Martin Luther King Jr. argues that means and ends must be commensurable. If one wants to bring about a more equitable society, one must do so by equitable means. This means-ends principle is reiterated in the writings of Gandhi and King, but it has often been treated as something mysterious. A pragmatic case can be made for it if we pay attention to the dynamics of communication. Gandhi and King argue for an approach to social conflict that combines compassion for the needs of their opponents with a resolute opposition to the injustices these opponents perpetrate. Respect and respectability without challenge and protest will not contribute to the development of a more equitable society. But neither will challenge and protest without respect and respectability. By attending to how nonviolent direct actionists combine these two pressures, I develop an alternative to the dominant perspectives in communication ethics, but one that shares their concerns for morality, effectiveness, and nonviolence.

Many of the unofficial advocates for states-in-waiting were individuals affiliated or identified with the international peace movement. These transnational advocates often found themselves championing independence struggles in states-in-waiting that were situated within newly decolonized postcolonial nation-states. While some within these postcolonial state governments may themselves have relied on these advocates during their own independence struggles, they opposed such advocacy after they won their independence, since it had the potential to undermine their own state sovereignty. The 1963 Friendship March – launched by the World Peace Brigade, a transnational civil society organization set up to find peaceful solutions to global decolonization, exemplified this contradiction. The Friendship March started in New Delhi, India, and intended to cross the Chinese border in the immediate aftermath of the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

In December 1960, the international advocates Rev. Michael Scott and Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan met for a conference at Gandhigram Ashram in Madras State (now Tamil Nadu), India. Although Scott and JP did not agree on certain issues – such as the demands of Naga nationalist claimants within India – they both supported anticolonial nationalism across much of the decolonizing world and were committed proponents of nonviolent political action. At the conference, JP called for the creation of a World Peace Brigade, an international civil society organization that would send peace activists to intervene nonviolently in confrontations between states, empires, and nationalist movements. The Brigade’s first endeavor, the Africa Freedom Action Project, was launched in Dar es Salaam in 1962, which they hoped to make the “anti-Algiers” – a training ground for nonviolent, anti-communist, anticolonial national liberation.

Romantic writing in English developed a rich repertoire of variations on the classical distinction between undertaking and undergoing an action, one that descends to us, for example, in the grammatical distinction between the active and passive voice. Shelley’s central writings often foreground this kind of distinction, as when in Act I of Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus tells Jupiter: “I weigh not what you do but what you suffer.” Yet, in Shelley’s case, suffering is more particularly identified with the experience of pain and sorrow, and nowhere more clearly so than in Prometheus Unbound, where the Titan is repeatedly defined by his suffering, and his suffering is repeatedly cast as his capacity not only to confront the pain and sorrow of the world but also to bear them. Such radical passivity would become crucial to Shelley’s proto-Gandhian doctrine of revolutionary nonviolence, as spelled out in his Philosophical View of Reform, written in the wake of Peterloo just weeks after the completion of Prometheus Unbound. This doctrine, which Gandhi would have encountered in his London days from Henry Salt, would be eventually embraced, mutatis mutandis, by Christian leaders of the American civil rights movement who would have been otherwise unsympathetic to Shelley’s atheism, and in nonviolent movements around the world ever since.

Gupta’s conviction indicates that Indian nationhood had earlier beginnings than has generally been supposed. The “Mutiny-Rebellion” of 1857, long regarded as a key transformative event, being hailed as the “first war of Indian independence” having “national” elements, was situated within a longer genealogy. This underscored the evolutionary process through which Indian nationhood developed. It also highlighted the multivalence of the revolt. It at once symbolized “power,” Indian agency, and collective identity: cutting across caste, class, and communal divisions. By connecting the revolt with the imperial glory of Mughal Delhi, Gupta mediated the many meanings of 1857, and linked it with a long patriotic past that evoked the idea of India despite endless fragmentation. His remarks hold the key to understanding how the many stories of Indian nationhood converged at complex levels.

Pacifist activism flourished in Britain and America during the first half of the twentieth century, and peace was a central preoccupation for writers and intellectuals before and during both world wars. Vera Brittain, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, and Aldous Huxley were all actively engaged in some form of peace writing. This chapter examines this history in the British context, from the impact of conscription during the First World War to the grave challenges to peace of the 1930s. It investigates a variety of texts by conscientious objectors, peace campaigners, feminist pacifists, anti-war poets, public intellectuals, and internationalist reformers. This literary and political history reveals how the notion of peace shifted radically during this period. What began as a moral imperative – inherited from Christian teachings and the liberal legacy of the Enlightenment – was transformed into a secular notion with extensive political potential. As this chapter shows, pacifist thought underpinned arguments towards socio-political reform, and it shaped the language of rights central to political discourse after the Second World War.

The Pashtun Awami National Party (ANP) may have engaged in violence in Karachi, but in , I explain why it refrains from violent acts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. KP is a heavily armed province which has faced the brunt of militant violence over the last decade. Despite this, the ANP has chosen not to engage in violence itself or ally with any violence specialists in the area. I rule out explanations for this divergence that center on levels of electoral competition, ideology, or features exclusive to Karachi. Instead, I suggest that the ANP’s distinct violence strategies are a function of the dissimilar nature of ANP support bases in these two areas and the nature of state coercive capacity which affects the party’s incentives for violence. I use a combination of qualitative evidence from Peshawar, Islamabad, and Karachi along with survey data to showcase key differences between Pashtun voters in Karachi and KP.

There is a multiplicity or pluriverse of modes or families of democracy and citizenship on this planet, from diverse types of participatory democracy to Gaia or Earth democracy. In response to the ecological and democratic crises, the aim of this volume is to disclose and survey five modes of democracy: Indigenous democracies, Local/global participatory democracies, representative democracies, international/global democracies, and Gaia democracies. We study how they are enacted and the ways in which they interact in order to show how they can coordinate and cooperate democratically in response to the ecosocial crises we face. We call this integration of democratic diversity “joining hands” and explicate six ways of joining hands in practice. The Introduction includes overviews of each chapter.

What makes some challengers willing and able to embrace a strategy of civil resistance and others not? This chapter shows how social ties–direct interpersonal connections that link members of a challenger organization to other actors in the society–are central to each of these processes. Two types of relationships, what I term “grassroots ties” and “regime ties,” are especially important. Each has distinct implications for different dynamics of challenger-state contention. I develop a typology of challenger networks based on different combinations of these ties, and make predictions about each type of challenger’s likelihood of initiating a campaign to overthrow the regime using a strategy of civil resistance. An attention to challengers’ social ties holds the potential to explain cases that other theories struggle with, such as variation within regional “waves,” within states, or even within movements over time. It can also improve our understanding of how other theoretical mechanisms work by suggesting why some movements might be more vulnerable to repression or fragmentation than others, or how tactical repertoires can evolve.

Civil resistance has proven itself to be a powerful force in international politics over recent decades. What this book has shown, however, is that the story of how civil resistance works begins long before protesters take to the streets demanding regime change. Challengers have been working for years to build organizations, form coalitions, and experiment with various tactics of resistance. The state has been playing this game as well, trying to pre-empt, co-opt, repress, and shatter organized challenges to its rule. The result is that not all challengers are equally positioned to attempt civil resistance. While traditional theories of contentious politics put great emphasis on the ability of states to shape and constrain the political opportunities available to challengers, the central argument of this book has been that the specific attributes of challengers matter as well. Challengers with social ties that link their core members to multiple social groups as well as to key pillars of regime support will be well positioned to engage in civil resistance while those lacking such ties will not. This concluding chapter provides a final reflection on the argument and evidence as well as implications for research, policy, and activism.

This chapter traces the strategic evolution of the Nepali Congress from its deliberation and rejection of nonviolence through a vote of party leaders in Calcutta in 1950 to its gradual return to an exclusively nonviolent platform by 1990. It illustrates that the movement's lack of social ties with other groups within Nepal limited its ability to generate mass mobilization, causing leaders to sour on the prospects of being able to achieve victory through civil resistance. But over the course of the following four decades, the Nepali Congress party was able to substantially enlarge its social base in ways that made it far better positioned for civil resistance. Interestingly, a challenger with a very different ideology, the Marxist-Leninists, underwent a very similar transition. After a failed effort at inciting revolution through the beheading of “class enemies” in the early 1970s, the Marxist-Leninists, like the Nepali Congress, engaged in a program of organization- and coalition-building that paved the way for the adoption of civil resistance.

From Eastern Europe to South Africa to the Arab Spring, campaigns of civil resistance have proven capable of overthrowing regimes and bringing about revolutionary political change using primarily nonviolent tactics. Recent research has suggested that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to achieve their self-stated goals, to produce democratic outcomes, and to yield an enduring peace. But if nonviolent strategies are so effective, why do so many groups still choose to take up arms? This book aims to explain the crucial early-stage strategic choices made by challengers to state power seeking the political goal of regime-change. Drawing on multiple cases each from Nepal and Syria, as well as global cross-national data, it details the processes through which revolutionary organizations come to attempt or reject civil resistance as a means of capturing state power.The book illustrates how the social ties that link a challenger organization with broader society inform the challenger’s expectations about the viability of nonviolent tactics and consequently its strategic behavior.