Nonviolent Struggle

From Gandhi's movement to win Indian independence to the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, an expanding number of citizens have used nonviolent action to win political goals. While such events have captured the public imagination, they have also generated a new surge of scholarly interest in the field of nonviolence and civil resistance studies. Although researchers have produced new empirical data, theories, and insights into the phenomenon of nonviolent struggle, thefield is still quite unfamiliar to many students and scholars. In Nonviolent Struggle: Theories, Strategies, and Dynamics, sociologist Sharon Nepstad provides a succinct introduction to the field of civil resistance studies, detailing its genesis, key concepts and debates, and a summary of empirical findings. Nepstad depicts the strategies and dynamics at play in nonviolent struggles, and analyzes the factors that shape the trajectory and outcome of civil resistance movements. The book draws on a vast array of historical examples, including theU.S. civil rights movement, the Indonesian uprising against President Suharto, the French Huguenot resistance during World War II, and Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers. Nepstad describes both principled and pragmatic nonviolent traditions and explains various categories of nonviolent action, concluding withan assessment of areas for future research. A comprehensive treatment of the philosophy and strategy of nonviolent resistance, Nonviolent Struggle is essential reading for students, scholars, and anyone with a general interest in peace studies and social change.

It is not an easy task to capture a moving target, but Nepstad has successfully done so, having effectively woven the different threads of this emerging field together. Nonviolent Struggle provides a comprehensive overview of this still under-researched phenomenon and in that sense is clearly one of the foundational academic works... Nonviolent Struggle is a must-read for scholars, students, practitioners and anyone with a general interest in conflict transformation, peace studies, social change and social movements.

Sharon Erickson Nepstad is Professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of numerous articles and three books, including: Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century (2011, Oxford University Press); Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement (2008, Cambridge University Press); and Convictions of the Soul: Religion, Culture, and Agency in the Central AmericanSolidarity Movement (2004, Oxford University Press).