International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

Fletcher Summer Institute 2013

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fsivideoimgThe Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict (FSI) is the only executive education program in the advanced, interdisciplinary study of nonviolent conflict, taught by leading scholars and practitioners of strategic nonviolent action and authorities from related fields.
Organized in conjunction with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, the oldest exclusively graduate school of international affairs in the United States, the program offers a certificate in the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict that draws upon its multi-disciplinary approach to global affairs.

Applications are now closed.  You can stay up to date with all the news on FSI 2013 on our Facebook page and Twitter feed. Download the FSI 2013 flyer. To learn about past FSIs, you can watch presentations from FSI 2012, 2011 or 2010. If you have any questions, or would like to request a paper application, please send an email to fsi@nonviolent-conflict.org .
When: June 16-22, 2013
Where: The Fletcher School, Tufts University, Boston, MA

Keynote Address: Rev. James Lawson

Speaker: Rev. James Lawson, Distinguished Scholar at Vanderbilt University
Date: Sunday, June 16th, 2013
Time: 9:00pm – 10:30pm

Description: Rev. James Lawson was one of Dr. Martin Luther King’s key strategists during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Having traveled to India to learn about Gandhian nonviolence, upon returning to the United States Lawson would put what he learned into action throughout the American South, integrating mass-based, nonviolent direct action into some of the movement’s most successful campaigns – the lunch-counter sit-ins, the freedom rides, the sanitation worker’s strike, and many more. A gifted trainer of nonviolent action, a committed voice for social justice, and a distinguished scholar, James Lawson speaks about his experience during the Civil Rights Movement and the role of civil resistance and nonviolence in contemporary struggles for rights and justice.  The keynote address is preceded by a segment from the film, A Force More Powerful.

Additional Resources:

 The Dynamics of Civil Resistance

Presenter: Jack DuVall, President of International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
Date: Monday, June 17th, 2013
Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm

Description: The modern practice of civil resistance sprang from new ideas about the underlying nature of political power that began to be framed about 170 years ago. As later developed by Gandhi and adopted by scores of movements and campaigns for rights and justice in recent decades, strategies of civil resistance have exhibited a common dynamic, propelled historic changes, and imparted certain political and social properties to the societies in which those changes happened. The record of these strategies in liberating oppressed people, when compared to violent insurgency or revolution, has been remarkable – and suggests why political violence may recede in the future.

Additional Resources:

Civic Struggle to Protect the Environment and Political Rights

Guest Speaker: Evgenia Chirikova, Russian Environmental Activist
Date: Monday, June 17th, 2013
Time: 12:30pm – 2:00pm

Description: This talk focuses mainly on major environmental campaigns that Evgenia Cherikova led and has been involved in. These include defending the Khimiki forest (against a highway project that would destroy a natural habitat) and the Khopra region (against nickel mining). These campaigns have been driven by resistance against private corporations with close ties to both local and central authorities. Evgenia discusses how people were mobilized and organized, how they developed their strategies and resilience, what actions of civil defiance they engaged in, and the campaign outcomes.

Movement Formation

Presenter: Dr. Maciej Bartkowski, Senior Director for Education and Research at International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
Date: Monday, June 17th, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: When repression persists, it is often mistakenly believed that a regime is durable and mass-based resistance is not feasible. As soon as the people rise up and the regime falls, the prevailing view quickly shifts: the popular upheaval is seen as inevitable and the collapse of the system unavoidable. So movement emergence is neither impossible nor can it be easily predicted. Yet, nonviolent movements come to life and in places and times few predicted. This session will aim to explain why people rise up even if the risks are high and success uncertain. This will be linked with other questions: How are people able to break the barrier of fear and apathy? How do action-takers build their case for change? How do they gain greater recognition and how do they use an adversary’s countermeasures to strengthen or maintain their own momentum?

Additional Resources:

Strategic Planning and Tactical Innovation

Presenter: Hardy Merriman, Vice President and Director for Content Development at International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
Date: Monday, June 17th. 2013
Time: 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Description: Strategic planning and tactical choices are essential considerations in effective civil resistance. This session will offer a strategic framework with which to analyze civil resistance movements. It will also examine numerous tactics available to civil resisters and explore issues involved in tactical choice, success and failure.

Additional Resources:

A Force More Powerful: “Freedom in Our Time

Guest Speaker: Mkhuseli Jack, Veteran of South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Struggle
Date: Monday, June 17th, 2013
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm

Description: Mkhuseli Jack was one of the most effective leaders in summoning the people’s participation in nonviolent action, in recent history. In particular, his leadership of the consumer boycott campaign in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, helped to show how the costs of apartheid could be transferred from the people of black townships to the commercial business community on which the support and revenue of the government partly depended – a comparable strategy to the strikes by black workers aimed at industrial corporations, and the external sanctions by foreign governments which made doing international business in South Africa more difficult.

Khusta, as he is commonly known, was seen by Nelson Mandela as one of the best organizers on which the movement could depend. He will share ideas and stories from his work on behalf of bringing justice and rights to all South Africans, and also his reflections about South Africa today.

Additional Resources:

Sustaining the Movement: Unity and Coalition Building

Presenter: Hardy Merriman, Vice President and Director for Content Development at International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
Date: Tuesday, June 18th, 2013
Time: 9:00am – 10:30am

Description: This session addresses the critical task of building and maintaining coalitions within movements. Effective coalitions can provide movement infrastructure and be an organizational hub around which broad strategy and discourse are formed. However, coalitions require effort to establish and maintain, and there are numerous risks and potential stresses that can lead a coalition to failure. This session discusses the costs and benefits of coalition formation, as well as factors that promote or inhibit coalition establishment and sustainability.

Additional Resources:

  • Managing Repression

    Presenters: Dr. Erica Chenoweth, Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School, University of Denver

    Dr. Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco

    Date: Tuesday, June 18th, 2012
    Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm

    Description: In this session, Dr. Erica Chenoweth discusses how repression affects nonviolent campaigns. She provides empirical evidence that nonviolent movements are still effective even against brutally oppressive opponents. She discusses how movements “manage” repression through the promotion of backfire, as well as the strategic options movements have in dealing with repression. She also provides evidence suggesting that nonviolent movements that adopt violence or develop armed wings are not usually advantaged relative to nonviolent movements. This is because using violence against the regime, even when provoked, can undermine the necessary public participation that nonviolent campaigns enjoy, and can also undermine the backfiring of regime repression.

    Dr. Stephen Zunes emphasizes the international impact of repression, specifically how nonviolent responses in the face of brutal repression makes it easier to isolate the oppressive regime, whereas violent resistance, even where seemingly justifiable, could be seen as rationalizing further repression in the name of “national security” or “counter-terrorism.” He also addresses the importance of nonviolent discipline in encouraging defections by security forces and divisions within the regime.

    Additional Resources:

  • Download presentation slides (Chenoweth)

Jenni Williams on WOZA’s struggle in Zimbabwe

Speaker: Jenni Williams, Co-Founder of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA)
Date: Tuesday, June 18th, 2013
Time: 12:30pm – 2:00pm

Description: Jenni Williams is a prominent Zimbabwean human rights defender and co-founder of the Zimbabwean organization, Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA). Since its creation in 2003, WOZA, also meaning ‘come forward’ in Ndebele, has grown into a network of over 75,000 women and has inspired tens of thousands of women and men to stand up for their rights under Robert Mugabe’s regime. In nearly a decade of nonviolent struggle and hundreds of protests and actions, more than 3,000 WOZA supporters have spent time in police custody. Williams herself has been arrested over 50 times and frequently had to battle fabricated charges. In 2009, Williams was honored by President Obama at the White House when she and WOZA Programs Coordinator Magodonga Mahlangu were awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Award. She is also the 2012 recipient of Amnesty International U.S.A.’s 2012 Ginetta Sagan Award for Women’s and Children’s Rights.

Radical Flanks and Violence

Presenter: Dr. Howard Barrell, Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University
Date: Tuesday, June 18th, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: Do violent groups that operate independently of a nonviolent movement or on its fringes increase or decrease the likelihood of success of the civil resistance movement? This talk focuses on the South African anti-apartheid struggle and examine how simultaneous campaigns of civil resistance and organized military violence against apartheid interacted with each other. It shows a complex and paradoxical relationship and argues that the ANC’s almost exclusive focus on armed struggle between 1961 and 1979 severely undermined civil resistance. Ironically, it also held back the development of armed struggle itself, and retarded the achievement of ending apartheid. The talk concludes that civil resistance inside South Africa led by the United Democratic Front (UDF) eventually far surpassed armed activity as a force for change in South Africa in the 1980s.

Additional Resources:

From Cochabamba to Democracy

Speaker: Oscar Olivera
Date: Tuesday, June 18th, 2013
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm

Description: From 2000 to 2005, Bolivian social movements won a succession of important political victories, reversing unpopular government decrees and gaining increased freedoms for ordinary Bolivians. Average citizens became active practitioners of civil resistance and made their voices heard as never before.

This wave of popular struggle resulted in the election of the nation’s first indigenous President, Evo Morales, in 2005. Morales’ rise to power in Bolivia has created complex challenges for the social movements that brought him to power: How can movements maintain their independence when someone from their ranks assumes executive power? When new governments begin to commit the same abuses as their predecessors, how can social movements respond?

Oscar Olivera discusses these issues, and talk about his more recent efforts to use community work projects to strengthen self-reliance and sustain people’s organizing capacity outside the realm of state power.

Additional Resources:

  • “An interview with Oscar Olivera.”  Cochabambino.  April 28, 2011.  Available online
  • Dawson, Ashley.  “The Cochabamba Water Wars: an Interview with Oscar Olivera.”  Social Text.  July 5, 2011.  Available online
  • Dean, Matteo.  “Oscar Olivera: Opposition in Times of Evo.”  Desinformémonos.  August 11, 2010.  Available online
  • Lackowski, Peter and Sharyl Green.  “Democracy from Below in Bolivia: An Interview with Oscar Olivera.”  Upside Down World.  June 20, 2012.  Available online

Gender and Nonviolent Conflict

Presenters: Dr. Dyan Mazurana, Director for Gender, Youth and Community and Associate Professor at Tufts University

Roxanne Krystalli, Gender-based violence specialist in conflict and post-conflict areas

Date: Wednesday, June 19th, 2013
Time: 9:00am – 10:30am

Description: This session explores the role of human rights defenders, and in particular women’s rights defenders, and their use of nonviolent means to address, confront and respond to violence during armed conflict and afterwards. We’ll look at these human rights defenders’ various strategies and methods, and security risks and their attempts to mitigate these. We look at how they use and manipulate gender roles as a means to organize, stay safe and carry out their work, and the risks associated with this. Finally, we look at what they have achieved and where their efforts are blocked or fail and why.

Additional Resources:

Panel Discussion: Media and Civil Resistance

Moderator: Dr. Sarah Sobieraj / Associate Professor of Sociology, Tufts University

Panelists: Nada Al-Wadi, Independent Journalist, Writer and Researcher

Dr. Howard Barrell, Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University

Date: Wednesday, June 19th, 2013
Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm

Description: Activists and organizers need to get their messages across to domestic audiences and the wider world to grow in strength and influence. The local and international media can play important roles in helping them do so. But the media can seem unreachable or can misinterpret a movement’s actions. In response, nonviolent action-takers can use opportunities to develop their own media and bring out their message directly to a larger audience. This session will discuss the role of mainstream, citizen and social media in civil resistance and the challenges that media face in covering a movement as well as obstacles and benefits for the movement in devising effective strategies, including organizing alternative media.

The James Lawson Awards

Date: Wednesday, June 19th, 2013
Time: 12:30pm – 2:00pm

Description: In the 1960s, the Reverend James Lawson organized and led one of the most effective campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance in the 20th century: the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins for the US Civil Rights Movement. In the years that followed he was involved in strategic planning of numerous other major campaigns and actions and was called “the mind of the movement” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The James Lawson Award for Achievement in the Practice of Nonviolent Conflict (or, for journalists and scholars, the “Reporting” or “Study” of Nonviolent Conflict), is presented annually by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict at The Fletcher School at Tufts University during the Fletcher Summer Institute. It is awarded to practitioners, scholars and journalists whose work serves as a model for how nonviolent change can be developed, understood and explained.

This year, four distinguished people receive the James Lawson Award, in the presence of us all.

Breakout Session: Civil Resistance in Secession Struggle – The Case of West Papua

Presenters: Jason McLeod, Lecturer in Community Development, University of Queensland

Benny Wenda, West Papuan Independence Leader

Date: Wednesday, June 19th, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: Mainstream research into the dynamics of civil resistance has been built around investigations of how ordinary people remove dictatorships without resorting to violence. One particular area neglected is independence or secessionist struggles. Current examples include those in Palestine, Tibet, Western Sahara, and West Papua — all situations where an indigenous population is attempting to overthrow what is perceived to be a foreign occupation, or separate from an existing state in order to create a new state. One reason secession goals are more difficult to win than anti-dictatorship struggles is that they challenge the prevailing international order and require more complex strategies. Protagonists wanting to secede from an existing state need to wage nonviolent resistance in three distinct domains: the occupied territory, the territory of the occupier, and the societies of the occupier’s international allies. Through participatory and experiential methods and through using West Papua as a case study, this session explores the concept of “expanding the nonviolent battlefield”.

Breakout Session: The Arab Spring and Civil Resistance

Presenter: Arwa Hassan, Regional Outreach Manager MENA Region at Transparency International
Date: Wednesday, June 27th, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 took the world by surprise. Yet, even activists on the frontlines did not initially anticipate the power that the protests would mobilize. Egyptians had effectively used civil resistance to fight against corruption and oppression for years, and these movements culminated in the bringing down of the respective corrupt dictators. The revolutions had spin-offs in other countries too, such as Jordan and Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia has seen ripples of discontent.

Although President Mubarak and President Ben Ali have gone, threats still remain, with the old guard resorting to corrupt tactics to perpetuate their hold on power. The Military Council and the subsequent Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt clamped down further on civil rights.

People are again taking to the streets. What kind of tactics do civic movements need to deploy now in order to fight? What can activists do today to ensure that hard-won victories are not sabotaged by corrupt powers?

Breakout Session: Civil Resistance and Human Rights

Moderator: Nicola Barrach, Director of Civic and New Media Initiatives at International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

Date: Wednesday, June 19th, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: This session is a panel discussion with selected participants about civil resistance and human rights, exploring the fundamental role that nonviolent movements have played in securing and codifying most of the rights that are today recognized as universal. It is no exaggeration to say that civil resistance is both the creation and exercise of universal human rights. This includes preventing and opposing new forms of oppression. It is also the means by which new rights can be claimed and already established rights must be defended. A number of cases highlighted in this session will illustrate how civic movements and campaigns can benefit from and use human rights-related legal and institutional frameworks to advance their goals.

External Factors in Civil Resistance

Presenters: Dr. Maria Stephan, Lead Foreign Affairs Officer at the US Department of State’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations

Rob Wilkinson, Lecturer in International Negotiation and Global Aid Management at Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University

Date: Wednesday, June 19th, 2013
Time: 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Description: “The tasks of democratic governments is to pay attention to change, and in a spirit of solidarity of free peoples, support legitimate aspirations of people everywhere to widen their democratic space.” -A Diplomat’s Handbook for Democracy Development Support

Local nonviolent activists and movements, along with the tactics and strategies they use, will always be the primary drivers of bottom-up change. However, external actors, both governmental and non-governmental, can play an important role in supporting those activists and movements and shaping the environment for civic activism. Effective 21st century diplomacy, notably, must emphasize development and civilian power as much as military might.

Still, there are challenges to state support for indigenous movements. These include constraints imposed by normal bilateral relations and conflicting geo-strategic interests. This module will address the following questions:

– What are the pros and cons of external support (notably governmental support) to nonviolent activists?
– What tools do diplomats and other external actors have at their disposal to enhance the effectiveness of nonviolent activists and movements?
– Where have those tools been used effectively or not effectively?
– What are key lessons for future engagement between diplomats/policy-makers and nonviolent activists?

Additional Resources:

Economic Self Organization by Movements

Presenter: Kim Wilson, Lecturer in International Business at Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
Date: Thursday, June 20th, 2013
Time: 9:00am – 10:30am

Description: This session exposes participants to the idea of economic (financial and non-financial) self-organization in the context of strategic nonviolent conflict. We explore how civil resistance movements engage in and benefit from alternative economic organizing, what impact this type of self-organization has on mobilization and sustainability of nonviolent resistance, and what the challenges and obstacles are for pursuing grassroots economic independence in order to gain a greater strategic advantage in a civil resistance struggle. We look to specific examples from Haiti, Poland, South Africa and India to inform our thinking. We will pose a theoretical framework on self-organizing in civil resistance in general and specifically in economic and financial spheres and ask participants to respond and help reshape the framework.

Civil Resistance Versus Corruption

Presenters: Shaazka Beyerle, Senior Advisor at International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
Date: Thursday, June 20th, 2013
Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm

Description: Corruption remains one of the greatest stumbling blocks to democratic governance, power-holder accountability, human rights, and social and economic development. It’s intimately linked to violence, poverty, impunity, and oppression. Nonetheless, around the world, citizens are refusing to be victims, and literally millions are protagonists in nonviolent campaigns and movements targeting graft, abuse and organized crime. In this session we’ll consider alternative definitions of corruption; examine innovative cases (some currently underway); identify common attributes and general lessons learned; and explore together the dynamics of people power to confound corruption and gain accountability, rights and justice.

Why Skills Can Make Civil Resistance a Force More Powerful

Speaker: Dr. Peter Ackerman, Founding Chair of International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
Date: Thursday, June 20th, 2013
Time: 12:30pm – 2:00pm

Description: Nonviolent conflict is a contest between nonviolent civil resisters and their (often violent) adversaries. In this contest, each side has different strategies and tactics that they can employ. Civil resistance movements wage their struggle through political, economic, and social pressure, and they have a wide variety of tactics at their disposal. A movement’s adversary often tries to wage its struggle through violent means, which has a completely different dynamic and tactical repertoire. In this asymmetric contest between violent and nonviolent actors, the side that is best organized, most skillful, and most strategic, is more likely to prevail. Therefore, the skillful and strategic choices that civil resistance movements make are of critical importance to their outcome.

Breakout Session: Struggles in Africa

Presenters: Jenni Williams, Co-Founder of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA)

Mkhuseli Jack, Veteran of South Africa Anti-Apartheid Struggle

Date: Thursday, June 20th, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: The human potential and economic power of Africa are growing faster than ever before, but so too are threats to the freedom, safety and social justice sought by its people. Authoritarian rulers, corrupt officials, violent transnational traffickers, sectarian extremist groups, and foreign governments and corporations that wish to extract even more of its resources are competing for control of the continent’s future with the people of Africa. The people’s power has to be organized and applied to all these challenges, and there are many signs that this can be done. Where should civil society groups, local campaigns and larger movements focus their attention? What are the best issues to confront first? How can civil resistance be used as the chassis for practical action? Jenni and Khusta will lead a creative, open discussion of these and related questions.

Breakout Session: Civil Resistance and Corporate Action

Speaker: Althea Middleton-Detzner, Senior Advisor for Education and Field Learning at International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
Date: Thursday, June 20th, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: Laws, voluntary agreements, and corporate social responsibility mechanisms have failed to adequately regulate international extractive and development companies and their effects on local communities. Inadequate respect for the international norm of “free, prior, and informed consent,” human and worker rights abuses, environmental damage, and poor compensation are grievances faced by many communities. From Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta to Freeport Mining in West Papua, and the Belo Monte Dam in Brazil, nonviolent struggles have emerged to hold corporations and local governments accountable to the people. This session will explore these ideas and some of the cases where civil resistance has challenged power-holders responsible for the unjust practices.

*Video Coming Soon

Breakout Session – The Arts of Resistance: The Nonviolent Power of Music, Movement, and Imagery

Moderator: Daryn Cambridge, Senior Director for Learning and Digital Strategies at International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

Panelists:

Pimsiri Petchnamrob, MA Candidate at University for Peace

Ramson Chimwaza, Kumukoma Community Radio, Zimbabwe

Benny Wenda, West Papuan Independence Leader

Date: Thursday, June 20th, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: This session explores the role of music in nonviolent struggle and the various artistic/cultural elements that accompany it (poetry, visual arts, dance/movement, etc.). Daryn Cambridge will offer insights gained from an ICNC project that is obtaining music from bands and artists who are creating music in various regions and struggles around the world, and from selected participants who have also done so or used music in their struggles.

Leadership in Civil Resistance

Moderator: Dr. Deborah Nutter, Senior Associate Dean and Professor of Practice at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University

Panelists:

Evgenia Chirikova, Russian Environmental Activist

Mkhuseli Jack, Veteran, South Africa Anti-Apartheid Struggle

Date: Friday, June 21st, 2013
Time: 9:00am – 10:30am

Description: To give effective leadership to a civil resistance movement, an organizer must be able to strategically organize and plan, visualize a future that the movement wants to achieve, elicit sustained and value-driven participation, and effectively negotiate with disparate parts of a coalition for action, and with other institutions. The leaders must articulate ideas and generate tactical actions that build the movement in order to shift perceived legitimacy from the current system to a new society sought by the people. Dean Deborah Winslow Nutter leads a discussion on leadership, based on these and other ideas, with two leaders of civil resistance: Evgenia Chirikova of Russia and Mkhuseli Jack of South Africa.

Syria: From Civil Resistance to Civil War

Presenter: Bassam Ishakm Member of Syrian National Council

Date: Friday, June 21st, 2013
Time: 11:00pm – 12:30pm

Description: What began as a mixture of spontaneous and planned nonviolent resistance to the Syrian regime in early 2011, on the heels of other Arab Spring uprisings, and then developed into a robust and mainly nonviolent challenge to the authoritarian control of the Assad regime, became by the end of 2011 an increasingly violent insurrection that many scholars and observers of civil resistance viewed as a tragic mistake. But the early stakeholders in a nonviolent revolution in Syria have not abandoned the long-term struggle for rights and democracy in their country. One of their leaders is Bassam Ishak, an alumnus of the Fletcher Summer Institute and a skilled thinker about how civil resistance can be taken up and applied, even in treacherous times and circumstances.

Breakout Session: Women in Civil Resistance

Presenters: Dr. Mary King, Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at University for Peace

Dr. Anne-Marie Codur, Co-Founder of Newscoop

Date: Friday, June 21st, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: Most women’s activism has historically been nonviolent direct action, which has helped develop the technique of civil resistance. Movements for abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage made common cause in the nineteenth century. Women’s activism has been the galvanizing force in several civil-resistance movements, for example, the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–1956) that launched the U.S. civil rights movement was sparked by JoAnne Robinson and the city’s black women’s political council.

Women can sometimes exploit traditional political space as wives, mothers and nurturers, as did German gentile women married to Jewish men, who in 1943 saved their husbands through street protests in Berlin. Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo dared to march weekly in Argentina’s capital, 1977–1983, seeking acknowledgment that their children had been “disappeared” by the military generals. Their audacious demonstrations created the dynamic that would lead to the fall of the regime. Women have sometimes been able to accomplish what their male peers could not, as with the Palestinian women who led popular committees in the 1987 intifada. Israeli women’s activism in the Israeli “Four Mothers Movement” exerted such pressure on the Israeli government that the IDF withdrew from Lebanon in 2000.

The significance of women’s leadership, decision-making, strategy, organization, communications, networking, and tactics needs to be more systemically surveyed and acknowledged, as their role is critical in the success of any movement of civil resistance.

Breakout Session: Civil Resistance and Democratic Transitions

Presenters: Dr. Maciej Bartkowski, Senior Director for Education and Research at International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

Dr. Erica Chenoweth, Assistant Professor and the Josef Korbel School for International Studies at University of Denver

Date: Friday, June 21st, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: Institutional and economic concerns dominate the debate about democratic transitions. Constitutional reforms, the independence of the judiciary, civilian control over the military, free media, and honest elections are often the focus of continued activism. But how can civil resistance have a serious impact before and after such reforms? This session will explore the evidence that successful nonviolent campaigns tend to usher in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war than cases where violent insurgents succeed. Even the long-term effects of failed nonviolent campaigns are more favorable to democracy than the long-term effects of successful violent campaigns.

Breakout Session – People Power in the Digital Realm: ICT Strategies and Innovations

Moderator: Daryn Cambridge, Senior Director for Learning and Digital Strategies at International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

Panelists:

Amara Thiha, PhD Candidate at Coimbra University

Dallia Abdelmoniem, Freelance Journalist

Dan Thompson, Europe Region Chief of Public Affairs at US Department of Defense

Date: Friday, June 21st, 2013
Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Description: This session explores how the internet, social media, and digital technology have spawned new methods of resistance, or enhanced and innovated “older” forms of resistance. It will also explore the ways in which governments and private companies (oftentimes in collusion with one another) are using digital tech and social media tools to advance their own agenda and to attack, hack, block, and intimidate resistance movements.