Recovering Nonviolent History: Civil Resistance in Liberation Struggles

Greatly expand[s] our knowledge of not only the extent of nonviolent action, but how its dynamic operates and contributes to a society’s ethos.”
—Ralph Summy, Journal of Peace Education

“Due to this groundbreaking text, we now have greater access to the breadth [and] depth … of the people’s power.”
—Karen D. Crozier, International Journal on World Peace

“This very important book establishes beyond doubt the necessity of recording the history of nonviolent struggles throughout the world…. The authors’ accounts of actual struggles from nearly every continent demonstrate that we have available experience with powerful ways to wage conflicts and face problems without violence.”
—Gene Sharp, Albert Einstein Institution

“Recovering Nonviolent History brings to the fore the role of the masses in mobilizing for their emancipation from oppression in all its guises, using peaceful, nonviolent tactics…. It makes a substantive contribution to the existing body of knowledge on resistance struggles the world over.”
—Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Chair, African Union Commission

“No single volume has ever explored the dynamics of nonviolent contention in as broad a range of contexts as Recovering Nonviolent History. It is an altogether indispensable volume.”
—Doug McAdam, Stanford University

“Most people look to historical accounts to understand how their own nations emerged and fought for their freedom. Such explanations, whether found in books or imparted through public ceremonies and national memories, often tell of violent battles and insurrections, victories and defeats in wars, and fallen heroes in armed struggles. These narratives support the common belief that violence is the indispensable weapon to win freedom from foreign subjugation, but they ignore the power and historical role that nonviolent civilian-led resistance has played in many national quests for liberation.

This book brings to light the existence and impact of nonviolent organizing and defiance where it has not commonly been noticed. It argues that a number of historical struggles for national self-determination might not necessarily, or even primarily, have been won through violence. Instead, these struggles were decisively waged through diverse methods of nonviolent resistance led by ordinary people.1 Furthermore, during the unfolding process of civil resistance, it was often the force of population-driven, bottom-up, nonviolent mobilization that shaped nations’ collective identities (i.e., nationhood) and formed nascent national institutions and authorities (i.e., statehood). These processes were critical for an independent nation-state—more so than structural changes or violent revolutions that dominate the history of revolutionary struggles and nation making.

Recovering Civil Resistance

This book reveals little-known, but important, histories of civil resistance in national struggles for independence and against foreign domination throughout the world in the past 200 years. Often, these histories have been misinterpreted or erased altogether from collective memory, buried beneath nationally eulogized violence, commemorative rituals of glorified death, martyred heroes, and romanticized violent insurrections. In recovering hidden stories of civil resistance that involve diverse types of direct defiance and more subtle forms of everyday, relentless endurance and refusal to submit, this book shows how the actions of ordinary people have undermined the authority and control of foreign hegemons—colonizers and occupiers—and their domestic surrogates. Despite extreme oppression, the repertoire of nonviolent action has often helped societies survive and strengthen their social and cultural fabric, build economic and political institutions, shape national identities, and pave the way to independence. The narrative of the book contains a heuristic inquiry into forgotten or ignored accounts of civil resistance, showing how knowledge about historical events and processes is generated, distorted, and even ideologized in favor of violence-driven, structure-based, or powerholder-centric interpretations.”