What Makes a Movement Nonviolent? Bridging Theory with Practice.

This paper seeks to establish the conditions under which we identify a movement as 'nonviolent' by interrogating: theories of nonviolent resistance and protest; empirical claims about nonviolence; and actual cases of movements recognized as nonviolent. Drawing on these sources, the paper outlines five different dimensions of movement nonviolence, looking at political processes, movement goals, movement capacity, strategic repertoires, and movement framing. Processual Nonviolence The process of contention in which the movement participates and the procedures through which a given social change is attained are largely incompatible with or have little room for violent activity. This is an exceptionally common, but often unremarkable phenomenon, manifesting frequently in cases such as small-scale protest movements, awareness-raising campaigns, and grassroots community organizing. Nonviolent Goals The movement’s goals are non-violent in character. At the most elementary level, a movement may possess programmatic non-violence: pursuing purely peaceful goals. At a more sophisticated level, movements may pursue principled non-violence (Bharadwaj 1998), in which non-violence itself is a specific goal of the movement in question. This is often the case among pacifist movements and certain religion-affiliated causes (such as Quaker and Jain oriented movements), but also presents in circumstances where protagonists abhor personal violence (e.g. Insulate Britain). Nonviolent Capacity The movement’s resources are not conducive to violent activity: lacking arms, training, or sufficiently inclined members and affiliates. The phenomenon of ‘unarmed revolutionary movements’ (Ritter 2014) stands as a good example of movements with a generally nonviolent capacity. Strategic Nonviolence Movement strategy entails the use of a non-violent repertoire of contention to achieve its goals (Sharp 1973). While some movements may pursue ‘nonviolent discipline’ to ensure that movement protagonists engage in almost exclusively nonviolent forms of action (e.g. OTPOR, Extinction Rebellion), other movements may alternate between strategic nonviolence and violent activity (e.g. the French Gilets Jaunes), or adopt a permissive approach to violence in which violent actions are not disavowed but occur separately from predominantly non-violent movement activity (e.g. 2020’s US Black Lives Uprising). Professed Nonviolence The movement professes (or is professed) to be nonviolent. This may involve specific, highly visible performances of nonviolence (e.g. the Indian Independence and US Civil Rights Movements), or careful framing of movement activity through a non-violent lens. Professed nonviolence often accompanies strategic nonviolence and characterizes movements with non-violent goals, but this is not always the case. The Khomenite revolutionary movement in Iran made substantial use of non-violent framing but possessed goals that encompassed violence, and perpetrated substantial violence during the post-Pahlavi period. These five dimensions of movement nonviolence present a constellation of traits through which scholars may isolate the varieties of nonviolence that characterize a given movement. This fivefold approach substantially increasing our analytical resolution compared with the current state-of-the-art heuristic, which designates movement nonviolence exclusively as “[not] engaging in or threatening physical harm to other people or other people’s property” (Chenoweth 2019). Increasing the specificity of our heuristic for movement nonviolence allows us to better understand the casual dynamics of movement nonviolence and bolster the generalizability of future studies of nonviolent movements.