e-mail: summeru@ceu.edu
Tel.: +36-1 327-3811
Skype: ceu-sun
This course is designed to provide an in-depth and multi-disciplinary perspective on civilian-based movements and campaigns that defend and obtain basic rights and justice around the world - from Egypt to Burma, from Zimbabwe to West Papua.The course will examine such questions as: What is civil resistance? What determines the success or failure of a civil resistance movement? How can educators, scholars and professionals better understand and analyze what elements are at work when civilians use nonviolent tactics? How and when should external agents – governments, non-state actors – act or not act when civil resistance is gaining momentum? How can the dynamics and history of civil resistance better inform the understanding of political contention, negotiations, transitions, and violent and nonviolent conflicts?
This phenomenon has only recently started gaining greater recognition as a potentially formidable strategic force by policy makers, political observers and scholars. Often this recognition has been spurred by the spectacle of dictatorships and undemocratic rulers succumbing, not to armed insurrections, but to the coercive nonviolent pressure of mass civic movements, as in countries such as the Philippines, Chile, Poland, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine or Egypt. The sweeping political ferment taking place in North Africa and the Middle East since the end of 2010 provides new, dramatic evidence of how civil resistance can drive political change. Furthermore, countries that experience bottom-up, civilian-based resistance are known to have a better track record of successful democratic transitions than the states that initiated their systemic transformation after a protracted civil war, or due to top-down, elite-to-elite negotiations or external military interventions.
Who should join the course?
Graduate students, junior faculty, researchers and professionals from universities and civil society organizations are encouraged to apply.