catchphrase to encompass thepreoccupation of political leaders with power in its various forms Indeed, the

‘realist’ school of thought identiWes international relations with power politics,and places heavy emphasis on the proposition that action by states is typicallyself-interested, power-seeking, and even (in some versions) aggressive In thissense, power is more than just a currency that states use in their mutual relations:

it is a motive determining most if not all state action It is not just a means, but

an end.8

Such theories that interpret all international political developments as ations of power politics are vulnerable to many criticisms: they ignore theextraordinary diVerences in the behaviour of diVerent states and governments;they underestimate the role of international law and norms in inXuencing theactions of states; they have diYculty in accounting for many developments,including the Soviet Union’s rapid demise and the willingness of many states toforgo expansionism and untrammelled sovereignty; and, above all, they have anexcessively narrow conception of power as consisting exclusively of militarypower These criticisms are serious, but they do not add up to a claim thatpower is of no importance: rather, they suggest that it operates in conjunctionwith other factors, and can assume many diVerent forms

eman-A particular manifestation of great power politics that has a strong connectionwith civil resistance is the phenomenon often described as ‘spheres of inXuence’.Throughout history, and for a variety of reasons, powerful states have sought toestablish networks of compliant states in their region or more generally Spheres

of inXuence, particularly when based on authoritarian principles, tend to lead tonationalist reactions in subject-states, and often these reactions take the form ofcivil resistance movements Such movements must necessarily frame their strat-egy with their power-political situation in mind As the chapters in this bookshow, they often time their actions to coincide with changes of opinion orleadership in the dominant state Occasionally, civil resistance movements mayeven beneWt from the operations of the balance of power It remains an interestingquestion whether, after the revolution in 1974, Portugal was saved from a seriousattempt at communist party control by the wise and courageous actions ofPortuguese democrats, or by a degree of Soviet acceptance that Portugal waswithin the US sphere of inXuence: both were important

Although there is a tradition of thought that associates power politics almostexclusively with the state, many non-state entities use and pursue power asassiduously as states Regional warlords, and leaders of guerrilla insurgenciesand terrorist campaigns, are all parts of the phenomenon of power politics Theinterconnections between certain non-state uses of force on the one hand, andcases of civil resistance on the other, have been varied Civil resistance has beensigniWcant in many countries—from Portugal to the Philippines—that have also

8 For classic expositions of the power politics approach, see Hans J Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1948); and John J Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001).

faced guerrilla insurgencies, and has sometimes helped to establish a new politicalorder However, in a few cases civil resistance has played an unintentional part inthe emergence of campaigns of violence, in ways indicated in the chapters onNorthern Ireland and South Africa There is often a strained and complexrelationship between civil resistance and non-state violence.

Not all power involves the threat or use of armed force Both within countries

in their domestic politics, and also between countries, power can derive fromauthority, legitimacy, persuasion, and consent Power can, as Joseph Nye haspointed out, involve elements of ‘soft power’, which is ‘the ability to get what youwant through attraction rather than coercion or payments’.9 Civil resistance oftendepends on the power to attract, but it is not the same as soft power A principaldiVerence is that, unlike soft power, it can involve coercion: the peaceful with-drawal of cooperation can literally force a regime’s collapse

The idea that there can be non-military forms of power has also been reXected

in perennial claims that particular states or groupings of states are ‘civilianpowers’ In the 1970s both the European Communities (which later became theEuropean Union) and Japan were sometimes described as pure expressions of

‘civilian power’, by which was meant that they were primarily concerned witheconomic activity, had relatively low defence budgets, and were helping to build aworld of economic interdependence In subsequent decades the idea continued tosurface periodically, especially in relation to the European Union ‘Civilian power’came to be seen as comprising four main elements: acceptance of the necessity ofinternational cooperation; concentration on non-military, primarily economic,means to secure national goals; willingness to develop supranational structures toaddress key issues of international management; and civilian control over foreignand defence policy-making Curiously, the phenomenon of civil resistance, andthe extensive history of European support for it in many countries, never featured

in the debates about ‘civilian power Europe’—debates which are therefore oflimited relevance to the present study In any case the idea of ‘civilian powerEurope’ has long been challenged, principally on the ground that, like othercountries and regions, Europe is not an ‘ideal-type’, and is in fact somewhere on

a spectrum between the two ideal-types of civilian and military power.10

In writings on non-violent forms of action there has long been recognition thatcivil resistance is one form of power Indeed, the terminology and literature ofcivil resistance is suVused with the language of power: hence terms such as

‘people power’ and ‘social power’, and book titles in the tradition of RichardGregg’s The Power of Non-violence.11 Any realistic survey of the role of civilresistance needs to take account of the role of other dimensions of power,including military power This is not simply a matter of recognizing the con-

9 Joseph S Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public AVairs, 2004), x.

10 For two excellent critical views of the concept of ‘civilian power Europe’ in diVerent eras, see Hedley Bull, ‘Civilian Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?’, Journal of Common Market Studies,

21, nos 1 2 (Sept Dec 1982), 149 64; and Karen Smith, ‘Beyond the Civilian Power EU Debate’, Politique Europe´enne, no 17 (Autumn 2005), 63 82.

11 Richard Gregg, The Power of Non violence (London: George Routledge, 1935).

tinued role of armed force in human society, but also of acknowledging thevariety, and the complexity, of the interactions between classic forms of powerand non-violent movements Civil resistance is a distinct phenomenon, but itcannot be considered in isolation from other forms of power Indeed, as thechapters in this book suggest, it often thrives in situations of great power-politicalcomplexity.

The involvement of civil resistance with power also involves negotiations withthe powerful Resistance struggles often result in a stalemate, in which theresisters can deny their adversaries legitimacy and cooperation, but they stillneed governmental or other assistance if they are to achieve their goals As aresult, many leaders of civil resistance movements—most notably Gandhi,Martin Luther King, and Lech Wałe˛sa—have engaged in negotiations with gov-ernments The round table, as used at the opening of the critically importantnegotiations in Warsaw in February–April 1989, is the classic symbol In August

1989, as a result of the Polish round-table talks and the elections that followed, anon-communist became Prime Minister—the Wrst time this had happened in anycommunist country, and an epochal moment in the ending of the Cold War Thisepisode, with its major consequences for international relations, is one piece ofevidence of the continuous interplay between civil resistance and power politics,and of the role of negotiation in that interplay

C O M P L E T E A LT E R NAT I V E TO F O RC E ?

One approach to the understanding of civil resistance has been to see it as oVering

an alternative to power politics The core vision is of non-violent methodsreplacing political violence in many or all of its forms This approach is found

in three traditions of thought about how civil resistance relates to power politics:paciWsm, ‘progressive substitution’, and defence by civil resistance These arecrude labels: many writers within these traditions show a strong awareness thatsubstitutions for violence may be incomplete, and other approaches may beequally valid

The paciWst tradition and civil resistance

PaciWsm—which can be deWned as a rejection of all reliance on armed force,particularly in the realms of politics and international relations—is often bestunderstood as part of the belief-system of individuals When considered as apossible policy for states, it is vulnerable to three obvious lines of criticism First,its exclusive practice by a whole country would risk leaving that country vulner-able to both internal and external forces Second, the vulnerability of small andweakly defended countries to attack and foreign occupation can in turn increasethe likelihood of major powers going to war with each other—as is evidenced by

the roles of Belgium and Czechoslovakia in the outbreak of the two world wars.Third, it is an essentially negative doctrine—deWned more by what it is againstthan by what it brings to the table.

However, there is a distinct tradition within paciWsm that is more positive,seeing certain forms of civil resistance as a substitute for armed force.12 PaciWstindividuals and organizations have contributed signiWcantly to many civil resist-ance campaigns, including the US civil rights movement.13 Although the paciWsttradition of involvement in civil resistance has undeniable achievements, it hasalso suVered from four limitations First, it has sometimes seen peace movements,whether campaigning against reliance on armaments generally or against par-ticular wars, as the principal manifestation of civil resistance: less attention hasbeen paid to movements with diVerent aims Second, the claim that a generalbelief in non-violence is a necessary foundation of campaigns of civil resistancehas sometimes morphed into the narrow conclusion that any setbacks are due to alack of principled commitment rather than to other causes Third, a veil has oftenbeen drawn over the role of armed force in protecting certain civil resistancemovements against attack, or in helping the ultimate achievement of their goals.Finally, there has been a tendency to suggest that armed force should be re-nounced as a matter of principle even if there remains a question as to whetherthe methods of civil resistance can meet a country’s security needs Above all, aproblem of the paciWst tradition is that it has sometimes led, in public politicaldebates, to civil resistance being conXated with paciWsm, when actual experiencesuggests that it is a broader phenomenon that does not easily Wt into a precon-ceived ideological pigeon-hole

The idea of ‘progressive substitution’

The second tradition sees civil resistance in progressive substitution for the useand threat of force, but at the same time recognizes that force has servedimportant functions in society—for example in policing and in defence In thisview, civil resistance needs to be developed skilfully and strategically if it is toserve the functions previously served by armed force The hope is that it willreplace reliance on force progressively in a succession of issue-areas The centralidea is that only if there is a viable substitute can force be eVectively renounced.Implicitly, this tradition could be compatible with support for particular uses ofarmed force in circumstances where civil resistance appears impractical Gandhiand Martin Luther King, while hard to classify tidily under one single tradition,arguably leaned toward the concept of ‘progressive substitution’

12 For an account of the emergence of non violent action as part of a revival of paciWsm from the 1950s onwards, see Peter Brock, Twentieth Century Paci Wsm (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970), 213 60.

13 On the role of paciWst individuals and organizations in the emergence of the US civil rights movement, see Lawrence S Wittner, Rebels against War: The American Peace Movement, 1941 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 268 73.

Gene Sharp has done most to develop this tradition of thought into a coherenttheory, giving it a high degree of credibility because he combined it with ananalysis of political power, including that of dictatorial and totalitarian regimes.His attractive—even prophetic—vision of an expanding realm for non-violentaction was stated eloquently in 1980 in the preface to Social Power and PoliticalFreedom:

The concept of replacing violent sanctions with nonviolent sanctions in a series ofspeciWc substitutions is not utopian To a degree not generally recognized, thisalready occurs in various conXict situations, even on scales which aVect ourdomestic society and international relations Far from being utopian, nonviolentsanctions build upon crucial parts of our past and present reality Past cases,however, are only the crude beginnings of alternative nonviolent sanctions Thesecould be reWned and developed to increase their power potential, and adapted tomeet society’s genuine need for sanctions.14

At the end of the twentieth century, armed with the additional evidence of theimpressive cases of civil resistance in the intervening twenty years, Peter Acker-man and Jack DuVall oVered a vision of the historical role of non-violent struggleboth as a strategic alternative to force in speciWc situations and as part of aprogressive series of moves towards republican political systems The Wnal para-graphs of A Force More Powerful have the quality of a peroration:

People power in the twentieth century did not grow out of the barrel of a gun Itremoved rulers who believed that violence was power, by acting to dissolve theirreal source of power: the consent or acquiescence of the people they had tried tosubordinate When unjust laws were no longer obeyed, when commerce stoppedbecause people no longer worked, when public services could no longer function,and when armies were no longer feared, the violence that governments could use

no longer mattered their power to make people comply had disappeared

One hundred years ago the map of the world was dominated by empires andmonarchies At the beginning of the twenty Wrst century, the continents are Wlledwith republics Today the spirit of the old Roman civitas has become theuniversal standard and, with a few exceptions, its enemies are gone Gone, too,will soon be their ideas about power.15

Some have made even broader generalizations about the onward and upwardXow of civil resistance, its intimate links with democratization, and a diminishingrole for armed force.16 Such visions were made plausible by the events in theSoviet bloc in 1989–91 and by the revolutions in Belgrade, Tbilisi, and Kiev in

14 Gene Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1980), xi His paper for the March 2007 Oxford conference reXected this vision, presenting a remarkable account of how ideas about non violent action spread in the period since 1980, and of how some ‘speciWc substitutions’ occurred It is hoped that a revised version of his Oxford paper will appear in a further work on civil resistance and the battle of ideas.

15 Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent ConXict (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 505.

16 For example, Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 388 9.

2000–4 However, these visions depend upon a set of assumptions about therelationship between civil resistance and power politics that may not do justice tothe richness of the interplay between them In particular, those countries thathave experienced ‘civil revolutions’ have not seen a wholesale rejection of reliance

on organized armed force After the 2003 ‘Rose Revolution’ in the former Sovietrepublic, Georgia’s new leaders not only accepted the need for armed force andsought outside alliance with the US and NATO, but in August 2008 also author-ized a use of force in the breakaway territory of South Ossetia—part of a chain ofevents triggering war with Russia

Proposals for defence by civil resistance

The third tradition of thought—which is one particular application of thesecond—revolves around the idea of defence by civil resistance—often called

‘civilian defence’ or ‘civilian-based defence’ It can be deWned brieXy as a preparedand coordinated policy for defending a society against internal threats (e.g coupd’e´tat) and against external threats (e.g occupation, blockade, bombing etc.) byprepared and intensive campaigns of civil resistance This approach necessarilyinvolves a focus on the interface between civil resistance and power politics.Those who developed the idea from the late 1950s onwards were inXuenced bythe dangers and moral costs of reliance on nuclear deterrence to seek an alterna-tive defence policy Perhaps the most prominent was the controversial critic of

UK nuclear policy, Commander Sir Stephen King-Hall: his 1959 book supportedunilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain, and proposed an alternative contain-ing some reliance on conventional force plus ‘a defence system of non-violenceagainst violence’.17 In a second book, seeking to relate his proposals to a view ofpower politics, King-Hall argued that the nature of power was changing in thenuclear age, but he was less clear on exactly how it was changing, and statedtowards the end that ‘for all practical purposes the experiences of the past areuseless as a guide to our future’.18

Subsequently, along with many colleagues, I was involved in the attempt tolook more closely at the actual experience of civil resistance with a view toexploring its potential for defence.19 This work exposed a core problem for theidea of defence by civil resistance It may indeed be true that when a country fallsunder the control of a major foreign power or is faced with a coup d’e´tat by itsown armed forces, civil resistance can be one means of undermining the threat.However, countries that have been through the experience of resistance to foreign

17 Stephen King Hall, Defence in the Nuclear Age (London: Gollancz, 1959), 145 7 & 190.

18 King Hall, Power Politics in the Nuclear Age: A Policy for Britain (London: Gollancz, 1962), 13 & 223.

19 See esp Adam Roberts (ed.), The Strategy of Civilian Defence: Non violent Resistance to Aggression (London: Faber, 1967) The US edition was Civilian Resistance as a National Defense (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 1967) The paperback edition, with a revised and updated introduction, was Civilian Resistance as a National Defence (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969).

occupation—as in the present-day cases of post-communist states in central andeastern Europe—generally want to be defended and not liberated next time.

My work on Swedish defence policy from 1969 onwards brought me face toface with the question of whether a country could make a substantial or evencomplete substitution Sweden had been successful in keeping out of wars forover 150 years Opinion there had been particularly interested in the Czechoslo-vak opposition to the 1968 invasion, which—although failing to prevent thereturn to communist orthodoxy—had indicated possibilities of eVective massopposition to invasion In my report on Sweden’s defence options, published in

1972, I stated:

Civil resistance would be unlikely to be eVective in replacing some of the functions

of the Swedish armed forces for example the defence of sparsely populated parts

of the country However, it might be the best means of resisting alien control incertain types of circumstance (e.g total occupation by a super power, attack by aliberal democratic state, occupation with the aim of economic exploitation; oroccupation of urban and highly developed areas)

Merely to add civil resistance to existing military defence could raise seriousproblems, as the dynamics by which the two techniques operate are verydiVerent Civil resistance, if it was not accepted as a complete alternative,

#Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photographs

Figure 1.1 Classic confrontation of civil resistance and power politics Prague, August 1968:

a woman remonstrates with invading Warsaw Pact troops This was among the many photostaken by Josef Koudelka that were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and published innewspapers in western Europe

would need to be clearly separate from military defence in place, in time, inorganizational structure, and in other ways.20

In the course of this work in Sweden, and inXuenced by seeing the eVects of theSoviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia, I increasingly questioned the tradition

of seeing civil resistance as being a complete substitute for force, viewing it more as

a special option for special circumstances This of course begs two all-importantquestions To which circumstances is it appropriate? And if it is not a completesubstitute for violence, how does it coexist with factors of force in politics andinternational relations?

Much subsequent work has been done on the idea of defence by civil resistance

In 1983 an independent and distinctly non-governmental body in the UK, theAlternative Defence Commission, examined the idea thoroughly and saw possibil-ities in it, but came out in favour of NATO countries adopting a posture of ‘defensivedeterrence’—i.e deterrence based on non-nuclear weapons and strategies, includ-ing an element of military defence in depth The underlying idea was that such anapproach, to the extent that it is unambiguously defensive, would create a way out ofthe spiral of threat and counter-threat in which NATO and the Warsaw Pact weretrapped At the same time, the commission envisaged a role for civil resistance—mainly as a fallback policy if the UK’s NATO allies refused to accept the idea of

‘defensive deterrence’.21 The Alternative Defence Commission report, although ithad been published earlier in the year, played almost no part in the 9 June 1983 UKgeneral election, in which the Labour Party’s qualiWed advocacy of unilateral nucleardisarmament became a source of embarrassment, and, after its election defeat, led tothe determination not to repeat the experience.22

Since the end of the Cold War the idea of defence by civil resistance has beenpursued in a number of countries, including the Baltic states However, with thepartial and limited exception of Sweden, it has generally not attracted supportfrom major political parties, and it has not been adopted as a major plank in thesecurity policy of any country.23 This raises a question, not about the utility ofcivil resistance generally, but about its capacity to be a complete substitute formilitary force

20 My Wrst study for the Swedish Defence Research Institute, published as a paperback, was Totalfo¨rsvar och civilmotsta˚nd [Total Defence and Civil Resistance: Problems of Sweden’s Security Policy] (Stockholm: Centralfo¨rbundet Folk och Fo¨rsvar, 1972) This summary of its conclusions is drawn from my subsequent account of this work, ‘Civil Resistance and Swedish Defence Policy’, in Gustav Geeraerts (ed.), Possibilities of Civilian Defence in Western Europe (Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1977), 123.

21 Alternative Defence Commission, Defence Without the Bomb (London: Taylor and Francis, 1983).

22 Adam Roberts, ‘The Trouble with Unilateralism: The UK, the 1983 General Election, and Non Nuclear Defence’, Bulletin of Peace Proposals, Oslo, vol 14, no 4 (Dec 1983), 305 12 This article contains a critique of the proposals in the Alternative Defence Commission report.

23 On the development of the idea of civil resistance as an alternative defence, referring to developments in the Baltic states immediately after the end of the Cold War, see Randle, Civil Resistance, 129 30.

C O N N E C T I O N S B E T W E E N C I V I L R E S I S TA N C E A N D F O RC E

This glance at three traditions of thought raises the question as to whether violent action should be seen in either/or terms as an alternative to powerpolitics It is possible that the complete eradication of power politics is not theright aim, and that it may be more useful to see civil resistance as having a moremodest role Indeed, the tradition that sees it as progressively substituting the use

non-of force places an excessive burden non-of expectation on civil resistance, which thenfails to live up to the very high standard set for it Moreover, actual cases of civilresistance show something more complex at work: a rich web of connectionsbetween civil resistance and other forms of power

Links in ideas: Gandhi and Martin Luther King

The Wrst links can be found in the belief-systems of leaders of civil resistancecampaigns A seemingly general commitment to the avoidance of violence is almostalways in fact selective The history of non-violent action is full of instances of verycareful discrimination in judging the phenomenon that has been the subject of somuch sweeping generalization—violence Both Gandhi and Martin Luther Kingrecognized some modest legitimate role for force Gandhi’s views on the use of forcewere complex.24 Discussing the hypothetical case of a lunatic murdering anyone thatcomes in his way, he openly accepted that killing a person could be justiWable:

‘Taking life may be a duty Suppose a man runs amuck and goes furiously aboutsword in hand, and killing anyone that comes his way, and no one dares to capturehim alive Anyone who dispatches this lunatic will earn the gratitude of thecommunity and be regarded a benevolent man.’25 Martin Luther King famouslywent to the sheriV ’s oYce and applied for a gun permit after his home had beenbombed in January 1956 The application was eventually denied It is a curious factthat the same event, the bombing of his home, which led him to think of using a gun,was also to change the entire course of the Montgomery bus boycott and the US civilrights movement.26 This episode can partly be explained by the fact that the processwhereby King became converted to Gandhian non-violence in the course of leadingthe Montgomery struggle of 1955–6 was slow However, long after those events hecontinued to assert that violence in defence of one’s own home was in an entirelydiVerent category from violence on a political demonstration.27 These particularideas of Gandhi and King about permissible violence related to exceptional situ-ations rather than to the management of the campaigns of which they were leaders

24 See Judith Brown, Ch 3 below, 47 50.

25 Gandhi, ‘Is This Humanity? IV’, Young India, 4 Nov 1926 Reprinted in CWMG, CD version, vol 36, 449 51.

26 Lerone Bennett, What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), 71.

27 Martin Luther King, Chaos or Community? (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968), 27 & 55.

In practice, however, the links between force and civil resistance relate much moreclosely to the central aims and activities of campaigns.

Links in practice

Leaders of civil resistance campaigns have often shown an acute awareness ofpower-political developments For example, in 1989, central and east Europeanopposition movements responded astutely to the changes in the Soviet Union,knowing that the opportunities of the Gorbachev era might not recur Sometimesthe developments to which civil resistance responds include a country’s defeat

in war The 1905 revolution in Russia, following the country’s setbacks in theRusso-Japanese War, is a case in point In Argentina in 1983 the pro-democracyopposition faced the regime of General Galtieri that had been weakened by theoutcome of the 1982 Falklands War; and in 2000, the campaigners for democraticchange in Serbia knew that the Milosˇevic´ regime had lost credibility because of itssetbacks in Kosovo following the 1999 NATO military campaign

An awareness of power-political developments is often accompanied by a lack ofdogmatism—and some degree of acceptance of, even reliance on, certain uses offorce For example, the US civil rights movement in the 1960s generally welcomedthe use of federal forces to protect civil rights campaigners from the wrath ofpolice forces in the Deep South As Doug McAdam shows in his chapter, the USconstitutional framework, and the principles of equality that it embodied, played

an important part in the beginnings and subsequent development of the civilrights movement, and contributed signiWcantly to its sense of legitimacy.28 Facedwith the ever-present risk of violence from white southerners and state forces, civilrights activists generally needed a degree of armed federal protection The greatFreedom Ride of May 1961, which faced repeated violent opposition, got armedprotection for parts of the journey: on the section from Montgomery, Alabama, toJackson, Mississippi, it was escorted by twenty-two highway patrol cars, twobattalions of national guardsmen, three US army reconnaissance planes, andtwo helicopters This did not save the riders from being arrested in Jackson.29The US government provided protection partly for a power-political reason: ‘Theviolence against the Freedom Riders was being given international press coverageand the Kennedys were concerned about their image as they prepared for anupcoming summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.’30 Federal protectionwas critically important on several subsequent occasions, most notably in con-nection with the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 After the local police hadassaulted two previous attempts earlier in the same month, the marchers weresuccessful in reaching Montgomery at the third attempt, on 21–5 March, when

28 Ch 4 below, 62 5.

29 James Peck, Freedom Ride (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 107.

30 Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954 1965 (New York: Viking, 1987), 149.

they were protected by troops and federal agents.31 Civil rights leaders weregenerally impatient with federal agents and the federal government for beingtoo slow to act, whether in providing protection for civil resisters or in enforcingfederal legislation prohibiting racial discrimination.

The long struggles in central and eastern Europe up to 1989 provide otherinstances in which leaders of civil resistance, while requiring their followers toavoid any use of violence, did not see non-violent action as a general solution

to the world’s ills, and would have been horriWed at the idea that the West shoulddisarm completely and unilaterally in the face of Soviet power In Czechoslovakia

as elsewhere in eastern Europe, civil resistance often owed more to events, and tocivil spirit, than to an overall doctrine of non-violence.32 Va´clav Havel had been askilled impresario of civil resistance in Czechoslovakia from the founding of

#William Lovelace/Stringer (Hulton Archive) Getty Images

Figure 1.2 US government provides armed protection of non violent demonstrators Montgomery, Alabama, March 1965 Policemen watch the arrival of the civil rights march fromSelma that had previously been postponed due to acts of violence against the marchers

31 Ibid 279.

32 The view of the resistance following the August 1968 invasion as being grounded in a determin ation to act honourably combined with a complete absence of any strategic plan or overall leadership was emphasized by Kieran Williams in his paper at the conference on ‘Civil Resistance and Power Politics’, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 15 18 Mar 2007 It was also conveyed graphically by a prominent radio journalist, Jirˇı´ Dienstbier, at a panel discussion on ‘The European Way of Civil

Charter 77 in 1977 to the Velvet Revolution in 1989;33 yet he could also, withoutany sense of contradiction, pay tribute to the work of the NATO alliance.

In March 1991, now president of his country, he told the NATO Council:

I am happy to have this opportunity to tell from this rostrum today the truth:the North Atlantic Alliance has been, and remains pursuant to the will ofdemocratically elected governments of its member countries a thoroughlydemocratic defensive community which has made a substantial contribution

to the facts that this continent has not experienced any war suVering for nearlyhalf a century and that a great part thereof has been saved from totalitarianism.34Often, as in this case, the military force of an outside power is important toresisters largely because it provides a defended space which their oppressorscannot control Such space may be valuable simply because it enables the merits

of freedom and independence to be demonstrated, or because it makes possiblespeciWc kinds of assistance

A life-saving example of assistance to civil resistance from a defended spaceoccurred in 1943 when thousands of Jews were spirited out of German-occupiedDenmark and across the Sound to Sweden: this action is often and rightly upheld

as an example of successful non-violent resistance to Hitler, but a crucial factorthat made it all possible was that Sweden had enough of a defence system to beable to maintain at least a degree of independence from Germany—and, by 1943,could see which way the Second World War was going.35

Civil resistance often creates a situation in which a major power is shamed intoacting—even into using military force In the years since 1945, one notablefeature of the far-Xung American imperium has been its responsiveness to pres-sure from civil resistance campaigns to abandon US support of tawdry dictators.Often non-violent campaigns in a country have been able to weaken the regime of

a dictator, but have not been able to bring about its Wnal downfall Thus in SouthVietnam in 1963, the Buddhist-led popular revolt against the regime of PresidentNgo Dinh Diem caused a huge crisis, but was unable to resolve it Only a mixture

of US pressure on the regime, and a coup d’e´tat carried out by the SouthVietnamese army on the night of 1–2 November 1963 with deep US involvement,could actually depose the hated government and install a new one The fact thatthis non-violent struggle erupted at the same time as the National LiberationFront (Vietcong) insurgency was gathering pace in South Vietnam may have

Resistance’, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 23 May 2008 Dienstbier published an account of the resistance of the Czechoslovak broadcasters, Rozhlas proti tankum (Prague: Pra´ce, 1988), and became foreign minister of Czechoslovakia immediately after the Velvet Revolution.

33 On Havel’s role in 1989 see Kieran Williams, Ch 7 below, 121; and Timothy Garton Ash,

increased the pressure on the US government to sort out the political chaos byditching its long-standing and embarrassing ally.36 Similarly, a US change of

# Bettmann/Corbis

Figure 1.3 Non violent protest against an entrenched repressive regime VietnameseBuddhist monks at Xa Loi Pagoda in Saigon on 18 August 1963, protesting at PresidentNgo Dinh Diem’s discriminatory policies against the country’s Buddhist majority Thesigns were also in English thereby reaching a worldwide TV and newspaper audience

In the end, it took a coup d’e´tat to depose the Diem regime

36 On US involvement in the 1 2 Nov 1963 coup in Saigon, see esp US Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington DC: US Government Printing OYce, 1975), 217 23.