Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present

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Immediate success in civil resistance projects that promise democratisation and social justice, to name a few, cannot guarantee a long-term change, while ostensible failures may strengthen future struggles. With these propositions in mind, the book revisits cases that are well-known in the literature on civil resistance and non violent activism, such as the civil resistance led by Gandhi in India during — 47, the US Civil Rights movement, the revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe in the s, the civilian-based emancipation from racial discrimination and colonisation in South Africa, and the fruitful and failed democratisation of the movements in the Philippines and China.

In the cases of the Philippines, Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, the emasculated and disunited opposition parties were key ingredients for the birth of mass movements. There is also a bitter truth acknowledged at least among non violence scholars and activists demonstrated in several chapters — that is, the interplay between non violent and violent action in resistance campaigns. The South African liberation movement epitomises the co-existence of non violent and violent approaches to the struggle.

Similarly, the fight for self-determination in Northern Ireland and Kosovo witnessed a shift from the dependence on non violent methods to the use of armed tactics. While understanding its complexity, and thereby giving a realistic account of civil resist- ance, the book, more hopefully, recognises the role of ordinary people in social change. A simple fact is recognised: The domestic and regional networks of people movements did not weaken the Soviet empire.

Civil Resistance and Power Politics: Domestic and International Dimensions

In any event, chapters on non violent revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe show that foreign aid can be fruitless without a growing, and an increasingly transnationalised, civil society, and the existence of an effective non violent strategy. In summary, while the book is successful in illustrating the forces shaping the processes and consequences of civil resistance, it would have been enhanced by presenting and analysing cases of civil resistance campaigns arising from more diverse conflict contexts.

The book is dominated by histories of ethnically homogeneous civilians resisting undemocratic regimes, and their apparent success in reaching at least the immediate goal of removing the regime. Few cases of civil resistance emerging from ethnic conflicts — for example, those in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Kosovo — are covered.

Yet in these cases, the tragedy of mass violence was the result. Put differently, while the book is clear about how non violent actions were carried out for the democratisation project, it fails to spell out how non violence can respond to and mitigate the impacts of ethnic conflicts. While, in ethnic conflicts, the use of violence can be justified by the populace, non violent alternatives are unquestionably needed; the knowledge of civil resistance — reflected in this book — has not adequately explored non violent options for these conflicts.

Overall, Civil Resistance and Power Politics provides, through thoroughly researched cases, invaluable insight into the social phenomenon of civil resistance. The negative consequences of modern warfare are high, whether in terms of direct casualties or indirect ones, such as conflict- related famine, spread of diseases and collapse of health systems, environmental degradation Downloaded By: These human costs, as well as their broader implications for international stability, mean that the imperative to improve our peacemaking capacities is compelling.

A World History is a valuable and unique resource, exploring the long history of peace- making. It provides readers with an understanding of the trials, errors and successes of peace and peacemaking in the past, from which they can gain insight and practical knowledge to guide peacemaking in the future. This broadens his focus beyond the cessation of violent conflict and towards the development of positive peace.

In challenging the notion of peace as the absence of war, Adolf also challenges the assumption that writing history is the exclusive privilege of the militarily mightiest.

He argues instead that without the peacemakers, there would not only be no history to write, but likely no world in which to write it. First, that sensitivity to cultural contingen- cies and diversities is integral to understanding the history of peace, and the attention given to the complexities of the cultural contexts in which peace has been made over history reflects this concern. However, while the book offers a strong and detailed account of peace in Europe, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and, to a lesser extent, the Americas, the history of peace and peacemaking in African contexts is noticeably absent.

This is particularly problematic given the current high prevalence of violent conflict in that continent, and therefore this book has limited applicability to peacemakers working there. Second, Adolf identifies three distinct arenas of peace, which have a dynamic and mutually reinforcing relationship: This classification guides his analysis, and informs the pyramid of peace presented in the conclusion in order to summarise and give a pragmatic character to the salient peace principles and practices explored in preceding chapters.

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On the base level of the pyramid lies corporeal peace, achieved through education, healthcare, nutrition, shelter and sanitation. It is followed by sanctuarial peace, which involves the elimination of structural violence, inter-personal violence and harm against nature, and can be built upon to achieve socio-economic peace, which entails the reduction of inequal- ities in wealth, the elimination of discrimination, and full and free employment. In terms of structure, Peace: A World History follows the history of peace from primordial times.

This chapter also outlines the move to political secularism as a means of achieving peace, and the development of anti-war and non-violence theory by Renaissance and Reformation scholars.

Adolf argues that individuals and groups have played key roles in making and maintaining peace despite nation-states, and his account of those actors is picked up in later chapters. While the analysis of globalisation presented is not groundbreaking, there is a tangible value in the explicit outlining of how changing contexts impact upon the way that peace and con- flict play out, thereby improving our capacity to tailor our responses to them. A World History often fails to analyse the implications of various actions or struc- tures for peace.

For instance, while the discussion of the UN and its limitations to making peace is detailed, it offers no insightful analysis on what those limitations actually mean, how they interact with other international processes and structures, or how they could be addressed p. However, detailed empirical studies show that foreign policies in post-colonial states are both produced in domestic politics and are themselves discursively productive of regime consolida- Downloaded By: Rather than simply being the product of a national sovereign entity, foreign policy itself produces that entity as sovereign and its regime as hegemonic.

Furthermore, foreign policy is one force which generates this intertwining of regime and state security which itself challenges the notion of a sovereign state autonomous from society. Yet, despite this appar- ent relegation of the sovereign state to the realm of a discursive effect of political power, empiri- cal studies also show that this discursive effect, the sovereign state, is remarkably enduring.

The author is quite explicit that his focus is neither an assessment of the success of Turkmen foreign policy nor its reception domestically, but a consideration of the sources and objectives of foreign policy. Nevertheless it is not clear that the author has spent any time in Turkmenistan and this is a weakness of the book. However, the text is clear and very well-organised, placing Turkmen foreign policy in the context of Turkmen nation-building — the consolidation of its authoritarian regime under the idiosyncratic Sapuramat Niyazov from to and his successor, the blander Gurban- guly Berdymuhammedov since Three chapters on respectively foreign economic policy, relations with Russia and Western pressure with regard to human rights highlight the key vectors of Turkmen foreign policy since independence.

Moreover, the book is remarkably up-to-date, with a brief chapter on the Berdymuhammedov era and a conclusion which assesses foreign policy continuity and change following the death of Niyazov. Through- out one key objective of foreign policy remained: As would be expected, many of the per- sonnel and practices of foreign affairs remain from the Soviet era.

Furthermore, despite the assertion of neutrality, the Soviet metropole of Moscow remained the key external sponsor of the Turkmen regime, and indeed became more significant from the late s pp. This rhetoric is very much the product of a late-Soviet era where offi- cial pronouncements were cynically and formulaically reproduced. The astonishingly rapid and painless reformation of the Turkmen regime, and Downloaded By: This puzzle is raised by the book but unfortunately lies beyond its scope.

Second, Anceschi raises questions of comparison with the foreign policies of other states in the region. Foreign policies in Central Asian states are primarily about the expression of independence and sovereignty in order to legitimise the incumbent regime within its extant territorial boundaries.

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Thus, in considering the performative dimension of foreign policy for nation-building discourse the book reveals points of comparison within and beyond the region that would be invisible to a behaviouralist approach. However, these com- parisons are never fully explored in the text. Here his use of the concept of sul- tanism is both familiar, being a path trodden by other scholars of Turkmenistan, and yet ulti- mately unconvincing.

As Anceschi notes p. Yet ideologically-saturated discourse, formed from the crude intellectual resources of a late-Soviet scientific objectivism and materialism, charac- terises post-Soviet political communication.

Equally, these highly personalised regimes do not necessarily collapse when their sultan perishes — as the Turkmenistan case seems to show. Battles for power largely stay behind closed doors and the state ultimately provides the frame- work within which power is contested. The formalities of foreign policy are themselves consti- tutive of that framework: John Heathershaw University of Exeter E-mail: This very topical volume is highly relevant to Europe and, as such, represents a welcome addition to the emerging literature on piracy and its impact on inter- national relations.

It is also an informative and practical contribution to the already extensive literature on Somalia and its violent past. The book comprises six chapters, each dealing with an aspect of the complex web of issues and actors that characterise the crisis in Somalia.

The first chapter provides an overview of the broad international security and strategic Downloaded By: The limitations of this chapter are conceptual. The author takes a rather uncritical approach to the evolution of conceptions of security and the con- sequences of this evolution by arguing that new conceptions such as human security and the responsibility to protect automatically legitimate humanitarian interventions military or other- wise. Inevitably this results in an overly optimistic and simplified portrayal of the state of inter- national relations and the use of force today.

Poland, ; 9. Mass Protests in the Iranian Revolution, ; Political Mass Mobilization against Authoritarian Rule: Pinochet's Chile, ; The Demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and Beyond: Echoes of Gandhi ; Civil Resistance and Civil Society: Lessons from the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic in ; The Limits of Prudence: Civil Resistance in Kosovo, ; Civil Society versus Slobodan Milosevic: Serbia, ; Georgia's 'Rose Revolution' of A Forceful Peace ; Ukraine's 'Orange Revolution' of The Paradoxes of Negotiation ; The Moment of the Monks: Burma, ; A Century of Civil Resistance: Some Lessons and Questions show more.

Review quote a book full of thought-provoking stories and arresting statistics And this may prompt a rethink as to the very nature of power itself. Seldom has a collective work displayed such coordinated research; seldom has the selection of authors been so successful The great value of Civil Resistance and Power Politics is to provide relatively succinct accounts of these diverse events in such a way as to underline both their differences and their similarities.

His main academic interests are in the fields of international security, international organizations, and international law including the laws of war. He has also worked extensively on the role of civil resistance against dictatorial regimes and foreign rule, and on the history of thought about international relations. Professor Timothy Garton Ash is the author of eight books of political writing or 'history of the present' which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last quarter-century.

His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and he writes a weekly column in the Guardian which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Throughout the nineteen eighties, he reported and analysed the emancipation of Central Europe from communism in contributions to the New York Review of Books, the Independent, the Times, and the Spectator. Book ratings by Goodreads.

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