This year’s awardees include:
Jonathan Pinckney is a Ph.D. student at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies in the fields of International Relations and Comparative Politics and a Research Fellow at the Sie Cheou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy, where he supervises the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) 3.0 project. His research interests focus on extra-institutional means of political contention, primarily nonviolent civil resistance and political violence. Jonathan’s work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, Foreign Policy Magazine’s Democracy Lab, and the Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Jonathan received his BA in International Affairs from Gordon College, graduating summa cum laude with special honors, and his MA from the Korbel School in 2014. He was a 2012 recipient of the Korbel School’s Sié Fellowship.
Making or Breaking Nonviolent Discipline in Civil Resistance Movements
Abstract: How can we understand when nonviolent movements will stay nonviolent? When are they likely to break down into violence? In this monograph, Jonathan Pinckney analyzes both what promotes and undermines nonviolent discipline in civil resistance movements. Combining quantitative research on thousands of nonviolent and violent actions with a detailed comparison of three influential cases of civil resistance during the “Color Revolutions,” Pinckney’s study provides important lessons for activists and organizers on the front lines, as well as for practitioners whose work may impact the outcomes of nonviolent struggles. We learn how repression consistently induces violence, as do government concessions. On the flip side, we see that structuring a campaign in an inclusive and non-hierarchical way is conducive to greater nonviolent discipline.
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Elizabeth A. Wilson is visiting faculty at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey, USA. She is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, India. Her areas of specialization include public international law and international human rights law. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, USA.
People Power Movements and International Human Rights: Creating a Legal Framework
Abstract: International human rights law did not come into existence top-down, out of the benevolent intentions of states, even though states eventually began to recognize that large-scale human rights abuses could pose a threat to the international order. Rather, it came into existence from the bottom-up efforts of ordinary people in civil society to ally with each other in solidarity and demand their rights, often through organized nonviolent campaigns and movements that pressured elites and powerholders to recognize or grant individual rights (freedom for slaves, women’s rights, labor rights, and children’s rights, to name a few). Unlike international law generally, the real source of international human rights law has been the coordinated, organized and nonviolently forceful efforts of individuals—in other words, what one can refer to as people power.