In 2016, we received a total of 27 applications from Ph.D. candidates and Junior Faculty and awarded 3 fellowships ranging from $4000 to more than $10,000 each in support of research on civil resistance. The goal of these fellowships is to assist awardees in expanding their analytical and methodological focus, support data collection and database development and facilitate fieldwork and interviews with activists, practitioners and observers.

The 2016 Research Fellows:

Bio: Domale is a doctoral candidate in Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned an M.Ed from Harvard University and a B.A in English from Trinity University. Her research interests include African and African-immigrant women activists, their issues and methods for activism, especially those pertaining to education, access to education and activist pedagogy. She is also interested in transnational social movements and the ways in which movements evolve as they shift between various settings. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Domale taught English and composition at the secondary level in San Antonio, TX. She is also a founding director of Project AIDS Nigeria, a nonprofit which arms secondary students with skills to prevent the spread of HIV and other diseases in Nigeria. Domale resides with family in West Los Angeles. In her free time, she loves to visit surrounding farmer’s markets, run, and read fairy tales.

Tentative title: Ogoni Women: Issues and Mobilization

Abstract: The Ogoni Struggle features prominently in the history of nonviolence in Africa. Since the early 1990s, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) began protesting Shell Oil Company and the Nigerian government’s drilling of oil from their lands which resulted in environmental damage to an area heavily dependent on farming and fishing. However, minimal attention has been given to Ogoni women’s role in the activism. The Federation of Ogoni Women’s Association (FOWA), the women’s wing of MOSOP, has been one of the largest women’s nonviolent activist organizations in Nigeria since the 1990s. FOWA, initially organized against exploitation by oil companies has also fought for women’s issues including girls education and women’s general and reproductive health. My dissertation will examine the Ogoni movement from women’s perspectives and seeks to understand the issues for which they agitate as well as the nonviolent methods and tactics they employ to address those concerns. Understanding the Ogoni Struggle from women’s perspectives will add a critical part to the narrative about Ogoni nonviolent organizing as women’s roles and views, which continue to be undervalued in predominantly male-led social movements, can be central to their success and sustainability.

Bio: Kara is a PhD candidate in International Studies at the Josef Korbel School and research fellow with the Private Security Monitor project. She graduated summa cum laude from Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 2010 with a BA in Government/International Affairs. She earned her MA in International Studies from Korbel in 2012. Kara’s research interests include civil-military relations and democratization, and her dissertation focuses on military behaviors in response to anti-authoritarian protest movements and their relationship to democratic change.

Tentative title: Explaining Military Defections and When They Support Democratization

Abstract: Why do militaries shift their loyalty from authoritarian regimes in some instances of anti-authoritarian regime civil resistance campaigns and not others, and when do these shifts lead to democratic change? These questions are crucial for understanding the success of protests and other peaceful movements for regime change, a topic of increased attention in recent years. Answering them has so far been challenged by a lack of data on the responses of militaries to anti-regime civil resistance campaigns. I use a combination of primary and secondary sources to create a data-set that indicates whether the full military or part of the military remained loyal, refused regime orders, defected, or took power in response to all regime change civil resistance campaigns from 1950 to 2014. Militaries respond to campaigns in a variety of ways, and disaggregating and specifying responses commonly understood as defections allows for a greater understanding of their implications for both campaign outcomes and democratization. In addition to the newly-coded military behavior variable, the data-set compiles variables on regimes, campaigns, and militaries’ relations with both.

Bio: Jonathan is a PhD candidate at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, 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 centers on nonviolent political contention in non-democracies, which special focus on the role of civil resistance in democratization. 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 Sie Fellowship.

Title: When Civil Resistance Succeeds: Building Democracy After Popular Nonviolent Uprising

Abstract: Why do nonviolent movements often lead to democracy? Why do they sometimes not? While several existing studies have pointed to a strong connection between successful campaigns of civil resistance and a greater likelihood of democratization, prominent failures of democratization, as in many of the Arab Spring cases, raise questions about this finding. Furthermore, little literature has examined the dynamics of civil resistance campaigns following the initial democratic breakthrough to trace the mechanisms whereby civil resistance can encourage or undermine democratic prospects. I present a theory of civil resistance transitions, focusing on a series of strategic challenges faced by nonviolent movements after their initial democratic breakthrough. I argue that resolving three challenges: transitional mobilization, the problem of leftovers, and depolarization, is crucial for a successful transition to democracy. I support my argument with a quantitative analysis of all transitions from authoritarianism initiated by civil resistance from 1945-2011 and several qualitative case studies.

Read Dr. Pinckney’s ICNC Monograph, When Civil Resistance Succeeds: Building Democracy After Popular Nonviolent Uprisings