Nonviolent revolution

A nonviolent revolution is a revolution conducted primarily by unarmed civilians using tactics of civil resistance, including various forms of nonviolent protest, to bring about the departure of governments seen as entrenched and authoritarian without the use or threat of violence. While many campaigns of civil resistance are intended for much more limited goals than revolution, generally a nonviolent revolution is characterized by simultaneous advocacy of democracy, human rights, and national independence in the country concerned. An effective campaign of civil resistance, and even the achievement of a nonviolent revolution, may be possible in a particular case despite the government in power taking brutal measures against protesters. The commonly held belief that most revolutions that have happened in dictatorial regimes were bloody or violent uprisings is not borne out by historical analysis. Nonviolent Revolutions came to the international forefront in the 20th century by the independence movement of India under the leadership of Gandhi with civil disobedience being the tool of nonviolent resistance. Later it become more successful and more common in the 1980s as Cold War political alliances which supported status quo governance waned. In the 1970s and 1980s, intellectuals in the Soviet Union and other Communist states, and in some other countries, began to focus on civil resistance as the most promising means of opposing entrenched authoritarian regimes. The use of various forms of unofficial exchange of information, including by samizdat, expanded. Two major revolutions during the 1980s strongly influenced political movements that followed. The first was the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines, from which the term 'people power' came to be widely used, especially in Hispanic and Asian nations. Three years later, the Revolutions of 1989 that ousted communist regimes in the Eastern Bloc reinforced the concept (with the notable exception of the notoriously bloody Romanian Revolution), beginning with the victory of Solidarity in that year's Polish legislative elections.

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Related concepts (12)

Nonviolent resistance

Nonviolent resistance, or nonviolent action, sometimes called civil resistance, is the practice of achieving goals such as social change through symbolic protests, civil disobedience, economic or political noncooperation, satyagraha, constructive program, or other methods, while refraining from violence and the threat of violence. This type of action highlights the desires of an individual or group that feels that something needs to change to improve the current condition of the resisting person or group.

Otpor

Otpor (Отпор!, Resistance!, stylized as Otpor!) was a political organization in Serbia (then part of FR Yugoslavia) from 1998 until 2004. In its initial period from 1998 to 2000, Otpor began as a civic protest group, eventually turning into a movement, which adopted the Narodni pokret (the People's Movement) title, against the policies of the Serbian authorities under the influence of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević. Following Milošević's overthrow in October 2000, Otpor became a political watchdog organization monitoring the activities of the post-Milošević period of the DOS coalition.

Revolutions of 1989

The Revolutions of 1989, also known as the Fall of Communism, was a revolutionary wave of liberal democracy movements that resulted in the collapse of most Marxist–Leninist governments in the Eastern Bloc and other parts of the world. Sometimes this revolutionary wave is also called the Fall of Nations or the Autumn of Nations, a play on the term Spring of Nations that is sometimes used to describe the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe.