A Guide to Civil Resistance

In discussions about people power or nonviolent action, most people will immediately think of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, a few will recall the end of the Marcos regime in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, and some others will remember or have heard of the Prague Spring nearly two decades earlier. Moreover, for most activists and others involved in peace action and movements for social change, there will be little knowledge of the theories of nonviolent action and still less of the huge number of actions taken in so many countries and in such different circumstances across the world. Even recent events across the Middle East are rarely put in a broader historical context. Although the focus of this book is on post-1945 movements, the opening section provides a wide-ranging introduction to the history and theoretical bases of nonviolent action, and reflects the most recent contributions to the literature, citing key reference works.

April Carter has lectured in politics at the universities of Lancaster, Oxford and Queensland, and was a fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. She is currently an honorary research fellow of the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies, Coventry University, and a senior editor on the international editoral board for the International Encyclopedia of Peace. Howard Clark was an English nonviolent activist and independent peace researcher. He was the chairperson of War Resisters' International, having previously been its coordinator, and was a research fellow of the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies, Coventry University, where he was responsible for the Centre’s project on Unarmed Resistance: the Transnational Factor. He is the author of Civil Resistance in Kosovo. Michael Randle has been involved in the antiwar movement in Britain since the 1950s and in 1958 was one of the organizers of the first Aldermaston March against Britain’s nuclear weapons. A former chairperson of the War Resisters’ International, and subsequently coordinator of the Alternative Defence Commission, he has been a visiting research fellow at the department of peace studies at the University of Bradford. Paul Rogers teaches at the department of peace studies at University of Bradford and has written or edited 26 books and over 100 papers, much of which has been translated into many languages. He writes a weekly analysis on international security for www.opendemocracy.net which is reproduced on 40+ websites.