Non-violent revolutions do not always remain non-violent, as the examples of uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Syria in the Arab Spring have shown. However, peaceful movements for regime change often do succeed. They have toppled illegitimate rulers, as with the post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, and ended apartheid in South Africa, for example, or, before that, the Jim Crow system in the US South. Non-violent movements broke British rule in India and Malawi, and brought down authoritarian regimes in Chile, the Philippines and Portugal.
On the surface, most of these cases seem so different from present-day Russia as to be irrelevant to the success or failure of the current protests against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s continued rule and the protesters’ call for free, fair and competitive elections. However, which differences are important?
The immediate outcomes of non-violent movements for political change are not decided by macro-factors such as levels of education, unemployment or the presence of a modern middle class. After all, civil resistance has succeeded in poor, backward countries, like India, and failed in rich, educated ones, like the Gulf states.
Nor do short-term windows of opportunity play a decisive role: No serious economic crisis was needed for Chileans to oust former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, while former Panamanian president Manuel Noriega survived a massive non-violent protest movement, despite crippling economic problems and divisions within the ruling elite.
Recent research by the sociologists Erica Chenoweth, Maria Stephan and Sharon Erickson Nepstad shows that one factor more than any other determines whether non-violent struggles succeed: protesters’ decision to adopt non-violence itself. Indeed, Chenoweth and Stephan have shown that peaceful protests are more than twice as likely as violent confrontation to bring about complete or partial regime change.
However, the outcome of civil resistance also depends on the precise methods used. Challenging the regime’s legitimacy and withholding skills and material resources from it are important, as is creating free spaces for dissent and maintaining the movement’s unity and clarity of purpose.
Most importantly, as Nepstad has shown, a protest movement aimed at regime change needs to win over critical parts of the police and armed forces.
Conversely, a government that secures the unconditional loyalty of its troops will be able to crush even the most sustained popular protests. Yet it can do so only at the cost of much bloodshed and a half-hearted or ineffectual crackdown makes the protesters’ triumph much more likely.
Given this, what are the prospects for Russia’s current protest movement? So far, it has gotten many things right. It has focused on a single demand: fair elections. It has united liberals, communists, nationalists and otherwise apolitical citizens in a broad coalition, despite these groups’ mutual disdain and a colossal potential for rifts.
Like the 2000 Serbian uprising against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, the Russian movement has produced an astonishing upsurge in grassroots creativity and political wit. A good example is the recent “nano-protest” in the Siberian city of Barnaul, where police officers were forced to write up a report on a group of Lego figures brandishing slogans. These toy protests have now spread to other cities.
To circumvent biased reporting on state TV and bridge the huge distances between Russian cities, the protesters have used decentralized means of communication, such as social networks. High-speed Internet connections have penetrated remote corners of Russia in recent years and blogging services such as LiveJournal have been prominent for a decade. Thus, the Internet plays a more important role than it did in Iran’s abortive Green Revolution or during the Arab Spring.
Nonetheless, Russia’s size could become a liability for the protesters if things come to a head and, say, Putin refuses to accept a defeat in the March election. While there have been regular protests in cities from Stravropol in the south to Khabarovsk in the Far East, only Moscow and Saint Petersburg have seen true mass demonstrations. As in Serbia in 2000 or Ukraine in 2004, where demonstrations played out mainly in the capital cities, Russia’s metropolises have long been hotbeds of dissent. Unlike Serbia and Ukraine, however, provincial protesters would be unable to come to the rescue in case of a showdown.
In the Philippines in 1986, former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos’ tanks were stopped by nuns and small children. In the fall of 1989, East German soldiers joined their fellow citizens in the protests that brought down the Berlin Wall. However, during the same year in China, protesters in Beijing were crushed by troops from Inner Mongolia who didn’t understand Mandarin and had no sympathy for big-city dwellers.
While army units or riot squads (OMON) stationed in Moscow are too disgruntled by the recent police and military reforms to participate in a bloody clampdown, special-operations forces from the provinces, staffed with veterans of the Chechen war, might cherish the excitement of sticking it to the Moscow fat cats. Likewise, army officers from poorer regions are more grateful for the salary hike that Putin’s United Russia party announced, with much fanfare, shortly before the recent Duma election.
However, while some parts of the security apparatus might support an initial crackdown, violent repression would be difficult to sustain. That means that Putin would be well advised to heed the protesters’ demands and call new and fair parliamentary elections. If he opts for violent confrontation, the short-term outcome will be decided by the loyalty of the armed forces. His long-term fate, however, would be much grimmer.
Mischa Gabowitsch is a research fellow at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
US President Donald Trump has gotten off to a head-spinning start in his foreign policy. He has pressured Denmark to cede Greenland to the United States, threatened to take over the Panama Canal, urged Canada to become the 51st US state, unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America” and announced plans for the United States to annex and administer Gaza. He has imposed and then suspended 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico for their roles in the flow of fentanyl into the United States, while at the same time increasing tariffs on China by 10
With the manipulations of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), it is no surprise that this year’s budget plan would make government operations difficult. The KMT and the TPP passing malicious legislation in the past year has caused public ire to accumulate, with the pressure about to erupt like a volcano. Civic groups have successively backed recall petition drives and public consensus has reached a fever-pitch, with no let up during the long Lunar New Year holiday. The ire has even breached the mindsets of former staunch KMT and TPP supporters. Most Taiwanese have vowed to use
As an American living in Taiwan, I have to confess how impressed I have been over the years by the Chinese Communist Party’s wholehearted embrace of high-speed rail and electric vehicles, and this at a time when my own democratic country has chosen a leader openly committed to doing everything in his power to put obstacles in the way of sustainable energy across the board — and democracy to boot. It really does make me wonder: “Are those of us right who hold that democracy is the right way to go?” Has Taiwan made the wrong choice? Many in China obviously
About 6.1 million couples tied the knot last year, down from 7.28 million in 2023 — a drop of more than 20 percent, data from the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs showed. That is more serious than the precipitous drop of 12.2 percent in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the saying goes, a single leaf reveals an entire autumn. The decline in marriages reveals problems in China’s economic development, painting a dismal picture of the nation’s future. A giant question mark hangs over economic data that Beijing releases due to a lack of clarity, freedom of the press