This is the second of three posts comprising Part III of a series of posts in which Dr. Ian Hansen shares his thoughts on nonviolence.
See also Part 1a, Part 1b, Part 1c, Part 2a, Part 2b, Part2c and Part3a.
Photo by Mbi3000, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Iran, Egypt, Libya, Ukraine and even Syria all reflect examples of uprisings that had a major nonviolent campaign as the lynchpin of popular revolt and managed to change the relations of power in some way. But none of these uprisings stayed Gandhi-style nonviolent, and it seems these revolutions all had aftermaths ranging from the dubious to the disastrous.
Still, held up against totally violent revolutions that succeeded in overthrowing preceding governments–like those in China 1949, Russia 1917 (the October one), and Cambodia 1975—these dubious nonviolent revolutions look relatively good, if only because the aftermath of the violent revolutions was so hyperbolically horrific.
Even the extreme carnage in Syria (and the specter of a new Cold War between great powers over Ukraine’s Crimea) does not weigh down the partially nonviolent group as much as the Cambodian genocide, Stalin’s purges, and the Great Leap Forward weigh down the violent group. Of course, I have just cherry-picked anecdotal examples here. Chenoweth and Stephan (authors of Why Civil Resistance Works) try to root the contrast of more violent versus less violent uprisings in a systematically principled selection of comparison groups, but they come to largely similar conclusions.
But what about those nonviolent revolutions which Chenoweth and Stephan count as somewhat successful but after which the relations of power have hardly changed at all? Or the cases in which the original relations of domination grew even more entrenched since that revolution? I will discuss one of these cases in the final post in part 3 of this series and in my final series on nonviolence.
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.