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- Title
Riots as Civil Resistance Rethinking the Dynamics of 'Nonviolent' Struggle.
- Authors
Case, Benjamin S.
- Abstract
How do we understand violent actions in social movements? Civil resistance research has made strides in demonstrating the comparative efficacy of 'nonviolent' campaigns, and has become a major force in shaping social movement strategy today, calling for nonviolent discipline. But dominant arguments narrowly interpret the data and uphold a violence/nonviolence dichotomy that does not reflect the tactical repertoires of social movements on the ground. This paper argues that unarmed collective violence is common in civilian-based social movements and can be analyzed in the same terms that civil resistance scholars use to analyze nonviolent actions. The paper makes use of prominent datasets on contentious political actions and on nonviolent struggle to demonstrate the common occurrence of riots alongside nonviolent civil resistance campaigns, and advances a theoretical argument using the example of the anti-Mubarak Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Ultimately, this paper argues that civil resistance studies must move beyond the violence/nonviolence paradigm so that standard analyses of unarmed movements include a broader range of collective actions that more accurately reflect existing movement repertoires.
- Subjects
SOCIAL movements; CIVIL disobedience; RESISTANCE to government; EGYPTIAN revolution, Egypt, 2011; PASSIVE resistance
- Publication
Journal of Resistance Studies, 2018, Vol 4, Issue 1, p9
- ISSN
2001-9947
- Publication type
Article