Does nonviolent resistance work? What Chenoweth and Stephan get right (Part 1c)

Third in a series by guest author Ian Hansen

This is a continuation of Part 1 of a four-part series: Does nonviolent resistance work?

  • Part 1: What Chenoweth and Stephan get right (also see Parts 1a1b2a2b and 2c)

In her comment on my original post, Dr. Dahlia Wasfi pointed out that Maria Stephan works for the State Department. That does not necessarily mean she personally supports U.S. empire. Historical figures like Mikhail Gorbechev and Zhao Ziyang (former Premier of the People’s Republic of China, who supported the Tiananmen Square protestors and thus fell from power) are reminders that participants in systems and even leaders of systems can facilitate or try to facilitate major humanity-respecting changes in those systems.

Not all servants of a state are enthusiastic supporters of that state’s wars, atrocities, and acts of oppression.

Dr. Wasfi also noted that it is strange for Chenoweth and Stephan to treat the Iranian Revolution as an example of successful nonviolent revolution given the prominent violent elements to that revolution. I have a different reason for discomfort with describing the Iranian Revolution as a “successful” nonviolent uprising. The state that emerged in the aftermath of that revolution treated many of the participants in it with a murderous brutality that recalled the purges of much more violent revolutions. (See Marjane Sartapi’s Persepolis for a firsthand account of a leftist family struggling in the aftermath of the anti-Shah movement they helped support.)

Chenoweth and Stephan admit that violent revolutionary activities co-occurred with the nonviolent civil resistance in Iran and that the post-Shah government was as brutal or more brutal in many ways. Still, they make a good case that nonviolence, while not used by all parties, was the most effective tactic employed in the Iranian revolution. Those who relied more exclusively on nonviolence gained the most power in the subsequent regime. The irony is that this faction then used the power they gained from nonviolence very violently. Chenoweth and Stephan argue—and offer data-based evidence—that this kind of state violence is less likely and less extensive after nonviolent than violent revolutions.

The take-home, then, is that as a matter of probabilities (rather than money-back guarantees), the victorious leaders of relatively nonviolent revolutions (and coups) are less likely to enact purges and genocidal-scope mass killings than are the victorious leaders of relatively violent upsets in relations of power.

Nonviolent revolutions get betrayed, too (as with Iran, and more recently Egypt), but usually the betrayal is gentler and has a lower body count compared to the betrayals enacted by leaders who take power after ultra-violent transformations.

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.

Does nonviolent resistance work? What Chenoweth and Stephan get right (Part 1a)

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.Why Civil Resistance Works by Chenoweth & Stephan

  • Part 1: What Chenoweth and Stephan get right (also see Parts 1b1c, 2a2b and 2c)

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.

Fallujah: Death and destruction again, Part 2

By guest author Ian Hansen

CIA leaflet for bounty hunters, offering $5-10K for Al Qaeda and Taliban members, or even foreigners.
CIA leaflet offering huge bounties for capture of Al Qaeda and Taliban members (even “foreigners”). Image in public domain; from Wikimedia Commons

There was a time when many U.S. and international experts on terrorism said that Al Qaeda as such “did not exist.” The claim was that Al Qaeda, especially after the post-9/11 worldwide manhunt for its leaders, was effectively little more than an internet ideology that could inspire independent groups of people who wanted to kill Americans under religious cover. For a long time, Al Qaeda had no core managing operation–no Al Qaeda central pulling the strings.

I imagine this is still the case to a large extent, but it seems that all the attempts to use civilian-indifferent, law-indifferent, truth-indifferent mass violence to stamp out a quasi-non-existent group have brought it more fully into existence. These means of fighting a phantom enemy have also brought into existence groups like Al-Shabab, and the latter is effectively aligned with the ideological goals of Al Qaeda, if not with Al Qaeda itself.

And the flowering of this ideological pathology is arguably in the interests of those who profit from violence in this country and “the West” more generally (which now effectively includes cooperative parts of “the East” as well). The willingness to use such backfiring tactics in the “War on Al Qaeda and Associated Forces” is increasingly reminiscent of the vacuum cleaner salesperson who throws dirt on your rug and then vacuums it up.

The more Al Qaeda can be increased in worldwide presence by U.S. global imperialism, the more justification there is for the continued existence of our bloated military-intelligence complex, the national security and surveillance state, the scraps of core Constitutional and human rights protections, and the concentrations of wealth in increasingly few hands.

So I see nothing positive about the people of Fallujah being taken down by the violence-loving dominionist sociopaths of Al Qaeda. I hope the people of Fallujah push them out as they did the U.S., ideally with a nonviolent movement, since nonviolent movements tend to work best according to all the existing empirical research on how to overthrow autocracy and oligarchy.

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.

Fallujah: Death and destruction again, Part I

By guest author Ian Hansen

As a supporter of human rights and locally-controlled democracy in Iraq, I am dismayed to see Fallujah fall to Al Qaeda.

Al-Qa'ida training manual
Al-Qa’ida training manual, CIA Virtual Museum. Image in public domain, from Wikimedia Commons

Some may see poetic justice for the U.S. in this development: the U.S. war of aggression has clearly backfired in Fallujah. But there’s no justice in it for the people of that historic city. I would have been happy to see Fallujah residents lead a nonviolent civil disobedience movement to regain control over their communities, but the ascendance of Al Qaeda there is a tragedy.

The people of Fallujah have already endured enough massacres, destruction of the city’s ancient buildings and mosques, and chemical weapons horrors from the U.S. siege in 2004. And although the draconian rule of the U.S.-aligned Iraqi Security Forces should be overthrown by local democratic rule, the siege by Al Qaeda is, if anything, a regression, not an improvement.

Al Qaeda is not a progressive organization, and there is nothing redeeming about it. It’s a violent oppressive scourge on Islam in much the same way that the Christian Coalition–and the U.S. military-industrial-ideological machine generally–is a violent and oppressive scourge on Christianity.

It is not a coincidence that Al Qaeda as a movement arises largely from the Arabian Peninsula, most of which is controlled by an oil-rich U.S.-Israeli ally (Saudi Arabia). Saudi Arabia–one of the most draconian autocracies in the Middle East–is playing a disgraceful role in the Syrian disaster right now; it just got around to abolishing slavery in 1962. Al Qaeda is at odds with the Saudi regime in obvious ways, but in other obvious ways Al Qaeda mirrors its core values.

And I don’t think that violent decision-makers in the U.S. actually want Al Qaeda to disappear (though until more evidence pours in, this is more of an accusation against our leadership’s unconscious intentions than their conscious ones).

Even at the time of 9/11, Al Qaeda was originally a pretty paltry and unpopular group. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the drone assassinations, and the other Joint Special Operation Command-CIA paramilitary killings all over the world seem to have only magnified Al Qaeda’s international presence.

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.