Studies on civil wars more often than not look at opposition to the government in a very dichotomous manner – violent action or inaction as the two possible categories. However, in reality the mode of opposition by challengers to the government and the political status quo varies widely. Opposition groups follow different strategies to make political change – some countries experience non-violent opposition, while others have been marred with violence, and still others experience both. Motivated by the advancing research agenda of disaggregating violence – primarily with regards to the actors involved and the strategic choices at their disposal – this paper points to the contention that the alternative to violence is not simply inaction since there is a plethora of non-violent strategies that groups can resort to so as to achieve political change. The present study advances the argument that the choices available to the challengers to the political status quo are contingent upon the state and its attributes. This paper, hence, tests systematically the relationship between a set of structural conditions and opposition group strategy. The theoretical framework draws from the literature on intra-state conflict, social movements and contentious politics so as to explain the variation in opposition group strategies to achieve political change conditional on the state and regime characteristics. By conducting a Large-N study using the ACLED dataset, this paper explains opposition group strategy by testing derived hypotheses. It is expected that strong states discourage violent group opposition as well as that democracies are unlikely to experience high levels of violence. The choice of opposition group as a level of analysis is not accidental since country-level analyses are likely to omit important specificities, while individual-level studies tend to hamper generalizations. This paper contributes to the research agenda of disaggregation while providing explanation of both violence and non-violence that can be instrumental in advancing knowledge on contentious politics and civil conflict at the group level.
