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Under what circumstances are women more likely to protest? Despite significant cross-national research on contentious politics in general and women's collective mobilization in particular, no study to date has offered a systematic global analysis of mass mobilization among women. Using newly gathered data on women's nonviolent protest for the years from 1991 to 2009, this article offers a cross-national analysis of the socioeconomic and political correlates of women's protest. Drawing insight from the major theoretical approaches on contentious politics, the results from the data analysis indicate that higher levels of gendered economic and political discrimination, strong presence of women's organizations, and higher female population rates in the general population significantly increase the likelihood of women's protest events. The findings also indicate that collective mobilization among women is more likely in wealthier countries. Furthermore, mass mobilization among women appears to be more common in mixed political regimes rather than in consolidated democracies or autocratic polities. This manuscript complements and adds to the contentious politics literature by focusing on the factors that mobilize a specific segment of the society: women. The findings also speak to the gender and politics literature that lacks comprehensive cross-national studies exploring the determinants of women's mobilization.

Recent studies indicate that strategic nonviolent campaigns have been more successful over time in achieving their political objectives than violent insurgencies. But additional research has been limited by a lack of time-series data on nonviolent and violent campaigns, as well as a lack of more nuanced and detailed data on the attributes of the campaigns. In this article, we introduce the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) 2.0 dataset, which compiles annual data on 250 nonviolent and violent mass movements for regime change, anti-occupation, and secession from 1945 to 2006. NAVCO 2.0 also includes features of each campaign, such as participation size and diversity, the behavior of regime elites, repression and its effects on the campaign, support (or lack thereof) from external actors, and progress toward the campaign outcomes. After describing the data generation process and the dataset itself, we demonstrate why studying nonviolent resistance may yield novel insights for conflict scholars by replicating an influential study of civil war onset. This preliminary study reveals strikingly divergent findings regarding the systematic drivers of nonviolent campaign onset. Nonviolent campaign onset may be driven by separate — and in some cases, opposing — processes relative to violent campaigns. This finding underscores the value-added of the dataset, as well as the importance of evaluating methods of conflict within a unified research design.

The murder of George Floyd ignited one of the largest mass mobilizations in US history, including both nonviolent and violent BlackLivesMatter (BLM) protests in the summer of 2020. Many have since asked: Did the violence within the largely nonviolent movement help or hurt its goals? To answer this question, we used data [R. Kishi, et al., (Report, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, 2021)] about the location of all BLM protests during the summer of 2020 to identify US counties that featured no protests, only nonviolent protests, or both nonviolent and violent protests.We then combined these data with survey data (n = 494; study 1), data from the Congressional Cooperative Election Study (n = 43,924; study 2A), and data from Project Implicit (n = 180,480; study 2B), in order to examine how exposure to (i.e., living in a county with) different types of protest affected both support for the key policy goals of the movement and prejudice toward Black Americans. We found that the 2020 BLM protests were not associated with reduced prejudice among either liberals or conservatives. However, when containing a mix of nonviolence and violence, these protests predicted greater support for BLM’s key policy goals among conservatives living in relatively liberal areas. As such, this research suggests that violent, disruptive actions within a broader nonviolent movement may affect those likely to be resistant to the movement.We connect these findings to the notion of disruptive action, which explains why these effects do not materialize in reducing prejudice, but in generating support for important policy goals of the movement.

The events of the Arab Spring have suggested the necessity of rethinking the logic of authoritarian persistence in the Arab world. However, the internal variation in regime collapse and survival observed in the region confirms earlier analyses that the comportment of the coercive apparatus, especially its varying will to repress, is pivotal to determining the durability of the authoritarian regimes. At the same time, the trajectory of the Arab Spring highlights an empirical novelty for the Arab world, namely, the manifestation ofhuge, cross-class, popular protest in the name of political change, as well as a new factor that abetted the materialization of this phenomenon-the spread of social media. The latter will no doubt be a game changer for the longevity of authoritarian regimes worldwide from now on.

In protest, activists sometimes turn to disruptive and violent tactics to meet their goals. Doing so, however, can also undermine support for their claims. We argue that how protestors weigh this trade-off depends on their targets and the extent to which their claims appeal to diverse constituencies, which then factors greatly into their choice of protest tactics. We complement past work that suggests that forces of professionalization and counterpressure alter activists' tendency to use violent and disruptive tactics. With data on over 23,000 protest events in the United States between 1960 and 1995, we find that protest events characterized by broadly resonating claims are more likely to employ tactics that are disruptive but nonviolent. By contrast, events espousing narrower claims are more likely to employ disruptive tactics that are also violent. Moreover, when governmental entities are targeted, protests are less likely to witness the use of both violent and nonviolent disruptive tactics. We discuss the implications of our results for social movement theory and the dynamics of collective violence.

A growing research field examines the conditions under which major nonviolent resistance campaigns—that is, popular nonviolent uprisings for regime or territorial change—are successful. Why these campaigns emerge in the first place is less well understood. We argue that extensive social networks that are economically interdependent with the state make strategic nonviolence more feasible. These networks are larger and more powerful in states whose economies rely upon organized labor. Global quantitative analysis of the onset of violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1960 to 2006 (NAVCO), and major protest events in Africa from 1990 to 2009 (SCAD) shows that the likelihood of nonviolent conflict onset increases with the proportion of manufacturing to gross domestic product. This study points to a link between modernization and social conflict, a link that has been often hypothesized, but, hitherto, unsupported by empirical studies.

This article studies the effects of human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) on domestic antigovernment protest. Unlike mainstream scholarship, the authors argue that human rights INGOs are not simply the magic bullet in orchestrating nonviolent protests; different types of human rights INGO activity have varying effects on protest. Moreover, some human rights INGO activities may lead to higher levels of violent protest. The empirical tests use new data on the activities of over 400 human rights INGOs and domestic nonviolent and violent protest globally from 1991 to 2004. The authors find that increases in human rights INGO activities reflecting a greater commitment to the domestic population are associated with higher levels of both violent and nonviolent protest.

The use of violent coercion to repress unarmed protests, such as that seen during the Arab Spring, sometimes backfires on the government – an outcome called 'political jiu-jitsu'. Examining unique global data covering extreme violence used by governments against unarmed protests from 1989 to 2011 (drawn from UCDP) and the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data, this study aims to explain the conditions under which this outcome occurs. This study contributes to both the nonviolent action and one-sided violence literatures by further disaggregating this effect into both domestic and international outcomes, a distinction that has not previously been made in empirical studies. We find evidence that a pre-existing campaign infrastructure increases the likelihood of increased domestic mobilization and security defections after violent repression, but is unrelated to international backlash. Within ongoing NAVCO campaigns we find that parallel media institutions increase the likelihood of increased domestic mobilization and international repercussions after repression, and that this effect holds true for both traditional media and 'new' (i.e. internet-based) media. One of the novel contributions of this study is that we identify an important selection effect in the NAVCO data and the critical role of organizational infrastructure, especially communications infrastructure, in generating preference changes that create the conditions where killing unarmed civilians becomes costly for repressive governments. We conclude with a discussion of the potential implications of this study and avenues for future research.

Whereas optimists see the so-called Arab Spring as similar to the revolutions of 1989, and likely to bring about democratic rule, skeptics fear that protest bringing down dictators may simply give way to new dictatorships, as in the Iranian revolution. Existing research on transitions has largely neglected the role of protest and direct action in destabilizing autocracies and promoting democracy. We argue that protest and direct action can promote transitions in autocracies, and that the mode of direct action, that is, whether violent or nonviolent, has a major impact on the prospects for autocratic survival and democracy. We present empirical results supporting our claim that nonviolent protests substantially increase the likelihood of transitions to democracy, especially under favorable international environments, while violent direct action is less effective in undermining autocracies overall, and makes transitions to new autocracies relatively more likely.

The theoretical literature on government repression has mostly taken a choice theoretic perspective, wherein either the protest group optimally chooses a protest tactic in response to government behavior or the government optimally chooses a repression strategy. This approach is insufficient for capturing the strategic nature of protest and repression. The theoretical shortcomings of this approach are reflected in contradictory empirical findings on the effects of repression on dissent. The article develops an extensive strategic game between the government and an opposition group that allows one to identify the conditions for successful deterrence or protest. Introducing incomplete information and a third-party threat additionally produces equilibria with repression and escalating violence. The model produces novel testable hypotheses that shed new light on the effect of repression on dissent, the likelihood of violence, and the possibility of a coup. Implications for the domestic democratic peace and \"murder in the middle\" hypothesis are drawn.