Over at Duck of Minerva, Rodger Payne offers this endorsement:

The authors skillfully employ a multi-method research approach in this work. Specifically, they analyze a large-N database to explain the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance and the ineffectiveness of violence resistance. They also provide interesting and illustrative case studies of the Philippines, Iran, Burma and Palestine. Not all of these cases ended successfully, of course, and they justify their selections in the text.

For those who call for international relations scholars to produce policy-relevant research, this book is an excellent recent example. For everyone else: read it, cite it, and teach it.

Why Civil Resistance Works also won the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, which the American Political Science Association gives annually to the best book on government, politics, or international affairs published in the U.S. during the previous calendar year.

The book is now available in paperback. Click here for a discount code.

The paperback edition of Why Civil Resistance Works will be released this week. Those ordering directly from Columbia University Press can receive a 30% discount by entering the code WHYCHE at checkout.

Incidentally, Idean has chimed in over at Political Violence @ a Glance to help us understand why Turkey and Syria are now engaged in border skirmishes that threaten to escalate to war between the two countries–and maybe others.

Idean’s take on the source of the dispute: refugee flows and rebel sanctuary, initiating a chain reaction of retaliatory violence.

Saw this one coming. Just sayin’.

Heather McCuen tells people to stop thinking “endless protest” will help a movement win. It’s about strategy, not just tactics, right?

Swedish activists drop teddy bears over Belarus to protest human rights abuses, resulting in the sacking of two Belarusian generals.

Al Jazeera’s defection tracker. I want a global one.

no matter what happens now, no matter whether Assad falls this year or this decade, Syria is already irreversibly, fundamentally changed. Syrians have found their voice, and they will not surrender again into silence. Fathers in Deraa insist that they will happily die to secure the futures of their daughters and their sons, and if their children must die too for the next generation, then no sacrifice will be spared. As one Damascus activist explained, the freedom of joining a protest, of standing in the street and holding a reckless and untouchable regime accountable for the first time in generations, is a freedom no one will relinquish once they taste it.

This passage reminds me of Doug McAdam’s concept of “cognitive liberation,” which I discussed last week (see point #4). This is a process in which people suddenly and collectively decide that they are no longer afraid, that their recent fear or apathy was based on lies, and that there is no going back to the old ways of thinking. McAdam identifies this process as an important factor in getting people to mobilize–and stay mobilized–until some sort of major shift occurs.

In other words, the genie is out of the bottle, and he’s not going back in.

Now, although the above passage makes the claim that “Syrians have found their voice,” it’s hard to ascertain from the article how widely shared the cognitive process really is. But one thing we know from prior research is that the more people sense that change is inevitable, the more inevitable the change becomes. It’s circular, yes, but it’s true.

Read the full story here.

YoSoy132 movement is fired up (and organized) to take on the Mexican media establishment and its links to politics. Check out some of their slogans.

Nonviolent activists in Syria show remarkable discipline, resilience, and creativity in the midst of bloodshed.

Palestinians express greater confidence in nonviolent resistance as a method of struggle.

Draft-dodging takes its toll on the Syrian government’s capacity to repress.

Students in Quebec borrow a tactic from the Chilean playbook (first used against Allende, then against Pinochet).

Collins is no Steinbeck. Nonetheless, I (slightly hesitantly) confess that I was impressed with many of the underlying themes within the series—particularly with how well Collins seems to understand how people build and take power in oppressive systems. Besides the strong “shame on us for our oblivious, exploitative, violent consumerism…arise!” message of the series, here were my key takeaways from a conflict perspective. Spoiler alert, by the way.

1. All oppressive regimes end. Even totalitarian ones. In fact, the longer they endure, the more vulnerable they are to failure. Why? Because the more generations live under oppressive rule, the more likely they are to develop the skills they need to eventually undermine it. Katniss Everdeen develops survival skills—hunting to sell food on the black market, making tools out of basic objects, and knowing how to deprive the regime of what it really wants (her obedience)—that eventually help her to totally outsmart the Arena. The deprivations imposed on the districts of Panem turn out to give them the very tools that empower them to challenge the Capitol’s rule in the end.

2. Every oppressive regime has ambivalent insiders. All regimes are, in the end, totally dependent on the obedience of those who support it—economic, military, media, and civilian elites. When such insiders (Sinna, Plutarch, etc.) stop obeying the regime, and its pillars of support begin to crack, it’s the beginning of the end. Insiders, too, are often intimately familiar with the regime’s vulnerabilities and are therefore quite well-disposed to challenge it.

3. Power is essentially psychological. No regime can repress all of the people all of the time. So many regimes rely on terror to suppress dissent. And by and large, it works—until it doesn’t.

4. It’s all about exposing the lie. The psychological power of terror ends when people simply decide to stop being afraid. Then it’s all over. Like in the books when the Districts end up rebelling once they realize that 1) the Capitol is (and always has been) vulnerable to challenge; (2) all information coming out of the Capital is (and always was) lies; and (3) all they have to do (now and ever) is coordinate their uprisings. The people of the districts realized they had the power all the time. As soon as this “cognitive liberation” was achieved, it was all over for the Panem of the Hunger Games.

5. Girl power is real power. Of course a strong, smart, and independent female protagonist distinguishes the series from many others like it. This is a rather fantastical feature of the series—the apocalypse must have truly come and gone for such gender equity to be standard practice. In fact, many of the key political players in the story turn out to be female, with many of the male characters depicted as weak, passive, or possessing a level of self-doubt or naïve goodness that exasperates the heroine (um, role reversal!). Those female characters who are fairly weak and uninspired to action (e.g., Katniss’ widowed mother) are viewed with disdain by the stronger characters, but not because they are female–just because they are apathetic. But here’s the thing about girl power. I have a hunch (yet to be fully tested empirically) that in our contemporary, pre-apocalyptic earth times, when women are willing to mobilize against oppressive systems, their movements have far greater potential to win. Jay Ulfelder, Orion Lewis, and I recently looked at which factors are associated with the onset of major nonviolent popular uprisings and found that higher rates of female literacy (maybe a proxy for increased social engagement, economic influence, political power, or all of the above) are significantly associated with such onsets. When women join the fight, movements can become twice as large. Maybe women are more organized or more tactically disciplined (at least one colleague has mentioned this as a possibility). There are often taboos against public repression of women that can be used to the movement’s advantage. And women can deprive the regime of many things it wants—cultural, political, economic, and sexual obedience. In other words, I have a feeling that when men hit the streets, dictators shrug. But when women get fired up, dictators tremble.

–Reposted from The Duck of Minerva–

Feel free to cruise by.

–reposted from The Monkey Cage–

Soon they’ll also have a Global Digital Activism Dataset (click here for summary infographics), which identifies cases of digital activism around the world.

Both of these data sets are the first of their kind and worth checking out.

Also, I will be returning from an extended hiatus soon. Travel and writing deadlines have kept me away from the blog, but I’ll be reviving it soon.