Why Civil Resistance Works

Erica Chenoweth is an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University. Previously she was a fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a visiting fellow at the University of California at Berkeley's Institute of International Studies.Maria J. Stephan is a strategic planner with the U.S. Department of State. Formerly she served as director of policy and research at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) and as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and American University. She has also been a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

出版者:Columbia University Press

作者:Erica Chenoweth

页数:320

出版时间:2011-8-12

价格:GBP 54.95

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9780231156820

图书标签:社会运动政治学社会学比较政治抗争政治非暴力抗争非暴力冲突非暴力

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories.

Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment.

Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

用户评价

槽点不少

统计部分千疮百孔并不妨碍这本书大受欢迎，不过也不是第一次看见重要的选题和讨好的结论压倒方法上的缺陷了

槽点不少

统计部分千疮百孔并不妨碍这本书大受欢迎，不过也不是第一次看见重要的选题和讨好的结论压倒方法上的缺陷了

以书中所整理数据而言，1900年至2006年间323次社会运动中，非暴力抵抗运动相较于暴力运动，其实现完全或部分成功的可能性接近两倍；此种差距尤其体现在以政体改革或民族解放为诉求的非暴力抵抗运动中。于是分析框架由宏观的数据与相对微观的个案分析向下蔓延，寻求非暴力抵抗运动的成功原因：更低的参与屏障（the moral, physical, informational, and commitment barriers to participation）引来更高程度、更多元的社会参与及大规模动员，并由此形成一系列有益于运动成功的社会机制，包括高效复原、策略创新、扩展混乱（增加政体维持稳定的成本）与政体支持者的分崩离析。非暴力抵抗运动并非必然导向成功，但或许这是一条更可取的政治进路。