Abstract
Armed conflicts (that do not end in military victory or that just continue to linger on) can transform in three basic ways. First, they can be mediated and resolved through political dialogue, ultimately resulting in negotiated agreements usually assisted by international and diplomatic interventions. This is the shift ‘from the battlefield to the negotiation table’. Second, armed conflicts can change their focus from the battlefield to the political realm, implying that armed actors, such as rebel groups, can be transformed into political parties. This is the shift from ‘rebels to parties’. Third and finally, armed conflicts can transform strategically from the use of armed to unarmed tactics. This is the shift ‘from bombs to banners’. Yet, whereas quite extensive research has been done on the first two forms of transformations, the shift from armed to unarmed strategies of contention is substantially less examined and understood. A new book on this theme, Civil Resistance and Conflict Transformation, is a very welcome contribution, which sheds new light on a clearly under-studied field of research.
Theoretically, we might expect this shift from violence to nonviolence to occur at one decisive moment: substitution of means by unified strategic actors. Yet empirically, as pointed out by Véronique Dudouet in this study, ‘few groups (if any)’ make such complete and decisive shifts. Interestingly, the transformation processes seem to be both more complex and more varied. The book identifies three main types of transitions: 1) situations where the opposition has shifted to nonviolent struggle but retained their ability to use violence; 2) a two-step process of demobilization and, then, a return to nonviolent struggle; 3) progressive escalation of nonviolent struggle paralleled with a de-escalation of armed struggle, driven partly by generational changes within the opposition. Overall, what the book shows us clearly is that there is a high degree of empirical overlap between the analytical categories of armed versus unarmed forms of contention.
Dudouet has assembled many well-written and interesting analytical narratives about the processes of transformation in armed conflicts around the globe, written by scholars with deep area-expertise and immense knowledge about empirical processes. Indeed, I found the chapters focusing on West Papua, Egypt, Nepal and Western Sahara particularly revealing in unfolding the complex processes transforming armed conflicts to nonviolent resistance and analyzing how different factors influence this transformation. These factors include generational changes within the struggle to international and geopolitical conditions. They also highlight the important notion of learning in the transmission of nonviolent tactics across conflict situations, and how this has contributed to changes in contentious collective action. These illustrative examples show how decisions to move from armed conflict to nonviolent resistance unfolded in different contexts of group-based socio-political conflicts.
The book presents a framework for understanding how shifts from armed to unarmed struggle occur, a framework that is interesting, nuanced and multi-leveled. This framework helps to identify a set of explanations for this shift at different levels of analysis: the intra-group level, as well as the societal, state and international levels. Moreover, the in-depth case studies identify and examine how different factors at intra-group, relational and international levels contributed alone or together to a shift from ‘bombs to banners’. Importantly, the book reveals the complexities in these shifts: transformation from armed to unarmed conflict is not a linear process but often involves gradual shifts in the balance between armed and unarmed strategies and a variety of interactive and collaborative actors. Uncovering the several empirical processes from armed to unarmed conflicts and identifying a set of different factors contributing to these shifts at different levels of analysis is an important first step in the analysis of conflict transformation.
However, the decision to include only cases where the shift has occurred has consequences in regard to the explanatory power of the book. Undoubtedly, by including only cases where the strategic shift has occurred, the book cannot explain why shifts occur. More specifically, by excluding cases where armed conflicts have not experienced shifts to unarmed struggles or where there have been attempts but these have failed, the book cannot compare the conditions under which these shifts occur more or less often. It is, therefore, now up to future research to help us to understand why these shifts come about in certain conflicts but not in others. The multi-leveled framework and the empirical findings of the book can be used as a basis for systematic comparison of armed conflicts in which strategic shifts have occurred to those that have not experienced strategic shifts. Only through this type of systematic comparison can we learn more about the explanatory power of specific factors theorized and observed to play a role in contributing to a shift from armed to unarmed contentious collective action.
That said, this book is enormously interesting and highly relevant for scholars interested in civil resistance, strategic nonviolence and unarmed insurgencies, but also for scholars of civil war termination. As such, the book breaks new ground by bridging civil war termination research with research on nonviolent struggle – two areas of research that have, so far, had surprisingly little synergy.