PAPERS

Nonviolent action is among the most potent tools for countering violence, advancing democracy, and protecting human rights. Recognizing this fact, the international community routinely invests significant resources in training activists in closed and conflict-affected societies to more effectively organize. Yet to date, little to no research has rigorously evaluated whether training effectively promotes nonviolent action, much less whether such training has a direct impact on violent conflict. In this study we measure the effects of a training program in nonviolent action and peacebuilding through a randomized controlled trial across 13 states in Sudan that trained 2,400 activists and civic leaders. Using pre- and post-intervention surveys, a dataset of local events from citizen journalists in treatment and control districts, and in-depth interviews we show that such training not only significantly increases trainees’ knowledge, skills, and confidence in nonviolent action but also reduced state violence in districts where the training took place, compared to control group districts. However, we find no significant impact from the training on government concessions to protesters or non-state violence. These findings provide strong evidence that nonviolent action can be learned, and when learned, can reduce some forms of violence in fragile environments.

Research in conflict studies comparing nonviolent and violent collective action has gained widespread attention due to the counterintuitive finding that nonviolent movements succeed more often than armed movements. However, rising repression and authoritarianism worldwide, alongside declining success rates for protest movements, highlight the need to further theorize and test the conditions under which nonviolent action succeeds. This article distills the different logics by which excluded minorities are advantaged or disadvantaged in nonviolent action. It also reviews three new books that advance the field of movement effectiveness in the short and long runs, and that demonstrate that success is context-dependent, with few characteristics universally conferring advantage or disadvantage. We conclude by outlining areas for future research, including the role of digital technologies.

Why do some groups survive government repression while others get eliminated? This paper offers a corrective to the widely held theory that locally embedded opposition organizations with large and interconnected networks of civilian supporters are better adapted to survive. It argues that extreme and selective violent repression from a capable state requires strict compartmentalization and social detachment. These measures slow the speed and reach of repression. I test these propositions by examining the top targets of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Cross-checking individuals on the Pinochet’s target lists against the victims lists, the article shows that the Revolutionary Leftist Movement (MIR) had a significantly lower rate of victimization than the other top targets. Archival and interview data demonstrate that MIR’s higher survival rate is due to the mechanisms proposed. This study renders intended repression observable and offers implications for the survival of a wide range of actors.

How can nonviolent protest emerge under extreme repression? I argue that nonviolent protest under extreme repression is more likely when protectors—third parties that assist victims and that have ties to at least one of the parties to the conflict—are present. The article tests this proposition by examining the role of Catholic clergy and assistance organizations, and the emergence of nonviolent protest during the high repression years of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Interviews with victims in mobilized and demobilized communities, and a new dataset of Catholic clergy, demonstrate the power of moderate protectors. In contrast to conservative and leftist ones, moderate clergy, together with Catholic assistance organizations, indirectly increased the probability of nonviolent protest by reducing the barriers to mobilization and increasing the cost of repression. Protectors thus contributed to the channeling of grievances against the state nonviolently, opening civic space and paving the way for transitional justice.

How does government repression condition the strategy that opposition groups use to wage political struggle? Conventional wisdom suggests that popular uprisings against repressive regimes are more likely to be violent than nonviolent. More recently, scholars have provided evidence of the opposite phenomenon: that nonviolent movements emerge in more difficult settings–and against more formidable opponents–than armed campaigns. This new research also contends that adding repression as a variable in predictive models of nonviolent uprisings reduces their performance. We help clarify these disparate findings by examining movement onset at the highest levels of repression. We argue that the extreme end of the spectrum of repression is where there is a vast divergence between nonviolent action and armed rebellion. While both nonviolent and armed organizing is likely to take place at any level of repression, nonviolent mobilization is far more difficult under very high repression than armed mobilization. We provide evidence of this empirical pattern using cross-national data at the country-year level. We propose to test the causal mechanisms of our theory using an original survey experiment with activist leaders. This registered report outlines our argument and preregisters the hypotheses, estimation strategies, and inferential rules for the survey experiment. We also discuss the contributions and implications of our study. Our observational findings thus far suggest that there is a threshold of very high repression after which nonviolent mobilization no longer emerges. This censoring and potential source of bias is likely to affect all movement datasets that combine armed and unarmed movements. Our work also suggests that agency-based approaches have overclaimed the possibility of nonviolent activists being able to overcome major obstacles for mass action, such as very high levels of repression.