Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century
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| Anteprima |
In
the spring of 1989, Chinese workers and students captured global
attention as they occupied Tiananmen Square, demanded political change,
and then experienced a tragic crackdown at the hands of the Chinese
army. Months later, East German civilians rose up nonviolently, bringing
down the Berlin Wall and dismantling their regime. Although both
movements used the tactics of civil resistance, their outcomes were
different. In Nonviolent Revolutions, Sharon Erickson Nepstad examines
these two movements, along with citizen uprisings in Panama, Chile,
Kenya, and the Philippines. Through a comparative approach that includes
both successful and failed cases, she analyzes the effects of
movements' strategies along with the counter-strategies that regimes
developed to retain power. Nepstad concludes that security force
defections have a significant influence on revolutionary outcomes since
those regimes that maintained troop loyalty were the least likely to
collapse. Through a close analysis of these cases, she explores the
reasons why soldiers defect or remain loyal and the conditions that
increase the likelihood of mutiny. She also examines the impact of
international sanctions, arguing that they sometimes harm movements by
generating new allies for authoritarian leaders or by shifting the locus
of power from local civil resisters to international actors. In
conclusion, Nepstad finds that the dynamics of nonviolent revolution are
not adequately captured by theories that have largely been derived from
studies of armed struggles. Nonviolent Revolutions offers insights into
the distinctive challenges that civil resisters face and it explores
the reasons why some of these insurrectionary movements failed. As this
form of struggle has increased in recent years--with the explosion of
"color revolutions" in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan and
Burma--this book provides a valuable new framework for understanding
civil resistance and nonviolent revolt.
