Articles

In the past decade, myriad studies have explored the effects of nonviolent resistance (NR) on outcomes including revolutionary success (short-term and long-term) and democratization, and how nonviolent mobilization can play a similar role to violence in affecting social change in some settings. This special issue seeks to advance scholars' and policymakers' understanding of the role of nonviolence by tackling some key assumptions in existing work that are complicated by historical and contemporary realities of deepening polarization worldwide. This issue addresses four key areas within conflict and peace research that limit scholars' and policymakers' ability to make sense of NR: (a) the fragmented nature of civil resistance campaigns in terms of supporters and demands; (b) the increasing prevalence of authoritarian or anti-egalitarian nonviolent campaigns; and (c) the complicated nature of revolutionary success. Cutting across all three of these substantive areas is another key area, which is: (d) the United States as an increasingly salient site of conflict and contention.

Following the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, Robert Stavins said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette that the talks were both frustrating and hopeful: frustrating because they did little to accelerate the slow pace of action to reduce carbon emissions, and hopeful because of a reawakened dialogue between the world’s biggest emitters—the U.S. and China—and movement to address climate-related damage to the world’s most vulnerable nations.

Recent quantitative scholarship uses warhead counts to examine whether nuclear superiority offers political or military benefits beyond having a secure second-strike capability. These analyses overlook other elements of a state’s nuclear capability such as state perceptions and beliefs.

An analysis of new data on postwar election results and remilitarization finds that losing elections does not drive belligerents to remilitarize. Instead, remilitarization is often determined by citizens’ ability to accurately understand and vote according to the postwar military balance of power.

For an assessment of what was done, and left undone, at the recent United Nations’ Conference of the Parties on climate change, the Gazette spoke with Rob Stavins, the Harvard Kennedy School’s A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development and head of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, who attended his first COP in 2007 in Bali. 

This article explores the symbiotic relationship between right-wing evangelicals and the apartheid state in undercutting racial equality in South Africa.

White Southerners opposed to Reconstruction used violence to undermine Black political power and force uncommitted white Southerners to their side. Although structural factors made it harder for the U.S. government to suppress this violence, a series of policy failures prompted Reconstruction’s failure and generations of injustice.

There is an urgent need to incorporate the latest science on carbon emissions from permafrost thaw and northern wildfires into international consideration of how much more aggressively societal emissions must be reduced to address the global climate crisis.

South Korea’s conventional counterforce and countervalue strategy is a manifestation of its uncertainties over the reliability of the U.S. alliance. This strategy has significant implications for strategic stability and the potential for denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.    

Why did Russia’s relations with the West shift from cooperation a few decades ago to a new era of confrontation today? Tracing the causal influence of domestic determinants—individuals (President Vladimir Putin), ideas (Putinism), and institutions (autocracy)—reveals Putin’s significant influence in the making of Russian foreign policy.