Human rights abuse tends to increase during national crises, such as civil wars and mass nonviolent uprisings. Under what conditions does this abuse abate or persist? The author argues that violent challenges provoke much more coercive state responses, exposing more personnel within the security forces to extreme forms of repression and priming them (both leaders and followers) to reproduce these behaviors after the conflict has terminated. This effect is mitigated or avoided when challengers rely on nonviolent tactics instead of violence, leading to less post-conflict abuse.

While scholars of nonviolent resistance recognize that large-scale campaigns are more likely to be successful campaigns, scholars and policymakers currently have little understanding of why some nonviolent protests grow into mass movements while others do not. In this article, the authors explore campaign size and, in particular, the role of individual and collective motives in facilitating the growth of nonviolent campaigns.

The authors write that this may be the largest wave of nonviolent mass movements in world history. What comes next? Social media has made mass protests easier to organize — but, perhaps paradoxically, harder to resolve.