The Maldives is a nation of 350,000 people living on an archipelago of more than 500 islands in the Indian Ocean, roughly 500 miles south-west of Sri Lanka. In October 2008 the Maldives held free and fair elections which ended the 30-year rule of corrupt autocrat Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. The elections were possible in part because a popular civic movement successfully de-legitimized the Gayoom regime among Maldivian citizens and various foreign states. Along with pressure from the European Union, and other international actors, the movement used Gayoom’s unpopularity to leverage a process of constitutional reform in 2004. Civic pressure was sustained for three years during the reform process in an effort to ensure that the process would be legitimate and that the new constitution would reflect the ideals of the Maldivian people. The new constitution was ratified in 2007 and allowed Maldivians to democratically elect Mohamed Anni Nasheed as their leader in 2008.

An independent kingdom prior to Dutch colonization of the East Indies located on the northwestern end of the island of Sumatra, the Acehnese have long resisted centralized control by Jakarta.  An armed rebellion, backed by the CIA to destabilize the leftist Indonesian government of Sukarno, flared briefly in the late 1950s.  A new armed rebellion was launched against the right-wing military dictatorship of Suharto in the 1970s, led by the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), with the goal of independence.  Acehnese civilians were caught in the crossfire and suffered terrible human rights abuses at the hands of the Indonesian armed forces (TNI), particularly as violence escalated in the 1990s. In 1999, inspired by the referendum for independence in East Timor, student activists rejecting both Indonesian rule and the armed struggle of GAM, adopted a program of mass mobilization in support of a referendum on the future of Aceh. The Acehnese organized a series of rallies, boycotts and strikes. The Indonesian regime was astounded when hundreds of thousands of people (out of a population of 4 million) participated in pro-referendum rallies. 

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While a military junta ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, dissent was silenced. In broad daylight or in the middle of the night dissidents were swept from their homes, and across the nation those who spoke suddenly “disappeared,” either to prison with torture or the grave. It became dangerous to socialize with those who spoke out against the military....

The silence was broken by a brave group of mothers, searching for their missing children, who at first were motivated by family rather than politics. They gathered in the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace, the national cathedral, and various government ministries. At the first demonstration on 30 April 1977 only fourteen women participated but by the following year hundreds were participating. On Mother’s Day, 5 October 1977, 237 mothers included their names and identity card numbers on a half-page advertisement in the national newspaper La Prensa calling for a “the Truth” regarding the disappearance of their children.

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Following General Augusto Pinochet's 1973 accession to power in a bloody military coup, a movement in opposition to the dictatorship gained momentum over the next 15 years despite assassinations, torture, and the "disappearance" of over 3,000 political opponents and officials of the previous democratic government. In order to legitimize his regime, Pinochet staged a plebiscite in 1980 that created a new constitution and consolidated power in the presidency but also mandated another plebiscite in 1988 to reconfirm his tenure in office.

A grassroots nonviolent movement mobilized during the years leading up to the 1988 plebiscite, organizing opposition especially within labor organizations, universities, and the church. Innovative strategic actions that showed the breadth of popular discontent empowered people to join the resistance movement. After nationwide mobilization of voters, poll watchers, and demonstrators, along with an effective use of the media, a popular "No" vote on the plebiscite defeated the Pinochet regime, forcing the general to step down from the presidency, although he remained in control of the military until his arrest in London in 1998. Since then, gradually democratic institutions have grown and institutionalized in Chile as a consequence of nonviolent coalitions mobilizing for change.

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Two days after the death of the reform-minded former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang on 15 April 1989, a group of about 600 young teachers and students laid a wreath for him in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic center of Chinese political power by the Tiananmen Gate (Gate of Heavenly Peace, built in 1417).  This prompted others to do the same that evening and the following day. By the second day, demonstrations developed, and a list of demands was issued that included calls for officials to re-evaluate the legacy of Hu Yaobang, reveal the salaries and wealth of government officials, stop press censorship, raise the wages of intellectuals, and increase government spending on education.  Thus began a breathtaking seven-week eruption on the world stage in which thousands of students occupied the Square, held a hunger strike, and tried to negotiate with Communist Party officials, while millions of others beyond the student population engaged in solidarity actions around the countryside.

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Colombia’s 60-year armed conflict has created what has been characterized by the United Nations as the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere. Acute levels of human rights violations and human rights abuses, attributed to the Colombian military and paramilitary and guerrilla factions respectively, have been accompanied by the forced displacement of approximately four million Colombians, including in particular indigenous and Afro-Colombian rural populations.

... With certain exceptions, the use of nonviolent action has been sporadic and fragmented and has lacked a unified strategy in Colombia.... [However], Important incidences of strategic nonviolent action have taken place at the level of municipalities within Colombia, including in excluded Afro-Colombian, indigenous and peasant communities, including the “peace communities”.

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Only eleven days after 17 November 1989, when riot police had beaten peaceful student demonstrators in Prague, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia relinquished its power and allowed the single-party state to collapse. By 29 December 1989, the so-called Velvet Revolution, led by the nonviolent coalition Civic Forum, transformed Václav Havel from a dissident playwright into the President of a democratic Czechoslovakia.

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Egypt is currently in an uneasy transition towards democracy. The Mubarak regime is ailing, while popular dissent is on the rise. With more than 40% of Egyptians living on just $2 a day, estimated 30% unemployment, and more than 30% illiteracy, most Egyptians feel neglected by the state, yet unable to voice their legitimate concerns. Mubarak’s almost-30-year monopoly on power and the emergency status laws have left the country without strong opposition to the regime. The country is holding parliamentary elections in 2010 and presidential elections in 2011. Internet and Facebook activism provide an alternative space for newly emerging civil society groups and political forces to operate. Growing dissent movements are planning nationwide, grassroots organizing to peacefully mobilize against Mubarak and his party in the upcoming elections.

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Broad-based nonviolent action erupted against British occupation forces and the colonial administration of Egypt in 1919 following the exile of popular pro-independence leaders. Nonviolent boycotts, petitions, pamphleteering, demonstrations, and a sustained general strike by students, professionals, and workers forced the British to declare limited independence for Egypt on February 28, 1922.

The authoritarian and eccentric General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez became president of El Salvador after a military coup overthrew the freely elected government of Arturo Araujo in 1931. After ordering the killing of thousands of peasants and political dissidents during his first two terms, Martinez suspended the constitution in early 1944 and declared he would serve a third without an election. An armed revolt by dissident military and other elite elements that April was quickly crushed, but, on May 5, students organized a general strike that crippled most of the economy and civil society. Mass rallies formed spontaneously and nonviolent protestors stormed the National Palace. Humiliated and isolated, Martinez fled to Guatemala on May 11. 

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Estonia, which had endured foreign occupation for centuries, joined its fellow Baltic Republics of Latvia and Lithuania in a nonviolent movement that enabled them to become independent from the Soviet Union in 1991.  Beginning in the mid-1980s, Estonians began taking advantage of their unique and rich cultural tradition, particularly in choral music, to encourage a national reawakening.  Estonians gathered in the thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands to celebrate their heritage in song, in what became known as “The Singing Revolution.”  Raising the banned Estonian flag while gathering en masse and singing banned patriotic songs, the movement eventually gained support of the republic’s ruling Communist Party in defying Moscow, faced down Soviet tanks, and successfully declared Estonian independence.

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Long before its ouster in 1994, the government of Sir Dawda Jawara had served too long and had grown increasingly inept and out of touch with the daily struggles of ordinary Gambians. Jawara led the country since independence on February 18, 1965, and his People`s Progressive Party (PPP) had since dominated electoral politics in The Gambia. As IMF and World Bank-induced structural adjustment programs led to job losses and disgruntlement among many Gambians, political opposition began to resonate even louder among them.

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In January 2008, President Álvaro Colóm was elected as the seventh president to take office since the return to civilian democracy in Guatemala in 1986. Twenty-two years after the return to elected civilian rule and twelve years after the formal end to the internal armed conflict in 1996, civilian actors continue to seek to develop effective strategies and forms of collective organization through which to impact upon Guatemala’s unconsolidated and restrictive democracy. Guatemalan democracy is restrictive given the absence of substantial structural transformation and impact of democratic governance upon the historical causes of the armed conflict and the social formations of poverty, racism, authoritarianism and exclusion. Extreme poverty has risen in the last five years, human development indices, particularly for indigenous peoples and women are amongst the lowest in Latin America, unequal distribution of land remains acute and determined through ethnic group membership, and political and economic elites continue to manipulate the democratic system in defense of their own interests. Guatemalan democracy is impervious to popular sovereignty and has brought with it the closure of spaces for effective civilian mobilization and impact, presenting a serious challenge to activists of nonviolent action.

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Guinea`s current situation remains one of those great contradictions of the natural affluence of most African countries. Although very rich in natural resources, Guinea remains a structurally poor country. Apart from the economy in the city, most of Guinea remains far behind modern market economics with subsistence agriculture, untapped markets and widespread poverty. Most Guineans continue to live in penury, while their leaders wallow in luxury. In addition, a far greater section of Guinea`s economic and political infrastructure remain underdeveloped, causing its economy to produce below even its median potential since independence. At present, more than 40 percent of the Guinean population is estimated to have annual incomes of merely $300 USD.

Yet, despite these dire economic conditions and a history of dictatorship, Guineans have repeatedly mobilized grassroots civil resistance and this, combined with international pressure, overturned the 2008 Camara dictatorship and led to a new plan for multi-party elections to take place in June 2010.

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Mohandas Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement of 1930-1931—launched by the Salt March—is a critical case for understanding civil resistance. Although by itself it failed to bring Indian independence, it seriously undermined British authority and united India’s population in a movement for independence under the leadership of the Indian National Congress (INC). It further signaled a new stage in the struggle for Indian swaraj (self-rule) and facilitated the downfall of the British Empire in India.  Gandhi’s Salt Satyagraha (a word Gandhi used to connote civil resistance, meaning “holding fast to the truth”) drew upon a traditional South Asian cultural practice – the “Padyatra” (a long spiritual march) that became a model of strategic action for many social movements in the decades to come.

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The Iranian Revolution of 1977-79 was the first in a series of mass popular civil insurrections which would result in the overthrow of authoritarian regimes in dozens of countries over the next three decades.  Unlike most of the other uprisings that would topple dictators in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia and Africa, the result of the Iranian struggle was not the establishment of liberal democracy but of a new form of authoritarianism.  However, except for a series of short battles using light weaponry in the final hours of the uprising, the revolutionary forces themselves were overwhelmingly nonviolent.  The autocratic monarchy of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi faced a broad coalition of opposition forces, including Marxists and constitutional liberals, but the opposition ultimately became dominated by the mullahs of the country’s Shia hierarchy.  Despite severe repression against protestors, a series of demonstrations and strikes over the previous two years came to a peak in the fall of 1978, as millions of opponents of the Shah’s regime clogged the streets of Iran’s cities and work stoppages paralyzed the country.  The Shah fled into exile in January 1979 and exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to lead the new Islamic Republic.

Opposition to the corrupt and dictatorial regime of General Mousa Traoré grew during the 1980s. During this time, austerity programs imposed to satisfy demands of the International Monetary Fund brought increased hardship upon the country’s population while elites close to the government lived in opulence. An opposition movement emerged, led by the Alliance for Democracy in Mali, which was brutally suppressed by the regime.

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A coalition of eleven Pakistani political parties known as the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) formed in 1983 to pressure the dictatorial regime of Muhammad Zia-ul Haq to hold elections and suspend martial law. The MRD, which remained mostly nonviolent, was strongest among supporters of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in Sindh Province. Though it launched one of the most massive nonviolent movements in South Asia since the time of Gandhi, failure to expand beyond its southern stronghold combined with effective repression from the military led to its demise a year and half later.

In 2005, Iftikhar Chaudhry became Pakistan’s Supreme Court Chief Justice. He led the court in ways that were inconvenient for then-President Pervez Musharraf, such as challenging the legality of Musharraf’s dual role as president and Army chief.  On March 9, 2007, President Pervez Musharraf suspended Chaudhry as chief justice, declaring that Chaudhry had misused his office. Pakistan’s legal community widely regarded Musharraf’s action as an attempt to curtail the Supreme Court’s increasing independence under Chaudhry’s leadership, and the Pakistani legal community soon took organized and nonviolent actions to protest Musharraf’s action. 

The lawyers formed an organized movement that came to be called Adliya Bachao Tehreek (“Save the Judiciary Movement”). Approximately 80,000 lawyers aligned across traditional Pakistani political divides with the mission of reinstating Chaudhry as Chief Justice and restoring judicial independence in Pakistan.  A Pakistani Supreme Court advocate described the movement’s formation as “the first time in Pakistan’s history that lawyers have dropped their conflicting political affiliations and forged an unprecedented professional unity to restore the rule of law.”

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In 1929, the Khudai Khidmatgars (“Servants of God”) movement, led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, nonviolently mobilized to oppose the British in India’s Northwest Frontier Province. Ghaffar Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement inspired thousands of Pashtuns (also called Pathans), who were known as fierce warriors, and others to lay down their arms and use civil resistance to challenge British rule. Although Ghaffar Khan’s initial reform efforts predated his involvement with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress (INC), he later formed a formal alliance with them and became a formidable force during and following the INC’s civil disobedience campaign of 1930-1931, helping the INC win provincial elections in 1937.

Nonviolent struggle against the authoritarian communist government in Poland began soon after the communists stole parliamentary elections in 1946. However, it took over three decades of civil resistance—waged over time with varying tactics and degrees of intensity—for Polish society to begin organizing and consolidating itself in a broad coalition of social forces that climaxed in the establishment of the Solidarność (“Solidarity”) as an organization and a movement in August 1980. Solidarity, with its roots in trade unionism shook and delegitimized the communist regime by exposing its ideological but false claims of being a free “workers’ state”. This popular movement created independent political space where alternative institutions, activities, and discourses could develop and flourish. Solidarity always pursued its political objectives with a high degree of nonviolent discipline as well as self-imposed limitations.  Both of these elements played a crucial role in a national compromise and peaceful transfer of power in 1989. This negotiated transition ushered Poland onto the path of a successful democratization that also carried important hallmarks of its civil resistance legacy.

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For forty years before March 2000, Senegal was ruled by the Socialist Party (PS) of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegal`s first president since independence on April 4, 1960, and his hand-picked successor Abdou Diouf who became president in 1981....

However, the Socialist Party (PS) continued to rule the country on the colonial model with broad presidential powers. That, coupled with the emergence of a post-colonial elite class, growing economic inequalities—especially among and between Senegal`s numerous regions—bred gradual opposition to the Socialist Party administration of President L.S. Senghor and later President Abdou Diouf. In addition, like most African countries at the time, Senegal`s fortunes were not helped by the damages caused by unpopular structural adjustment programs of the 1980s  implemented at the behest of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

This growing disaffection for the policies of the Socialist Party ignited the formation of opposition political movements....

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When a group of students founded the new organization Otpor (“Resistance”) in October 1998, the regime of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic seemed firmly entrenched. Only two years later, he was driven out of office after a massive mobilization of civil resistance inspired and in many ways shaped by Otpor organizers. The Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), the broad reform coalition that ousted Milosevic, dominated parliamentary elections in December 2000, took control of the government, and restored democracy to that war-torn country.

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The iconic struggle between the apartheid regime of South Africa and those who resisted it illustrates the complexity of some cases of civil resistance. Originally the use of civil resistance against apartheid was based on Gandhian ideas, which originated in South Africa in 1906 where Gandhi was a lawyer working for an Indian trading firm. Soon the African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912, became the major force opposing the apartheid system’s oppression of the 80% non-European population of the country. Using mostly legal tactics of protest during its first four decades, the ANC became more militant in the early 1950s and began using nonviolent direct action.

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The oppression of undocumented immigrants  in the United States is an underreported human rights crisis. Twelve million  or more undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States are denied basic labor protections, mobility, education, and public services because of their immigration status. Living in the shadows in low-wage industries such as farm labor, hotel, restaurant, and janitorial services, immigrants are vulnerable to labor exploitation, and they face constant fear of being fired or deported. A vibrant social movement in the United States has emerged to protect these immigrants from discrimination and from many cases of excessively repressive enforcement of immigration laws, as well as to advocate for legislation that will provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Since the last passage of immigration law reform in the 1980s, the movement has grown and demonstrated its power with numerous protests and non-violent actions that since 2004 have captured significant national media attention.

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The US Civil Rights Movement (1942-68) restored universal suffrage in the southern United States and outlawed legal segregation. The movement’s overall strategy combined litigation, the use of mass media, boycotts, demonstrations, as well as sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience to turn public support against institutionalized racism and secure substantive reform in US law. Thousands were arrested in nonviolent protests as images of the confrontations inspired widespread public support for the movement’s objectives. Hundreds of thousands more participated in marches, boycotts and voter registration drives throughout the US South. The movement helped spawn a national crisis that forced intervention by the federal government to overturn segregation laws in southern states, restore voting rights for African-Americans, and end legal discrimination in housing, education and employment.

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The U.S. war in Vietnam triggered the most tenacious anti-war movement in U.S. history, beginning with the start of the bombing of North Vietnam in 1964 and the introduction of combat troops the following year. Over the next decade, hundreds of thousands of young people become radicalized in a largely nonviolent, diverse and sometimes inchoate popular culture of war resistance, employing tactics ranging from comical street theatre to industrial sabotage. Students, government officials, labor unions, church groups and middle class families increasingly opposed the war as it climaxed in 1968, forcing a gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces. Anti-war activities, particularly large-scale resistance to military conscription, forced an end U.S. combat operations in Vietnam and a suspension of the draft by January 1973.

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Located on the western rim of the Pacific, bordering the independent state of Papua New Guinea, West Papua is a Melanesian nation in waiting. Under the Dutch the territory was the easternmost limit of the far-flung Dutch East Indies. On May 1, 1963, after less than one year of transitional rule by the United Nations, power was formerly transferred to the Republic of Indonesia. One condition of the transfer of administrative control was that there would be an internationally supervised act of self-determination. A sham ’referendum’ known as the ‘Act of Free Choice’, and supervised by the United Nations, took place between May and July 1969. On 19 November 1969 the United Nations General Assembly formally ‘took note’ that the results of the Act of Free Choice did not accurately or democratically represent the will of the people, however it still proceeded to recognise Indonesian government rule in West Papua. Since then the territory has been the scene of one of the most protracted, complex and volatile conflicts in the Pacific. After the fall of former Indonesian President Suharto in 1998 the struggle for self-determination and independence underwent a transformation from a poorly armed and decentralised network of guerrilla groups fighting in the mountains and jungles to a popular nonviolent civilian based movement in the cities and towns.

The nonviolent struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe became more pronounced from the late 1990s to the present. The struggle is led by opposition parties and civil society against the rule of ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front) under President Robert Mugabe, who has been the sole ruler since 1980 when the country gained its independence from Rhodesian colonial rule.

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