All around the world civil resistance has been a key way for ordinary people to struggle against different forms of violence (direct, structural and cultural). People have used it to bring about the collapse of dictatorships, as in the Philippines, or to seek independence from colonial power, as in India. In asymmetric conflicts, where opponents not only have the means but are also ready to exert violence against civilians, the latter have used civil resistance to leverage power to defend their rights. This is particularly so in Latin America, where nonviolent struggles are increasingly taking place against powerful1 actors in contexts of violent conflict. This is the case in Nicaragua, where peasants have opposed the construction of an interoceanic canal (McCall and Taylor in this volume); in Peru, where indigenous people have rejected the negative effects of mining on their communities (Wilson in this volume); as well as in Colombia, where civilians have challenged the rules imposed by armed groups and the violence exercised against ordinary people (Hernández and Roa, Masullo, Mouly and Garrido in this volume). The variety of cases included in this book reveals the richness of Latin American experiences of civil resistance in challenging contexts, as well as their successes and limitations. Yet, the overall message is one of optimism: despite their limited material capacities, civilians from these different countries, from Mexico to Bolivia through Colombia and Venezuela, have made a difference through the use of civil resistance.
In this book, we define civil resistance as the use of nonviolent, unconventional means to struggle against opponents who have a superior power, understood in terms of material capabilities. This definition draws on the work of Kurt Schock, who considers civil resistance as “the sustained use of methods of nonviolent action by civilians engaged in asymmetric conflicts with opponents not averse to using violence to defend their interests” with nonviolent action referring to “non-routine political acts that do not involve violence or the threat of violence” (Schock 2013: 277). It is also in line with the definition put forward by Erica Chenoweth and Kathleen Cunningham in the special issue on civil resistance that they edited in the Journal of Peace Research, as “the application of unarmed civilian power using nonviolent methods such as protests, strikes, boycotts and demonstrations, without using or threatening physical harm against the opponent” (Chenoweth and Cunningham 2013: 271). Additionally, we follow the mainstream literature on civil resistance and use “nonviolent resistance” and “civil resistance” interchangeably.
We define conflict as the real or perceived opposition of interests between two or more actors, referred to as “conflict parties”. A violent conflict is one in which one or more parties have engaged in acts of direct violence, that is, in acts aimed at inflicting pain to the person(s) or group(s) at which they are directed.2 Direct violence includes physical as well as psychological violence (Galtung 1969). This said, violent conflict often finds its roots in structural and cultural violence (Galtung 1990). As Vicenç Fisas (2004: 119) argues, violent conflicts generally refer to “grave situations of high tension and social or political polarization, with hostilities between political, ethnic or religious groups, or between these and the state, which alter the ordinary functioning of state institutions and produce significant levels of destruction, fear, deaths or forced displacement”.
This book covers a variety of situations of violent conflict, including ones in which opponents have used direct violence such as beatings to curb protests, detentions, forceful eviction of resisters, intimidation including through death threats and even the actual murder of activists as in the case of Berta Cáceres in Honduras (Maher in this volume) or as in Peru (Wilson in this volume). It also encompasses situations of armed conflict, in which warring parties do not hesitate to use armed violence against civilians who disobey their orders. We define armed conflict on the basis of the definition put forward by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, that is, a situation of conflict, which involves the use of state military forces and has resulted in at least 25 battle-related deaths in a year.3 Yet, we recognize that there can be a fine line between situations of simple violent conflict and those of armed conflict, and that not everyone agrees on the threshold required for a situation to be called an “armed conflict”. This can lead to different situations—for instance the one that opposes the Mexican government to drug cartels—being described as an armed conflict or not.
Arguably, many civil resistance campaigns take place in contexts of violent conflict. So, why focus on such contexts? We believe that such a focus is important because of the challenges raised by opponents’ use of direct violence and the need to better understand how grievance groups can best confront violent repression and achieve their goals through nonviolent means of struggle in such contexts. This said, we acknowledge the significant challenges raised by other forms of violence as well and the interrelationship between direct, structural and cultural violence.
The booming literature on civil resistance over the past decade reflects a growing awareness that nonviolent resistance is usually more effective than violent resistance even in such challenging contexts, as demonstrated in the large-N study conducted by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. In this study, the authors compared more than 300 nonviolent and violent campaigns against authoritarian regimes, colonial powers or foreign occupiers between 1900 and 2006 and found that nonviolent campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011: 7). One key reason for this is that nonviolent campaigns usually involve a higher level of participation compared to their violent counterparts, which set higher barriers for participation owing to potential risks. Further, when ordinary people take up arms, they compete on an unequal footing with their opponents, who possess superior material capacities and are often equipped with better armament. By contrast, civil resistance enables ordinary people to fight from a higher ground and to undermine some of the pillars of power of their opponents thereby shifting power around (Sharp 1973, 2010).
This volume is the first to cover a broad range of civil resistance campaigns that have taken place in contexts of violent conflict in Latin America. Only a limited number of studies have focused on nonviolent struggles in the region, despite its wealth of experiences (Martin 2015: 40–41). These include the works of Philip McManus and Gerald W. Schlabach (2004); that of Patricia Parkman (1990), who focuses on civic strikes; and a forthcoming book by the editors in Spanish, which will cover some Latin American experiences of civil resistance, although smaller in number in comparison with this volume and not only in situations of violent conflict (Hernández and Mouly forthcoming-b).4 Additionally, some books in the social movement literature, such as Stahler-Sholk et al. (2008) or Alvarez et al. (1998), discuss cases of civil resistance in Latin America. Yet, they do not place emphasis on the use of strategic nonviolent action to leverage power and reach a movement’s objectives—a key feature of the civil resistance literature (Zunes et al. 2017).
Likewise, only few books examine various processes of nonviolent resistance in contexts of violent conflict but focus on cases in the context of the Colombian internal armed conflict (e.g. Hernández 2004, 2012; Hernández and Salazar 1999; Kaplan 2017b). By analysing experiences of civil resistance in eight Latin American countries in contexts of violent conflict that do not necessarily reach the threshold of armed conflict, this book therefore provides unique contributions to the field of civil resistance studies and significant insights into the exercise of nonviolent resistance in such contexts, which can inform and guide practitioners who are involved in, or support, such initiatives. In particular, it seeks to stimulate comparison between the different experiences of nonviolent resistance that have occurred in eight countries in the region and draw lessons learnt. In each case the authors look at the violent context in which civil resistance has taken place, how movements have coped with it, the methods that they have used, the outcomes, the factors that have influenced these, as well as the challenges faced. In what follows we look at some of the book’s most salient features.
Campaign Objectives
A first noteworthy feature of this book that distinguishes it from the mainstream literature on civil resistance is the diversity of objectives sought by the various nonviolent campaigns covered in its chapters. While much of the literature looks at nonviolent movements against authoritarian or colonial powers, which aim to bring about the collapse of a dictatorship or to seek independence from colonizers, more and more studies now contemplate nonviolent struggles to achieve other types of goals in different contexts. These include studies of campaigns against corruption (e.g. Beyerle 2014), environmental damage (e.g. Hernández and Mouly forthcoming-a), the deprivation of land (Schock 2012, 2015) or armed actors’ abuses in the context of armed confl...