Turning the Other Cheek: How Commitment to Non-Violence in Mass Mobilization Helps Spur External Support

Beginning in Tunisia in late 2010, and extending through the first half of 2011, a wave of mass protests with calls for political change and democratic reform rolled through the Arab world. While the effectiveness of these protests in sparking genuine democratic transitions was limited, and several protests best can be described as outright failures, some of the protests nonetheless did bring about substantial changes in the form of government overthrows and/or political concessions. As the examples from the Arab Spring show, pro-democracy protests vary a lot in their effectiveness. However, why are some protests more effective than others are? While the structural conditions in which the protest takes place are certainly important explanatory factors, this paper argues that also the strategic behaviour of the protesters must be taken into account to explain their outcomes. Specifically, it argues that the use of non-violent mobilization, and especially commitment to non-violent resistance methods in the face of violent repression, increases the chance of protest success by increasing the probability that external actors will intervene in the conflict on the protestors’ behalf, e.g. by condemning or sanctioning the government. While other studies have addressed the internal dynamics of non-violent protest, external dynamics have received much less attention. This study thereby helps remedy this imbalance by bringing the external dimension explicitly into the equation, thus providing for a more complete understanding of the dynamics of pro-democracy protests worldwide. The proposition will be examined quantitatively using a recently published dataset, which records all instances and outcomes of pro-democracy protests worldwide in the period 1989-2011 as well as various characteristics of the protests such as size, use of violence by the protesters, and regime repression of the protest. To capture relevant types of external support for the protests, this dataset will be combined with data on international sanctions (both threatened and imposed) against the national governments in question as well as the author’s own coding of UN Security Council resolutions related to the protests. To illustrate the proposed causal mechanism, the quantitative analysis will be supplemented with a comparative case study of two initially nonviolent pro-democracy protests, one that exhibited commitment to non-violence and one that did not.