By Ian Hansen
This is the first in a series of posts intended as reply to a comment by Dahlia Wasfi on a previous post of mine. Nonviolent uprisings are an area of interest rather than expertise for me. I welcome feedback on my thoughts and expect my own views to evolve as I learn more.
Dr. Wasfi noted that nonviolent struggles cited as successful in Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth’s book Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict (see a shorter article here) could also be read as failures and that successful nonviolent movements have rarely worked in isolation. Violent factions fought the same powers and arguably also contributed to successful changes of power attributed to nonviolent movements like Gandhi’s Satyagraha in India and the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. She also noted that Maria Stephan works for the U.S. State Department, which is true.
I believe that Why Civil Resistance Works provides valuable reading to anyone interested in changing the existing power relations in any society. Chenoweth and Stephan are very aware of potential counter-arguments to the nonviolent position and take detailed steps to address them. I particularly admire their pragmatic attempt to classify movements that are more violent than nonviolent and more nonviolent than violent, and to compare their relative success. This classification and judgment is a pretty fraught task, but it is possible to make a plausible comparison across movements when enough movements are included.
The implications of Maria Stephan’s work for the State Department are unclear—must we assume that nothing she says is credible? Is it not relevant that the State Department leans considerably more towards supporting the peaceful rule of law than does, say, the Pentagon or Langley/CIA, as argued by right wing critics of the State Department (assertion) on the assumption that supporting the peaceful rule of law is a bad thing?
The U.S. government may oversee an empire, but different elements of that government employ substantially different means and are guided by substantially different goals and even ideologies. The State Department appears at least somewhat amenable to a shift in policy towards creating and influencing nonviolent movements in order to pursue global interests, judging by its previous support for movements like Otpor in Serbia and the No! Campaign against Pinochet.
Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.