Civil resistance is one of the most powerful forces for moving countries from dictatorship to democracy. Yet many civil resistance campaigns, even when they achieve a breakthrough against their authoritarian opponents, fail to result in high-quality new democratic regimes. I argue that one key factor influencing this is the mechanism through which civil resistance campaigns achieve this breakthrough. Winning a civil resistance campaign via an election or negotiation tends to promote democratization, while extra-institutional seizures of power, even when primarily nonviolent, tend to make democratization less likely. Crossnational statistical evidence from all successful civil resistance campaigns from 1945-2011 and two key case studies from Egypt and Armenia provide strong supportive evidence of the importance of breakthrough mechanisms and the democratizing impact of elections and negotiations. To promote democracy, civil resistance typically must not just win, it must win well.
Om författaren
Jonathan Pinckney is a Program Officer with the Program on Nonviolent Action at the United States Institute of Peace, where he conducts research on nonviolent action, peacebuilding, and democratization. He is the author of the book ’From Dissent to Democracy: The Promise and Peril of Civil Resistance Transitions, ’ from Oxford University Press, as well as a wide range of academic and general audience publications. He received his Ph D in 2018 from the University of Denver. He was a 2012 recipient of the Sie Cheou-Kang Fellowship at the University of Denver, and a 2016 recipient of an ICNC Ph D Fellowship. The opinions in this piece are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the United States Institute of Peace.
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