Is Violence Or Nonviolence The Most Effective Means To Achieve Social Change

Oxfam'due south Ed Cairns explores the evidence and experience on violence five not violence equally a fashion of bringing almost social change

One of the perennial themes of this blog is the idea that crises may provide an opportunity for progressive change. Truthful. Merely I've always been nervous that such hopes can forget that virtually conflicts cause far more human misery than any good that may come.

This is something that Duncan and I have (non-violently) tussled about over the years. So imagine my delight when I saw a recent report that seems to back up my caution. The International Center on Nonviolent Disharmonize'south paper on Nonviolent Resistance and Prevention of Mass Killings looked at 308 pop uprisings up to 2013. It found that "nonviolent uprisings are almost three times less likely than violent rebellions to encounter mass killings," which faced such roughshod repression nearly 68% of the time. The authors, Erica Chenoweth and Evan Perkoski, think this is because trigger-happy campaigns threaten leaders and security forces akin, encouraging them to "concord on to power at whatever price, even ordering or conveying out a mass atrocity in an attempt to survive."

There is a positive lesson here, that nonviolence works – at to the lowest degree better than violence. This builds on Chenoweth'southward earlier written report, which suggested that between 2000 and 2006, 70% of nonviolent campaigns succeeded, v times the success rate for violent ones. Looking back over the xx^thursday century, she found that non-violent campaigns succeeded 53% of the time, compared with 26% for fierce resistance.

Once more, there is a positive lesson – though information technology'd be interesting to know the figures since 2006, when the world appears to take get more repressive and violent. 2017 was the 12^th year, co-ordinate to the Usa-based Freedom Firm, "of decline in global freedom [as] seventy-one countries suffered cyberspace declines in political rights and civil liberties." As the Uppsala Conflict Data Plan shows, these years of pressure on rights have coincided with abrupt rises in conflicts since the outset of this decade. And according to the 2018 Global Peace Alphabetize, just out this month, "peacefulness has declined twelvemonth on year for eight of the terminal x years." This seems to suggest that in our fierce and challenging decade, nonviolent campaigns have institute information technology tough in many countries also.

Tragically, this may breed a climate of agony. In some other contempo article, Robin Luckham wrote that "the temptations of violence… are even stronger when authoritarian regimes violently beat not-trigger-happy protests…The plow from non-trigger-happy to violent resistance can easily open the way for more ruthless and improve armed groups to step into the political spaces initially opened up past peaceful protests, as in Syria and Libya."

This brings us perhaps to a less positive lesson – that living under tyrannies may exist less worse than violent campaigns to change them. Chenoweth and Perkoski contend that "popular uprisings are not all alike. Some, like those in Great socialist people's libyan arab jamahiriya (2011) and somewhen Syria (2011), are predominantly violent, wherein the opposition chooses to take up arms to challenge the condition quo. Others, like Tunisia (2010), Arab republic of egypt (2011), and Burkina Faso (2014), eschew violence altogether."

"Choose to take upward arms"? That's a harsh way to describe the situation at least some armed groups have faced. We should never forget that state repression often drives uprisings to become more violent. Merely looking at the historical evidence in these manufactures – and at nearly every conflict now – it's difficult to escape the conclusion that armed resistance is seldom successful, often counterproductive, and therefore rarely justifiable.

This begs one final question which Chenoweth and Perkoski can help with. Few would at present contend that foreign countries should arbitrate to modify regimes. But the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee is conducting an enquiry on the prospect of military interventions for a different purpose – to terminate mass killings. Its chair, Thomas Tugendhat, suggested that 'The Cost of Doing Cypher' in Syrian arab republic had been thousands and thousands of lives.

I've never been convinced of that example in Syrian arab republic, though the world's failure to cease the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s was among the most shameful events of our times. But Chenoweth and Perkoski highlight the danger of any kind of foreign intervention. The likelihood of mass killings increases, they conclude, both "when foreign states provide material aid to dissidents… [and] to the governments the movements oppose." In the starting time case, that'southward considering foreign support to oppositions encourages states to perceive them "equally an existential threat."

We shouldn't conclude that war machine action will never ever be justified to prevent mass killings. But nosotros know more reasons for caution than we once did. Every strange action needs to be carried out with the best possible knowledge of its consequences.

That's a harder matter to practise than in the 1990s, when this debate start forced its style onto humanitarian agendas. According to a UN/Earth Bank report, there were eight armed groups in an average ceremonious war in the 1950s. By 2010, there were fourteen. In Syrian arab republic in 2014, there were more than than a 1000. While more local parties are fighting within borders, regional powers – similar Kingdom of saudi arabia and Islamic republic of iran – besides as Russia and the US are more willing to contemplate state of war, in what Robert Malley of Crunch Group calls the world's "growing militarization of foreign policy." It is in this dangerous globe that the risks of military action are higher than when the ideas of "humanitarian intervention" and Responsibility to Protect were developed.

I've never believed that pacifism is an adequate answer to a world of atrocities that – in truly exceptional cases – phone call out for an armed response. Just there's an awful lot of evidence for caution – and reason to give peace a run a risk.