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In recent years, a major focus of research and campaigning on strategic nonviolent action has been on movements to oust authoritarian rulers. However, these "nonviolent revolutions" usually do not transform systems of economic and social domination. To motivate appreciation of what might be involved in a more far‐reaching social transformation, selected anarchist themes offer useful guides. The relevance of four principles of anarchist theory and practice—non‐hierarchy, self‐management, direct action, and prefiguration—is illustrated in the South African struggle against apartheid. Activists should consider how to use nonviolent strategies to move beyond systems of domination based on states and capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activists in both dictatorships and democracies use humor as a method of nonviolent resistance, and its special way of appealing to emotions and imagination through ambiguity frequently sets it apart from other forms of nonviolent action. This study analyzes three examples from twentieth-century Sweden of the political uses of humor according to the ability of each to facilitate dialogue, break power, serve as an utopian enactment, and be a normative regulation. In these cases, humor is found to have a particular ability to break the power of dominant discourses, because their ambiguity makes them ideal as 'guerrilla attacks' in the ongoing discursive guerrilla war the activists are waging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When nonviolent activists design an action that poses a dilemma for opponents-for example whether to allow protesters to achieve their objective or to use force against them with consequent bad publicity-this is called a dilemma action. These sorts of actions have been discussed among activists and in activist writings, but not systematically analyzed. We present a preliminary classification of different aspects of dilemma actions and apply it to three case studies: the 1930 salt march in India, a jail-in used in the Norwegian total resistance movement in the 1980s, and the freedom flotillas to Gaza in 2010 and 2011. In addition to defining what is the core of a dilemma action, we identify five factors that can make the dilemma more difficult for opponents to 'solve.' Dilemma actions derive some of their effectiveness from careful planning and creativity that push opponents in unaccustomed directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Escalation of conflict is frequently deemed undesirable and problematic, as it is often assumed to refer to the escalation of violence. However, there exists a different form of escalation that we call 'nonviolent conflict escalation.' This occurs when previously unrecognized conflicts are intensified using nonviolent means to a point where the conflict can no longer be ignored. Five aspects of nonviolent escalations of methods are examined through case studies, showing how different forms of intensification can work together to escalate the conflict. Nonviolent escalations of unrecognized conflicts can serve as potent tools in struggles against tyranny, injustice, and human rights violations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates what culture means for nonviolent resistance. While literature on nonviolence has had a tendency to look instrumentally at culture, this article suggests an intertwined relationship. Activists are themselves embedded in their own cultures, and there is no 'outside culture.' The authors suggest an innovative model of three strategies for analyzing the cultural aspects of a nonviolent struggle: (1) occasionally borrowing existing powerful symbols and cultural elements, such as flags or religious symbols, which is then applied; (2) partially remodeling'old' culture in the spirit of nonviolence. This strategy is illustrated through the Khudai Khidmatgar of the North-West Frontier Province in the 1930s and shows how the nonviolent struggle there, was 'negotiated' with Islam and a traditional code of honor; and finally, (3) systematically creating a nonviolent movement culture, which is a much more complex process, is illustrated through the movement for landless workers in Brazil, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]