Abstract
Sharon Erickson Nepstad has written a timely and concise treatment of social movement strategy and political change in Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century. With a good number of nonviolent movements successfully changing ruling regimes in the past decade—and several transitions still ongoing—Nepstad considers the lessons provided by civil resisters in the late Cold War period to understand how nonviolent strategies might have fomented shifts from authoritarian regimes. Nepstad refers to Gandhian and electoral models of nonviolent regime change to develop a theoretical framework that seeks to explain how nonviolent movements and regimes interact. In less than 150 pages, she crosses four continents and six countries—China, East Germany, Panama, Chile, Kenya, and the Philippines—and captures the dramatic moments of each of their nonviolent movements through her theoretical lens. As a result, the book is very accessible and the writing taut, reflecting the parsimony of her framework and analysis.
Nepstad aims to spark conceptual and theoretical refinement rather than generalize, and she understands that alternative case selection would alter her findings. That being said, her comparative framework is exemplary: using J. S. Mill’s Method of Difference, she contrasts three cases of “successful nonviolent revolution” (East Germany, Chile, and the Philippines) with three “unsuccessful” cases (China, Panama, and Kenya). She then pairs the cases by regime type: socialist regimes, military regimes, and personal dictators. These two moves allow Nepstad to address issues of causal heterogeneity by carefully managing her scope conditions. Additionally, while Millian methods are often used to eliminate potential alternative causal factors, Nepstad actually goes beyond her own framework: she reveals combinations of causes which demonstrate the variability of movement strategies, as well as their commonalities, at several levels of analysis. Case in point: though East Germany, the Philippines, and Chile all had successful nonviolent revolutions, only in the GDR and in the Philippines did religious organizations actively help to maintain nonviolent discipline. As opposed to eliminating this factor from causal consideration, Nepstad suggests that this factor was critical for the GDR and the Philippines, but not a necessary condition for Chile (pp. 132–133).
Indeed, while Nepstad could eliminate what she deems “structural factors” from causal consideration—economic decline, elite divisions, changes in the political opportunity structure, and the availability of public spaces (as all four factors were present in all six cases)—she argues that these structural factors were necessary, but not sufficient conditions. What she finds is that in all three successful cases, civil resisters were able to maintain their nonviolent strategies, even in spite of the regime’s responses. This, in combination with other civil resistance techniques and with structural factors, led to a breakdown in the ruling regime’s sanctioning power—that is, the defection of either troops (GDR), military officers (Chile), or both (Philippines), leading them to join the side of the protesters. These findings reinforce the book’s theoretical emphasis on nonviolent strategies and allow for comparative insights into regime-movement dynamics in her negative cases. As her treatments of China, Kenya, and Panama show, regimes respond to both structure and strategy and can deploy techniques that undermine movements, like shoring up the loyalty of their troops and well-timed appeals to unwitting international actors. Indeed, Nepstad finds international sanctions on dictatorial regimes can often have a deleterious effect on the leverage of nonviolent movements—a finding that suggests caution not only for movement participants but well-meaning observers as well.
Despite these strengths, scholars of revolution and democratic transitions, as well as area specialists, may find the book to be dissatisfying. In her defense, Nepstad is quite explicit in her caveats, and is aware of the limitations of a succinct study (see esp. pp. xiv–xvi). As the book will rightfully attract scholars beyond those who study social movements, it bears outlining how they may respond to such limitations. First, though she is explicit in defining nonviolent revolutions as a subset of political revolutions—and as such, they are not social revolutions—the conclusions of the book make the conceptual work problematic. Case in point: the book borders on tautology when it argues that movements which fail to remain committed to nonviolence undermine their chances of weakening a regime’s sanctioning power, and thus limit their chances for a successful nonviolent revolution. That is, a successful nonviolent revolution is one in which the movement is nonviolent. To be sure, as a matter of strategy for movement practitioners, reaffirming nonviolence is a profound conclusion; however, as a matter of conceptual advance, it falls short.
Second, Nepstad explicitly concedes that her goal with her case studies was not to create new historical narratives and that such an approach may dissatisfy some. However, she deploys her secondary sources in imbalanced ways which expose the text to validity issues. Nepstad deftly engages in debates between her secondary sources throughout the book—a hallmark of self-conscious and empirically-rigorous comparative-historical work. However, she does this when she weighs the relative importance of structural factors on movement success. In comparison, sources that affirm the strategies of movements do not receive a similarly adjudicative treatment. In addition, Nepstad uses U.S., Canadian, and British periodicals in her discussion of Panama, Chile, and Kenya—and only in those cases. Though the effect on the overall comparison between these cases and the others is minimal, methodologists and area specialists alike may find such secondary source material to be selectively applied and as such, problematic. Such data limitations do not fully undermine the contributions of the text; instead they should encourage future work to perform further tests on her findings with other sources.
Finally, Nepstad suggests that her framework and findings would push past the elite-centric nature of the democratic transitions literature. However, she owes much of her empirical data to secondary sources from that literature, and as such retreads rather than reaches past existing findings. Scholars who work on democratic transitions will find here several familiar “crucial” cases—Germany, Chile, the Philippines, and China (as a failed case)—as well as several key texts as secondary sources which were written using the transition paradigm. In none of those cases or in the sources she uses does Nepstad uncover anything new analytically for scholars of democratization. Case in point: the ultimate finding that state sanctioning power matters and that to alter it requires manipulating the threat perceptions of regime hardliners and softliners over time is a foundational point for the transitions literature. To be sure, one could argue the text shifts the emphasis onto movements rather than elites. However, we are left with a similar set of findings about the dynamics between movements and elites which the transitions literature has covered quite thoroughly.
On balance, Nepstad has written a profoundly useful book which should serve as a model for experts seeking to design a tightly-argued comparative project, as well as a reference for movement practitioners and advocates of nonviolence. The book would also be an excellent teaching tool for undergraduates in social movements and methods courses, and will certainly spark discussion for anyone interested in latter-day events like the Arab Spring.