Perhaps most obviously, violent protests necessarily exclude people who abhor and fear bloodshed, whereas peaceful protesters maintain the moral high ground. Chenoweth points out that nonviolent protests also have fewer physical barriers to participation.
You do not need to be fit and healthy to engage in a strike, whereas violent campaigns tend to lean on the support of physically fit young men. Violent movements, on the other hand, require a supply of weapons, and tend to rely on more secretive underground operations that might struggle to reach the general population. By engaging broad support across the population, nonviolent campaigns are also more likely to win support among the police and the military — the very groups that the government should be leaning on to bring about order.
During a peaceful street protest of millions of people, the members of the security forces may also be more likely to fear that their family members or friends are in the crowd — meaning that they fail to crack down on the movement.
But they do come at a personal cost, whereas other forms of protest can be completely anonymous. She points to the consumer boycotts in apartheid-era South Africa , in which many black citizens refused to buy products from companies with white owners. In the UK it would amount to 2. The fact remains, however, that nonviolent campaigns are the only reliable way of maintaining that kind of engagement. Bramsen and Chandler, for instance, both emphasise the importance of unity among demonstrators.
As an example, Bramsen points to the failed uprising in Bahrain in The campaign initially engaged many protestors, but quickly split into competing factions. The resulting loss of cohesion, Bramsen thinks, ultimately prevented the movement from gaining enough momentum to bring about change.
In the 12 months since that first protest, the movement has grown to see , people on the XR mailing list. Stephan, collected and analysed data on over violent and nonviolent major political campaigns in the last decade. They found that nonviolent campaigns had been twice as effective as the violent campaigns: they succeeded about 53 per cent of time compared to 25 per cent for an armed resistance.
This success of civil resistance is the backbone of the XR movement — any action attributed to the organisation must be nonviolent, and being arrested is not a requirement of getting involved.
She notes that a campaign cannot just be a one-off protest, it has to be a sustained sequence of actions — not just protests — to have any chance at success. But both in terms of immediate and longer-term impacts, nonviolent resistance seemed to produce more positive and beneficial results. A democracy initiated by a nonviolent movement was less likely to fall back into civil war, for example.
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These movements — and their protest tactics — have since been proved right. Through the retelling of history, we can simplify and idealise the sacrifices many people made in fights against injustice. Yet at the same time, when looking at contemporary movements, they receive much criticism for tactics that have got us where we are today. Society is not equal and the balance of power leaves many people marginalised, without access to justice and basic rights.
Protest can help balance the scales by creating space for different perspectives to be heard. Small acts of resistance can achieve huge things and inspire countless others to take a stand and show that another future is possible. Or even a very large delivery of peanuts. A disruptive protest will get attention and create space for debate and bring attention to a previously underrepresented issue. Some laws are unjust, or allow injustice to happen. For a long time, it was legal to buy and sell slaves, but illegal for women to vote.
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