An examination of mass mobilizations to promote land rights of the landless and near-landless by Ekta Parishad in India and the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil identifies a similar strategy of rightful radical resistance that incorporates key elements of rightful resistance but also transcends it. The comparable strategy is due to similarities in context: India and Brazil are semiperipheral countries with relatively high-capacity states and representative democratic political structures, but have inequitable distributions of agricultural land despite constitutional principles and laws that embody equitable land distributions. However, given the substantial variation across India and Brazil in culture, geography, and demography, the specific forms assumed by rightful radical resistance vary. This study contributes to the social movements and civil resistance literatures by explicating the strategic logic of the mass mobilizations, explaining similarities and differences across the two cases, and illustrating the potential of civil resistance for challenging the structural violence of land dispossession and inequality.

This article provides an overview of the practice and study of civil resistance. First, historical roots of modern civil resistance are discussed, including the emergence in the 19th century of mass-based campaigns of non-cooperation to promote nationalist and labor interests, as well as the significance of Mohandas Gandhi and the widespread use of nonviolent resistance in the 20th century. Second, perspectives of scholars of social movements and revolution are compared with those of scholars who focus more specifically on nonviolent resistance. Despite studying much of the same phenomena, separate literatures have developed that are ripe for cross-fertilization and synthesis. In the third section, a literature review is organized around three key concepts for understanding civil resistance: mobilization, resilience, and leverage. Fourth, consequences of nonviolent resistance relative to violent resistance are discussed. Finally, areas for future research are identified.

Civil resistance is a powerful strategy for promoting major social and political change, yet no study has systematically evaluated the effects of simultaneous armed resistance on the success rates of unarmed resistance campaigns. Using the Nonviolent and Violent Conflict Outcomes (NAVCO 1.1) data set, which includes aggregate data on 106 primarily nonviolent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 with maximalist political objectives, we find that contemporaneous armed struggles do not have positive effects on the outcome of nonviolent campaigns. We do find evidence for an indirect negative effect, in that contemporaneous armed struggles are negatively associated with popular participation and are, consequently, correlated with reduced chances of success for otherwise-unarmed campaigns. Two paired comparisons suggest that negative violent flank effects operated strongly in two unsuccessful cases (the 8-8-88 challenge in Burma in 1988 and the South African antiapartheid challenge from 1952 to 1961, with violent flanks having both positive and negative impacts in the challenge to authoritarian rule in the Philippines (1983–1986) and the South African antiapartheid campaign (1983–1994). Our results suggest that the political effects are beneficial only in the short term, with much more unpredictable and varied long-term outcomes. Alternately, violent flanks may have both positive and negative political impacts, which make the overall effect of violent flanks difficult to determine. We conclude that large-scale maximalist nonviolent campaigns often succeed despite intra- or extramovement violent flanks, but seldom because of them.

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