In his frequent discussions of how the nonviolent resistance campaign in Serbia was able to succeed, student movement leader Srđa Popović emphasizes the need for unity and the fact that toppling the dictator Slobodan Milošević took him and his fellow activists ten years of coalition building. In Ches Thurber’s theoretical framework, as developed in Between Mao and Gandhi: The Social Roots of Civil Resistance, this would mean ten years of actively forging social ties and organizing broad-based support for a common, maximalist goal—that of overthrowing a dictator. Thurber argues that activists can only mount a viable nonviolent campaign with such ties linking them to the grassroots as well as to elites. If movements do not have the luxury of such ties, he argues, then they need to start organizing and build them if they want to make their civil resistance campaign viable—sometimes over the course of a decade.
Thurber’s book develops an intriguing and elegant argument, making an important contribution to the scholarship on the causes and consequences of civil (or nonviolent) resistance. It explores the decision to initiate a nonviolent campaign, rather than explain whether nonviolent campaigns succeed or fail, which has been at the core of recent work. The central argument of the book builds on classical sociology to highlight the social rather than state structures constraining political challengers. On this account, movements need links to the grassroots to mobilize sufficient support for their campaigns, and links to the regime to convince potential defectors from the security forces to join them. If challengers have ties to both, the grassroots and the regime, they are “integrated” and adopt nonviolent campaigns. If they do not have or cannot obtain such ties, they either resort to mixed campaigns or, as “insular” challengers without any ties, to outright insurgency.
The focus on this initial decision about how to challenge the state allows Thurber to bridge research agendas that have evolved largely independently—those on insurgency and on civil resistance—and move the study of civil resistance forward in several important regards. First, the book’s main contribution lies in answering the crucial question of why political challengers to regimes sometimes conduct nonviolent and at other times violent campaigns to achieve their goals. Much of recent work, such as that by Donatella della Porta and Wendy Pearlman, has explained the adoption of violence from a process perspective, as a consequence of repression, fragmentation, and escalation. Thurber, in contrast, sets the record straight by showing that the decision to adopt nonviolent or violent modes of contention often takes place much earlier, at the beginning of mobilization. Second, another notable contribution is the counterpoint to the emphasis on normative commitments in recent work. As the book shows, in the case study of Nepal in particular, movements were exposed to ideologies of nonviolent and violent change. Thurber demonstrates that relevance of normative commitments depends on the availability of resources, in particular social ties.
Third, the book employs an ambitious and rigorous multi-method research design with cases from around the world, and with much attention to alternative explanations. It first analyzes and compares different movement campaigns in qualitative case studies from two separate countries, Nepal and Syria (the latter with comparisons to Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt), and then tests an implication of the argument statistically with a cross-national sample, and conducts out-of-sample tests analyzing campaigns in Apartheid South Africa and India. The book’s focus on the case of Nepal is an excellent choice, due to the variation in social ties and campaign types of movements across the latter half of the twentieth century, which include a return to civil resistance after an attempt at armed insurgency. The two chapters on Nepal are in fact the most compelling and original, as they fit well the empirical puzzle set out in the introduction and build on fieldwork, including interviews with movement leaders and original documents. The other chapters present a convincing case for the broader applicability of the argument.
The book also raises some generative questions, both empirically and conceptually, that are worthy of further research. One question concerns the precise “content” or quality of social ties. Do any kinds of ties—weak, strong, kinship, friendship, etc.—count, or are there qualitative differences that affect how such ties help or hinder the necessary support challengers need to mount a campaign? The case study on Nepal provides some interesting evidence on the isolated character of the Nepali Congress, which pushed its members to adopt a violent campaign in the 1950s. In the discussion on how they subsequently forged ties to overcome their isolation, Thurber emphasizes what basically amounts to organizing work—forming associations among different types of target groups and creating an information network. But what precisely did these new ties look like, what did this new connection mean? Were people formally connected by signing up for an organization or did it affect their daily life, drawing them closer into a political community that made them more politically conscious and emotionally connected, thereby providing a basis for the mutual acceptance of risk to engage in a nonviolent campaign? And similarly, with respect to regime ties, how did the Nepalese movements create the necessary coalitions to form ties to the regime? What did these ties precisely look like and what did they do for the movement? The analysis of how the Marxist-Leninists forged ties is much more specific here and highlights the role of encouraging new recruits to become teachers to work in rural areas to educate and mobilize supporters, which is a fascinating account of how to organize political education and build a movement over the long term. A question for future research would be to consider under what conditions movements are able to forge such new ties, and what kinds of social cleavages can be overcome through organizing work, and which cannot.
The question about the quality of social ties is not only relevant for the empirical, but also for the theoretical discussion. Social movement research has long recognized the importance of social ties for movement participation (see, for example, Doug McAdam and Ronnelle Paulsen, “Specifying the Relationship between Social Ties and Activism,” American Journal of Sociology 99: 640-67, 1993). But at times, Thurber’s analysis seems to equate grassroots ties with popular support, in particular when providing evidence for social ties in the chapters on Nepal. How do social ties and popular support relate, and when do social ties result in popular support? How do I need to be connected to someone in order to feel compelled to support their political mission? This is relevant to specify, as some researchers have suggested, that certain social ties might inhibit participation (see, for example, James Kitts, “Mobilizing in Black Boxes: Social Networks and Participation in Social Movement Organizations,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 5: 241-57, 2000). A particularly vital question for the theory is, then, what social ties precisely transmit. Is it information about the risks and benefits of participating, a feeling of solidarity undergirding a collective identity, or even a socialization process turning potential supporters into activists? The book points to several of these possibilities, but future research should outline the precise causal path from forging social ties to trusting that a nonviolent campaign can rely on sufficient support.
Another interesting question concerns the precise considerations that convince movement leaders to pursue a violent or nonviolent strategy. Thurber argues that leaders, as rational actors, consider social ties when deciding about the viability of nonviolent campaigns, which gives the argument a strong strategic orientation. But the book also shows that some challengers experimented with different options to reveal information about the group’s strengths, implying a learning process. How did leaders deal with information gained from experimentation, where did they see the problems and where the solutions? How was this related to the social ties that the movements lacked or could benefit from? The author conducted a considerable number of interviews with campaign leaders in Nepal that could potentially shed light on these questions; more discussion of the insights from these interviews would greatly contribute to the understanding of these leaders’ considerations.
A last question concerns the relation between nonviolent resistance and armed insurgency. Thurber is careful to keep the focus on explaining why challengers adopt nonviolent campaigns. In the conceptualization of the outcome variable, the case comparisons, and the cross-national analysis, however, nonviolent campaigns are compared with insurgencies. This raises the question of whether civil resistance and insurgency are true equivalents. Do all insurgencies result from social movements? The statistical analysis of the implication that politically excluded ethnic groups are unlikely to mount civil resistance campaigns shows that the theory explains the onset of nonviolent campaigns well, but not so much the onset of violent campaigns. The book’s conclusion is correct in stating that more research is needed to analyze the relation between civil resistance and civil war, not only with a focus on escalation, but also with respect to strategic decision-making of leaders in the beginning stages of struggle, to what extent leaders really consider violent and nonviolent strategies, and how these considerations intersect with other factors shaping the onset of insurgencies.
The book’s methodological rigor and analytical breadth will without doubt move the research agenda on civil resistance forward and will shape the debate on the choice between violent and nonviolent modes of contention for years to come.
