 Welcome to the US Institute of Peace. We are really delighted to have you all here this morning for what I know is going to be a very convivial conversation about the nexus of civil resistance and democratization. We are also thrilled to be sponsoring the official launch of a brilliant new monograph by Jonathan Pinckney, called When Civil Resistance Succeeds, building democracy after popular uprisings. My name is Maria Steffen. I direct the program on nonviolent action here at the Institute. And thank you. That's very kind. $5 after the show. I don't know about you all, but authoritarianism and activism have certainly been on my mind lately. So I can't think of a more timely topic to launch a conversation here today. On the one hand, we are living in the most contentious period in human history. There have been more protests and nonviolent campaigns in the first half of this decade compared to the entire decade of the 1990s. So huge amounts of protests happening around the world. At the other hand, as you all know, we are seeing a resurgence of authoritarianism around the world and backsliding in places where we would not have thought to see backsliding in democracies like Poland, Hungary, Venezuela, Turkey. So the rise of despotic governance I think is one of the really key challenges of our time, and essentially to the work that we do here at the Institute on peacebuilding. It is no surprise that when you look at the top list of most fragile states on the fragile state index, those top countries also happen to be the most closed authoritarian countries according to Freedom House scores. So moving away from authoritarianism is really critical to advancing international peace and security. But how that happens and what happens during the critical transition moment is really, really important. And we're going to hear what the research has to say about that today. I am especially pleased to be co-sponsoring today's event with the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which has been a close partner of the institutes for many years. In some respects, today's gathering is a bit of a family reunion. Hardy Merriman, Machi Barkowski, and I used to be colleagues together at ICNC, and we've collaborated on a number of things, including co-hosting, co-sponsoring the Alliance for Peacebuilding's working group on nonviolent action and peacebuilding. And Peter Ackerman, who was the founder of ICNC, also happens to be the co-chair of our International Advisory Committee here at the Institute, and incidentally was my dissertation advisor. So I am really pleased to introduce my brother in nonviolent arms and comrade, Hardy Merriman, to the stage to introduce the panel. Thank you very much. Thank you, Maria. That was excellent. Thank you. And thank you to your colleagues at USIP for hosting this event. We're delighted to be partnering with you on it. Good morning, everyone. My name's Hardy Merriman. I am president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, our acronym is ICNC. And a little bit about us. Since 2002, we focused on civil resistance movements around the world, trying to understand why and how civil resistance movements work, and particularly how they can be made more effective. We take a social science approach to this question, looking at why some movements succeed, why others fail. And our emphasis is on strategy, trying to understand the strategies of activists and organizers, and how that increases the chance of human rights respecting and democratic outcomes. We are thrilled with Jonathan's new research monograph on democratization. There's been a growing body of research, there's been a growing body of research showing that civil resistance movements generally lead to a high probability of durable democratic gain after transitions. Yet we're also troubled by cases like Egypt and Yemen that did not. So this begs the question of why most transitions do make it to democracy, but some very sharply can fail. So Jonathan has done a great service here by examining this critical question and offering what I think is one of the first cross-cutting frameworks for understanding why and how civil resistance movements succeed or fail in sort of the pre-transition period and post-transition period of bringing democracy and consolidating it. This is exactly the kind of research that ICNC loves to support. It's scholarly, but it's also policy relevant and relevant directly to activists and organizers on the ground. As Maria alluded to, it's been documented by Freedom House that for the last 12 years, democracy has been declining. It's very suiting to talk today about civil resistance movements, democracy, and my personal interest in how they can help reverse this trend. So thank you again for coming. Please, please pick up a copy. Some of you already have. It's also available for free online to download, so send it to your friends. And now I'd like to introduce Dr. Manche Barkowski, ICNC Senior Director for Education and Research who will introduce Jonathan Pinkney. Thank you. Thank you, USIP. It's President Nancy Lindbergh and the USIP Director on Non-Valent Action, Maria Stefan, for hosting and organizing this splendid event and with the great participation here in the room, as well as many people joining us live online. My name is Manche Barkowski. I'm Senior Director for Education and Research at ICNC, and I will be moderating panel discussion after the presentation by Jonathan. And before I introduce the keynote speaker today, I would like to say just a few words about how this event will proceed this morning. So after Jonathan will present, I will ask panelists to come to the stage and I will then introduce the panelists and each of them will have few minutes to reflect on the key findings from the monograph and link those findings with the areas of specialization, areas of focus, and discuss a number of cases that they are very much familiar with. And afterwards, together with Jonathan, we will respond to some of those comments from the panelists and then I will open the floor for the questions from the audience. So please make sure to stay with us until the end of this panel discussion so we will have a chance to ask questions and hear others from the audience asking the questions. I was told that we are tweeting the hashtag it's people power for peace. All right, so please, while you are listening to the presentation, please also tweet and share your thoughts and ideas on what will be discussed here. So I have now a privilege to introduce to you today's speaker, my colleague, Jonathan Pickney. Although he will not admit it because he is a very humble and modest man, but Jonathan is in fact by now a rising star among scholars who are studying civil resistance and nonviolent movements. And he's also a leading scholar on the role of nonviolent movements in democratization and the impact of nonviolent resistance on democratic consolidation. I have known Jonathan for almost five years. It was our common friend and his mentor, Professor Erika Chenoweth, that recommended me to contact Jonathan. That was the fall of 2013 and I had a number of questions about basically the aspects that time Jonathan was working on. The questions were about political transition and the role of civil resistance and no one had that time answers to those questions that I had. And even Erika Chenoweth, the prominent scholar of civil resistance, she said, no, I don't know. Actually, I have no answers to what you're asking, but I know one of my MAs, that time MAs student, Jonathan Pickney who will have the answers to the questions you seek. So when I contacted him, I remember he immediately produced all this interesting and compelling data and in fact, indeed he did answer all my questions I had that time. So I was also very happy to hear that he eventually continued his work as a PhD student at the University of Denver, researching long-term impact of civil resistance movements. And we at ICNC were very happy when he also applied for our research fellowship that supported his field research in Zambia, in Brazil and in Nepal, the case studies that he integrated into his monograph and about which he will talk here as well. And I work with Jonathan as the editor of basically his two groundbreaking monographs that we published in the last three years. The first publication was making or breaking nonviolent discipline in civil resistance movements. And the second publication that he will be talking about today when civil resistance succeeds building democracy after nonviolent popular appraisings. Both of those publications is hard to mention they are available for free online for the download and we've got hard copies available outside of the room that you can pick up as well. And I must say that as the editor I couldn't imagine a better author to work with than Jonathan. Extremely on time with his draft submissions, never irritated about my frequent edits and frequent requests for more data and additional informations. In fact, Jonathan skillfully masters sophisticated and complex analysis with explanations and conclusions that are down to earth practical, easily accessible and actionable. And actionable means that activists can use Jonathan's findings to increase the odds of the nonviolent struggles against repressive regimes and anti-democratic forces. And this type of work that Jonathan delivers is extremely important for organizations like USIP and ICNC that work to enhance the skills of those who fight nonviolent for their rights and freedoms. So finally some facts about Jonathan's career. He is a post doctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology and Political Science and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He's also an external associate at the Peace Research Institute. Oslo, he supervised data collection among others for the nonviolent and violent campaigns and outcomes. NAVCO 3.0 that is hosted by University of Denver. And Jonathan received his PhD in international relations from University of Denver in 2018 and four years earlier, MA degree from the same university. He earned his BA in international affairs from Gordon College in Massachusetts. And he was a recipient of 2012 fellowship from Kerbal School and 2016 recipients of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict PhD Fellowship. He currently lives in Trondheim, Norway. And besides his academic work, he's enjoying road biking, camping and mountain climbing. So Norway is certainly the place where he can really experience those fabulous outdoor activities. And I'm surely envy you Jonathan about that opportunities. So ladies and gentlemen, please give a very warm welcome to Dr. Jonathan Picney, our keynote speaker today. Well, thank you so much for being here today. It's a real privilege to be able to speak here at USIP. Thank you to USIP, to ICNC as well for arranging this event. And special thanks of course to my colleagues Dr. Marcia Barkowski, Hardy Merriman, Dr. Maria Steffen, and Nancy O'Kael and Linda Herring for being here as well. I want to start what I have to say today with a brief puzzle to give you a sense of why this topic was of interest to me in the first place because this really starts with a fairly personal story. I did, I was a study abroad student as an undergraduate in Egypt in 2006 and later in 2009 went back to work there briefly. And I remember having conversations with a number of friends who were sort of political activists of various stripes talking about what the potential was for political change in Egypt. And the answer was zero. The answer was none at all. That the only relevant political question in Egypt at that time was whether when Hosni Mubarak died, whether it was going to be his son who was going to succeed him or whether it was going to be Omar Suleiman, the head of the secret police who succeeded him. But of course, as we all know, an event which no doubt is deeply familiar to all the people in this room. Of course, in 2011, we had this moment happen. And we have this moment of tremendous hope, tremendous political change and real optimism across the Middle East that a region that had been previously very opposed to democratization where democracy many had argued could never take hold was now on the verge of taking hold. And this was something that as a young scholar I was very interested in understanding because this was so deeply unexpected. But of course, as we all know too well, after this moment came this moment that over the following years, there was increasing frustration. And then finally in 2013, the overthrow of Egypt's first democratically elected president. And then shortly thereafter, the massacre of possibly hundreds, possibly even thousands of peaceful protesters in Cairo's Raba Adawiya Square. And so I was very motivated to examine this particular question. Why do these nonviolent resistance movements, these nonviolent revolutions, that are these incredible moments of hopeful, peaceful mobilization sometimes lead to democracy and why do they sometimes not? And perhaps more importantly, what can we do about it? There's of course an extensive literature on democratization out there that focuses on sort of the deep factors that underlie it, things like a country's level of socioeconomic development or its connection to the West. Things that if you are in the throes of a political transition, there isn't really much you can do. But if you are an activist, a political leader in these situations, what can we actually say about what is likely to help you succeed? And that's really what I focus on in my research and what I'm going to focus on in the remainder of my time today. Briefly, a couple of definitions just to make sure we're all on the same page. Nonviolent resistance or civil resistance, terms that I use interchangeably. The application of political force outside of the normal avenues of politics and without the use or the threat of physical violence. So three core components there. Action devoted towards political goals, extra institutional or abnormal and without the use of violence. And next, civil resistance transitions, which I define as political transitions, periods of time between one political regime and another, which are initiated primarily, though perhaps not exclusively, by nonviolent resistance, in which nonviolent resistance has played a crucial role in the breakdown of an old regime. And in fact, civil resistance transitions have been a major force for political change over the last 70 years or so in the post-World War II period. This map here shows every country that has experienced at least one civil resistance transition during this time. A total of 78 transitions spread across 64 countries. And of the 78 transitions, at least 60 ended in at least a minimal democracy. That is to say, with an effective executive elected in at least moderately clean elections. Which leads me to the first conclusion that I come to in the monograph which builds on a growing literature that Maché and others referred to, that civil resistance does have a strong democratizing impact. And that this holds up, and this democratizing impact holds up even when considering the other factors that tend to affect democratic progress. But of course, I wanted to go a step beyond that and to understand why some of these transitions end in democracy and some don't. To do that, in part in the monograph and in a larger research project, I do some statistical analysis of this larger population of 78 transitions. And then in-depth case studies, as Maché mentioned, of three particular, most different transitions. So civil resistance transitions that came about in vastly different circumstances. To look for sort of the common threads across these cases. Brazil in 1984, in that country's transition away from military rule. Zambia in 1991, in that country's transition away from single party authoritarian rule. And Nepal in 2006 in its transition away from monarchy. And again, as I mentioned, the overwhelming finding, first of all, is that civil resistance transitions do tend to be overwhelmingly more democratic than other forms of transition. That nonviolent resistance has this strong, has this strong democratizing impact. This is even the case in very unfavorable conditions. The figure here breaks up civil resistance transitions with all other political transitions during this period of time, 1945 through 2011. With the percentage of transitions that ended in, that ended in at least minimal democracy broken up, again, based on whether they were initiated by nonviolent resistance, and then based on how authoritarian, how repressive the previous regime was. And as you can see, the civil resistance transitions in dark blue there, even in extremely undemocratic settings, the two columns on the far left there, 80% of civil resistance transitions end in at least minimal democracy, whereas other forms of transition end in democracy only about 20% of the time. So a strong, a strong consistent democratizing impact. But then to move on to this question of when we are likely to see civil resistance transitions end in democracy, and when not, I focus on what happens after. So once a nonviolent resistance movement has broken down a dictatorship, has ended an authoritarian regime, and initiated a political transition, what are the challenges that arrive afterwards? And in the monograph and in my larger work, I focus on two particular challenges. And it's important to say, I don't consider this to be an exclusive set. These are not the only things that matter in these particular cases. These are simply two things that we see operating in consistent fashion across wildly different contexts in civil resistance transitions. The first of these is transitional mobilization. Of course, nonviolent resistance movements tend to involve massive levels of public mobilization, typically across broad sectors of society, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people hitting the streets to achieve political change. But of course, once the non-democratic regime is out, once a period of political transition has ended, we often see very significant, very significant social and political demobilization. People who have been engaged in politics tend to go home. There is a drop in public accountability for new political elites, and a new democratic regime is not consolidated. So that's the first challenge, maintaining mobilization to continue to have sources of public pressure during the period of transition. The next challenge is in many ways, the mirror image of the first. And it's what I refer to in the monograph as street radicalism, where we may have continued social mobilization during the period of transition, but that mobilization is not directed towards building new democratic institutions, but instead is directed towards breaking down any potential system of new institutions and norms as it arises. That the powerful tools of nonviolent resistance and social mobilization are used to prevent the consolidation of any new, of any new political arrangement, making politics perpetually unstable and often leading to a reversion to authoritarianism. And what I found in looking at this population of 78 civil resistance transitions in the post-World War II period is that these two factors do consistently predict whether a civil resistance transition will end in democracy. Brief words about this figure here. This figure plots the 78 civil resistance transitions during this period. On the vertical axis there is the level of mobilization. On the horizontal axis, the level of street radicalism. I won't go into the specific statistics of that, but of course happy to answer questions as people have them later on. With the democracies indicated in yellow and the non-democracies indicated in dark blue. And as you can see on the figure, the democracies tend to cluster on the top left-hand side of the graph there, indicating high levels of mobilization and low levels of street radicalism. Whereas the non-democracies tend to cluster on the bottom right-hand side indicating low levels of mobilization and high levels of street radicalism. So having found this consistent relationship, having found these two challenges do seem to be important factors across this population of cases, I then wanted to examine what are the lessons that we might take from this and specifically that people within these countries going through these transitions might take from it on how they can encourage mobilization and how they can discourage street radicalism. And in the monograph I outline three specific lessons on each of these factors, which I'll briefly walk through here relating some vignettes from those three particular cases to illustrate. So the first lesson on maintaining mobilization is to foster independent civic forces. And the crucial thing here is during the transitional period to maintain sources of popular accountability through which issue-based mobilization can be channeled. So often a common factor in these transitions is that forces that have come together to oust a non-democratic regime then rapidly enter politics, either explicitly by becoming political parties or by becoming sort of clients of various political forces. And this is important of course for some groups to do. You can't have a democratic political system without political competition. But this often means that there are few voices that remain outside of the political process standing up for the deeper principles of promoting and consolidating democracy. And indeed that having such independent voices is often actively discouraged by these new emergent political forces. As one of the leaders of the 2006 revolution in Nepal related to me, we had said our movement will go on until the constitution is framed. And when that happened, our colleagues, political parties, civil society, NGOs deserted us. And slowly the whole entire civil society forces became status quo oriented. Our wings were clipped. These independent voices actively demobilized by new political elites and with deleterious effects on the progress of democratization in Nepal. All right. Second lesson on maintaining mobilization. Keeping new leaders accountable. And now of course non-violent resistance movements often though certainly not always are led by these charismatic heroic figures in whom their communities have tremendous faith. And people like Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi come to mind. And there's often in these cases a particular faith that once these particular leaders come into power everything's gonna be okay. Melinda and I were discussing this before the talk in relation to Ukraine in particular that this was a problem in the Orange Revolution there. And the sad truth of course is that as we all know, power corrupts. And that the heroic activist who is hitting the streets and willing to go to prison for what he or she believes in during a period of non-violent struggle once in power may become just as bad if not worse if the people who preceded them. And this gentleman here is a good example of that dynamic in practice. This is Frederick Chiluba, the second president of Zambia. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chiluba was a very prominent activist promoting greater democratic progress in that country. He suffered tremendous personal loss for that activism, went to prison several times and turned down lucrative opportunities for wealth and political power. And because of his activism when Zambia had its democratic transition in 1990 and 1991, Chiluba was a leading figure in that country's movement for multi-party democracy and became its presidential candidate. However, once in power, President Chiluba oversaw this period in Zambian history. This is the political corruption index from the Varieties of Democracy project. The yellow vertical lines there indicate the beginning and end of Chiluba's presidency in 1991 and 2001. And I think, yeah, the trend line there pretty much speaks for itself, a huge increase in political corruption. If you ask just about any Zambian activist or political leader, they will all relate a story in which, soon after coming into office, Frederick Chiluba proudly announced that he never knew that power could be so sweet. Which, can you be more on the nose than that? I don't think you can. Okay, something more positive. Third lesson on maintaining mobilization. Maintain a democratic vision. Again, often nonviolent resistance movements in non-democracies are motivated by negative goals. By the idea that there is a particularly hated dictator or non-democratic regime in power that we want to oust. Of course, the famous motto of the Arab Spring was the people want the downfall of the regime. And this is very useful for mobilization purposes. It's easy to unite disparate factions around shared hatred of those in power. But if your agenda is limited to these negative goals, to getting rid of hated figures in power, then there is very little reason for ordinary people to remain mobilized once the hated figure is gone. And the political transition in Brazil provides a good example of the opposite of this. Of activists thinking intentionally about framing their movement in terms of long-term goals and the long-term transformation of society rather than simply the negative goals of ousting a non-democratic regime. From the beginning of this movement, activists in Brazil argued that getting rid of the military was only a means to an end rather than the end itself. The end was a deeper transformation of society. Pursuing that deeper transformation kept activism going on many different fronts throughout the transitional period. A quote from a Brazilian political scientist. Popular movements believed that organized efforts should be arranged in order to avoid the demobilizing effects of transition through transaction and to maximize the prospects of making a break with the past. Aspirations for a more just society could only be achieved if popular pressure and participation were exercised. So three lessons on maintaining mobilization, fostering independent civic forces, keeping new leaders accountable and maintaining a democratic vision. What about street radicalism? The first lesson here is to avoid what I call extreme protest tactics. Non-violent resistance movements are powerful in part because their tactics disrupt the functioning of ordinary political, social, and economic life. Of course, in the context of a non-democratic regime, this means that they have tremendous power to achieve political change. But in the context of a political transition, this means that they also have tremendous power to disrupt the establishment of any new institutional order. And this, in turn, this sort of perpetual undermining, perpetual instability can undermine faith and democracy and lead to a desire for a return to authoritarianism. And Nepal is a very good example of this at work. Various political and social groups in that country, particularly the country's political parties, have frequently employed the most extreme protest tactics one can think of, from general strikes to total blockades of the country's trade routes with India, which have devastating effects on that country's economy. A study by two economists at the Nepal Central Bank determined that general strikes from 2008 to 2012 decreased annual GDP growth in that country between 0.6 and 2.2 percentage points per year. And the effect, again, as I talked about before, has been to undermine faith and democracy as the Nepali people lose confidence that the political system can deliver economic development. When I spoke to activists and political leaders in Nepal, even some of the most central figures in that country's movement against the monarchy in 2006 spoke about the need for a period of return to authoritarianism of the estimates range between 10 and 20 years in order to get the economy back on track and end this perpetual instability. So these tactics can have extreme consequences. Next, directing mobilization towards supporting new institutions. And here, Brazil provides another positive example. A lot of political mobilization, but that mobilization was mostly directed towards transforming new institutional channels of political participation, particularly the Brazilian Constitution. Civil society groups and other non-elite organizations advocated for popular amendments in part to the Constitution to push for a progressive agenda, 122 of which were proposed and ended up getting concessions such as such as a constitutionally mandated right to strike, universal healthcare through that country's unified health system and policies to fight inequality such as the expropriation of unproductive land. Final lesson on maintaining on combating street radicalism, not shutting everyone from the old regime out. Of course, a strong impulse in many of these transitions is for a sharp break with the past and punishment for all or almost all of those involved in the old regime. Now, accountability for the abuses of the past is certainly important and in particular, human rights abusers should certainly be prosecuted, but often this effort to shut out those from the past has less to do with accountability and more to do with vindictiveness towards one's political rivals. And Zambia here provides another good example. This is Kenneth Khaunda, the first president of Zambia and its president during a period of non-democratic rule. Khaunda, as I mentioned before, ousted in the 1991 movement for multi-party democracy, but sought to reenter politics a few years later and by all accounts sought to enter democratic politics honestly, that he was interested not in a return to authoritarianism, but in simply being a part of the political system. However, the government under Frederick Chaluba was deeply afraid of Khaunda, afraid of him as a political rival, first began using government resources to attempt to disrupt his party's mobilization and ended up indeed amending the Zambian constitution, not explicitly naming president Khaunda, but to the effect that he was really the sole political figure in Zambia to which a particular constitutional amendment would apply, barring him from running for the presidency. The effect of this was that Khaunda's political party lost faith in democracy and began formulating the so-called zero option plan to create political instability and overthrow the democratic government. This led to a state of emergency, significant rollbacks of civil liberties and a pattern of anti-democratic back and forth politics in Zambia that continues to today. So these lessons, of course, mostly focused on activists within these particular countries, but of course we in the United States are not going through a civil resistance transition just yet. And so what can external actors do in this regard? What is the role for people outside of these particular situations who may be interested in promoting democratic progress in these particular countries? Well, the first is a bit of a negative lesson, but something that came quite consistently from activists that I spoke to is to honor local autonomy. Independent civic forces need independence both from local political forces as well as and also from international donors. If they are going to remain connected to local needs, if they are going to be mobilizing people around the issues that are most important to them, then they need to have that a certain level of autonomy. I will just leave that quote up there for your perusal from one of the Nepali civil society leaders that I spoke to. Next, international actors can play a role in helping to foster the kind of long term strategic thinking that can keep movements going beyond the moment when they oppose a dictator. And I think one particularly useful way of doing this that came up in several conversations is the idea of connecting activists with those who have previously gone through this kind of transition. Sharing the lessons learned from other contexts so that activists can be thinking about the long term in their own cases. And finally, simply consistently honoring particular foreign policy principles. Of course, international actors are viewed skeptically in many of these cases because they are perceived as self-interested and advocacy around things like human rights principles or international law are perceived as hypocritical. But when this advocacy is more consistent, it can be quite helpful in raising awareness about the needs of particular activist groups and promoting democratic progress. So in conclusion, non-violent resistance is indeed a powerful democratizing force, but this force is by no means automatic. In order to carry it through the uncertain period of transition, activists and political forces need to continue to mobilize and to avoid street radicalism and direct that mobilization towards building new political institutions. With that, I'm done. Thank you so much for your time and I'm very much looking forward to our discussion. Perfect, a lot of good food for thoughts. And I will first start from introducing briefly our panelists and each of them will have a couple of minutes to reflect on Jonathan's presentation. So first of all, Dr. Nancy O'Kale, she is an executive director of the Tachir Institute for Middle East Policy and has more than 18 years of experience working on issues of democracy, rule of law, human rights, security in the Middle East and North Africa. She analyzes these issues and advocates in favor of human rights through testimony to legislative bodies providing policy recommendations to senior government officials in the US and Europe. In a short trial organized by the Egyptian post-revolution regime, Dr. O'Kale was among 43 NGO workers who were convicted in 2012 and sentenced to prison for allegedly using foreign funds to form and unrest in Egypt. She holds a PhD from University of Sussex in the UK and her doctoral research focused on the power relations of foreign aid. Next is Melinda Haring, is the editor of the Ukraine Alert Block as part of the Atlantic Council. She's also the vice chair of the Board of East European Foundation in Kiev, Ukraine and a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She's a long-term observer of political developers in Eurasia specifically in Ukraine and her articles were featured in a number of media outlets, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Newsweek and so on. And she is the author of the report reforming the democracy bureaucracy and Ukraine's internal displaced persons hold a key to peace. She's also contributed to the book Does Democracy Matter? She holds MA in government with a certificate in Russian-European studies from Georgetown University. And last but not least, Dr. Maria Stefan is the director of the program on nonviolent action here at USIP. She's also a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was formerly a nonresident fellow at Atlantic Council where she co-led the Future of Authoritarianist Project and she also worked at my center, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict directing policy and research portfolio. She was also the lead foreign affairs officer in the US State Department Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations where she worked on both operations, policy and operations for Afghanistan and Syria. She is an author of many publications on civil resistance, including a seminal book Why Civil Resistance Works, The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict written together with Erika Chenelev. She holds MA in PG from Fletcher, School of Law and Diplomacy and Bachelor of Degree from Boston College. She is from Vermont and like me, she like me, she has also, she's also of Polish descent. So, terrific panel. And so first of all, I will start from Nancy and I will ask Nancy to pick up the key kind of findings from Jonathan's presentation and bring that those findings to your experience observing transition in Egypt. How accurate those findings might explain certain developments and what might have been there with the transition Egypt that kind of go beyond, you know, monograph focus and can still shed more light on our better understanding of how transition can start and be, I guess, derailed in terms of building democracy. Right. Thank you so much and thank you for having me. I enjoy reading the monograph and it can be more timely than today and also thought-provoking. I really enjoyed reading like the different factors that lead to like a different destinies of whether violent or nonviolent resistance. One of the things is the conditions that are out there and the structures when the resistance start because that has a lot of effect on how the movement goes forward. The other thing is that I really, really particularly liked and thought a lot about is the idea of moving from street radicalization into glottic mobilization and several other nuances and the integration of different factors. Yet when I think about Egypt, I hardly was able to place it anywhere in there. There is, of course, some reflections out there and I think what happened in Egypt and why are we at the point we are today, I think to start with, there was an over-idealization of how the Egyptian uprising started and this description, it was almost patronizing. Speaking of like the beautiful Egyptian youth who are holding hands and singing Kumbaya and how the Muslims were praying and the Christians were protecting them, it was idealistic to a harmful way because the reason why people go against authoritarian regimes is not, of course, like freedom and rights is an end of its own, but because authoritarian regime produced unhealthy societies. If this is the product of Mubarak's regime, then he was really great if we're producing such society that is equal, that is tolerant, that is progressive in so many ways that is described there, but in reality that wasn't the case. Because of the unequal dynamics and unequal correlations and corruption and impunity, this is the case that are there. The other thing that I found problematic and maybe through the questions and answer elaborate on that because I only have two minutes is that there is always when people describe, not just in Egypt, but elsewhere, there is always an imaginary isolated spheres when we talk about the government, the people and the activists as if they are separated. And it's actually the entanglement of those three spheres, even if we can at least even to start with, separate them in three, because it's more complex than that. It leads to like misdiagnoses and some false assumptions about how those dynamics work. Again, and one of the things that you mentioned, and I really, really liked that you said that because some, although it's obvious, but some people miss it, is not just because someone went to prison and struggled that when he comes to power is going to be like sort of a democratic leader with integrity and everything. And it's actually only more likely that he goes the other way because he does not go and start from the vacuum. It starts in a structure that has its limitation, the lack of accountability mechanisms to start with. And also most importantly is the lack of skills and competence. So I think there is like a common criticism in Egypt and everywhere, which you describe that people know what they don't want, but they don't know what they want. I think to an extent people knew what they want. Like they want it justice, they want it equality and all this. They don't know how to get there and they don't have the competence to enforce policy, to form policy, the experience of governance, which is impossible because if they had an experience in governance, they would have been a part of such government. And this is one of the biggest challenges, like how to govern, how to learn, how to actually move, not just from the street to politics, but from politics to the art and act and ability to govern. And this is one of the biggest challenge that we have, I think. I'm gonna stop here and I know there's short time. Thank you. Thank you. I mean for me the key lesson that you mentioned was this preparation of the civil society by the movement for the ensuing transition. And civil society is being a product of authoritarianism, something that civil resistors need to take account. So I wonder to what extent in Ukraine case, after the revolution of dignity in 2014, the society was prepared by the movement for that democratization and transition. Melinda. Sure, so let me back up just a little bit because not everyone in this room watches Ukraine as obsessively as I do and my two friends in the front row. So in 2014, many normal average Ukrainians were freezing in the center of Kiev and they pushed Viktor Yanukovych out of power and he was deeply corrupt, but I wanna dig into what Jonathan and his New Excellent Report have to say about the Ukraine case. He has a wonderful quote. He says, the elephant got through, but its tail is stuck. The elephant got through, but its tail is stuck. I think that perfectly captures where Ukraine is today. They got rid of Yanukovych, but they're still stuck in transition and it's really, really hard. So Jonathan said that continued civic mobilization during the transition is crucial. Yes, I absolutely agree, but it's so hard. And finding those themes and keeping people engaged is incredibly difficult. He also said that a move away from this radicalism, the all or nothing struggle toward more institutionalized politics is essential. And in Ukraine, I see that. Reformers are in many parties in parliament today and that's a great thing. You also pointed out that non-resistance puts pro-democracy leaders in power and we saw this in 2014. New people came into government, business leaders, civic leaders, people who had nothing to do, scientists, people who had nothing to do with politics, one of them is in the front row, my friend from the Kiev city council, who's a lawyer and after the might on many of these people came and they're serving in small, medium, they're also serving in the executive bodies as well, as well as parliament. What you said about holding leaders to account is absolutely spot on and civil society is doing that. Civil society is incredibly strong and powerful in Ukraine. You talked about the importance of maintaining a democratic vision and that's, like we said, that's very, very difficult. But I'm happy to say that civil society is reflective in Ukraine and they're changing and thinking about that the struggle for democracy and for reform and for the country that they all worked hard for is gonna take a lot longer than four and a half years. It's probably gonna take, it's gonna be a generational project and it's no longer a sprint, it's a marathon. So when I'm in my conversations with civil society leaders, they're thinking about, they have a longer term horizon now and I think that's a mature sign. You said that there's a huge gap between getting rid of an old system and establishing a new one and I think both Nancy and I would say amen, amen to that. It's very hard. I do see some challenges in your report. One of them we talked about earlier. You talked about the importance of a free press and in Ukraine, the major television stations are all owned by oligarchs. You have some free press but it's not very free and TV is everything there and you don't have a culture of philanthropy. So you express some skepticism with the international donor community and there's reasons to be skeptical but what do you do in a country like Ukraine when the free press is a problem and the culture of philanthropy is just not there? And the last question I had was you talked about rapid democratization and you said if it takes place early in the transition the balance of forces often goes back to the elites and that there can be limited democratization and backsliding and I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about that, how early in the transition and what does that timeframe look like? But congratulations, I really enjoyed it and our friends from Ukraine will be taking it back and studying it as well. Hi, thank you, Marinda. Maria, I wanted to ask you to bring the kind of external actors perspective and the policy community and how policy community could be, I think more effective in helping civil resistors prepare better for transition given all those obstacles and challenges that Jonathan has identified and if you can refer maybe to specific cases I think Ukraine would be prominently perhaps there standing in terms of the role of international actors in helping transition there. So yes, what is your take from the kind of external perspective? Sure, thanks Machi and again congratulations Jonathan really terrific monograph and he wrote it in a way that made it very relevant and appealing to activists especially and also to policy makers and that's not easy to do so congratulations on that. I think the two kind of key things that I took away from the monograph was you come down very strong on the idea that the surest pathway from authoritarianism is civil resistance yet what happens during that transition period is really critical and you very help- helpfully isolate two variables the sustained healthy civic mobilization during the transition and the avoidance or minimalization of street radicalism as two key factors that help to consolidate democracy and I think just reflecting perhaps a couple minutes on three key sets of actors so from a donor funder perspective I think you rightfully encourage caution when it comes to supporting civic actors and especially civil resistors movements your central argument is that movements thrive on their grass-rootedness their linkages to local communities being able to address and represent their needs and sometimes there's an over-zillusness and enthusiasm in the donor community to want to help and so that can sometimes translate into distortions with funding to cutting people off from their key constituencies to kind of creating a competitiveness so I must say I really appreciated your kind of your idea of really being cautious with the type of support that's needed what you honed in on which I think is really really essential is what external actors both in the funding community also diplomats and embassies can do very well and helpfully is to convene disparate parts of society so they can help bring together the grassroots activists the more traditional technocratic NGO leaders the moderate government officials to help come up with the D-Day plus one strategy so what does the transition look like practically what are the key lines of effort just to build trust between these communities and to help build relationships that ultimately are gonna help get through the transition period I also think as you noted civil resistance is a lot about disruption it's about imposing costs it's about power shifts and engagement with governments and with other actors requires a different skill set and so there is an element of knowing how to dialogue knowing how to facilitate conversations knowing how to get to yes build coalitions for change and that's a different skill set so I actually think this bringing together of nonviolent action in peace building skills and approaches is really really critical to be able to address the challenges during the transition period I also think we talk a lot about support directly to civil society and movements but I think external actors are often in the best position to shape the environment around which these actors are operating so for example, corruption is an endemic problem in many authoritarian countries and is a problem during the transition one of the most important thing I think that government officials can do multilateral organizations is hone in on the corruption element hone in on where the stolen assets are really focus on supporting independent anti-corruption agencies, commissions and the like supporting the investigative journalists who are trying to uncover these things so I think there's a really really important role one really great example is the role that the Sikig Commission in Guatemala received the international commission focused on impunity there was incredible support for that which gave I think a lot of support to the activists on the ground the final thing that I would flag because it's less I think it's less heard of in this town especially is the role that security forces play in democratic transitions so we know that there's a very strong link between security force defections and civil resistance victories so there's there are plenty of data to suggest that but I think the role that security forces play in either supporting democratic processes or undermining them is really really important and there are a lot of tools and levers that the U.S. military other militaries have to influence the behaviors, attitudes and practices of security forces in other countries including allied countries that I think would be particularly useful and in this respect I would flag Admiral Dennis Blair's really helpful book which is called military engagement influencing armed forces worldwide to support democratic transitions I think there's a lot there that could help broad in the aperture in terms of how to support during this critical period but thank you. Perfect, thank you. So I would like to follow up on a couple of themes and then give some time for Jonathan to respond and we'll open the floor for questions. Actually I wanted to build on that military aspect because as Maria said a number of nonviolent resistance actions that were successful because they were effectively defections from the military and I think Egypt is an interesting case and Nancy I wanted to ask you to expand on that where basically what I saw was collusion between the activists and the military to bring down and I'm talking about 2013 the beginning of 2013 to bring down democratically elected President Morsi where the activists came to the military and asked so we don't like the president he is introducing Islamic laws and we are concerned about liberties what can you do to help us and they said well bring millions of people on the streets and we will certainly do something and when they indeed activists brought millions of people on the streets in 2013 late June military gave ultimatum to Morsi and brought it down and took over power so I wanted to expand more on this the need to work with the military to achieve political breakthrough and then the role of military during transition and what how activists should prepare I think better to ensure that military will not take over that transition and it will ensure the democratization and Melinda I wanted to maybe ask you to expand more on this old new elites because what I saw after the orange revolution and after revolution of dignity is the same old faces of this old leaders staying in power and I'm not talking about young activists entering parliament and being in parliamentary committees but I'm talking about key decision makers that are basically the same old guards that were working the 1990s and working with Kuchma and even with Yanukovych being in charge and being responsible for the reforms and in terms of external actors I was thinking more about Maria if you could maybe tap on your ongoing research on the role of external actors that you are leading in terms of the different phases of civil resistance and the type of perhaps aid and assistance that those external actors can provide in the kind of the phase when civil resistors are struggling to bring down the regime and then having a different types of challenges once that regime kind of is removed and those activists are giving an opportunity to influence transitional change maybe if you can identify two important assistance factors that you already see from your ongoing research on the external actors for the kind of pre-regime change phase and then after and Jonathan, I saw your presentation when you were presenting the graph that combine street radicalization and mobilization that some of those, there were outliers basically they had both processes street radicalization and mobilization and they were democracies I mean they build democracies so despite your and I think quite accurate analysis that street radicalization is negative for democratic transition you have some outliers that had both very high mobilization and very high street radicalization and still kind of faring relatively well on the democracies core in your study so if you can reflect on that like minute or two each of you if I can challenge you on the time and then we'll proceed. Yeah, Jonathan maybe you can start with me. You can start. Well, thanks so much first to all of you for your wonderful comments and I appreciate them and look forward to continuing to discuss them. Machi in regard to that, yeah, your specific question it's true, there are outliers there and I think the social scientist cop out answer is that it's not a deterministic relationship but to not leave it at that to dig into it a little bit more. I mean I do think these are factors that we do see a consistent effect but the effect is variable and so there are many other factors that come into the period of transition and even as Nancy was bringing up before structural factors in relation to the character of the old regime, the character of say the society's economic system that sort of thing that can affect the particular dynamics of these factors and so it's not something I always emphasize particularly when I'm talking to activists is that these are nudges not recipes that this is something that may help you have insight into people who have been in other situations similar to yours but I always assume that an activist, a political leader from a country going through transition understands their situation better than I do and so I leave it to them to interpret those particular nudges in specific cases. Would you like to say a few words about what the panelist brought up? Sure, so let's see. Maria, thank you so much for the comments about the external support component. I will admit that was the aspect of the monograph that I was most hesitant to discuss with this particular audience. I mean, and again, I think the core thing that I do try and emphasize both in the monograph and in kind of broader work is this, the international community can sometimes suck the air out of local mobilization that because in many of these countries the resource differential between local civil society and the international community is so vast. If the international community is coming in, if you are a sort of a young, intelligent, civic-minded kind of person but you also want to support your family, you also want to have a nice career, then it tends to be the most lucrative way to do that is to pursue international funding opportunities rather than the particular needs that your local community may be expressing and so oftentimes, and I would say this was particularly the case expressed to me in Nepal, oftentimes the people who would be the leaders of grassroots movements instead spend most of their time writing grant applications and grants are often very necessary but that's a challenging dynamic that can be problematic for grassroots mobilization and that's kind of the core thing that I want to emphasize. I'll just build on that because this idea has been surfaced actually in a research that my team is currently conducting which is focused on the role of external funding and training on movements for transparency, accountability and good governance and the countries that they have looked at are Nigeria, Kenya, Guatemala, Ukraine and Zimbabwe and Burma are coming up. So I would say that definitely one of the findings that Dabin O'Regan is leading this effort one of the main findings is just that a lot of donor support can be very much strings attached kind of thing and kind of takes the activists away from kind of some of the core organizing movement building work that they would otherwise do. This is not to say that external support for technocratic things like how to engage in constitutional processes like how to monitor budgets like how to do basic things are not important but I think there needs to be a rebalancing a bit between kind of support for the flexible more autonomous oriented funding that support grassroots mobilization and movement building that support organizing and because organizing is kind of at the core I think of sustainable transitions and organizing is a skill set that's linked to but different from civil resistance. And so I think kind of finding ways to bring these together is something that donor actors can do very, very well. So I would say kind of in the funding element also we know activists generally when in the moment when they're in the kind of peak mobilization moment they need kind of small amounts of flexible funds quickly. That's usually going to help them more than having a million dollars over two years in that moment. So kind of the rapid response funding I think is really, really important. And I think during that kind of peak moment the ability of diplomats from different embassies to coordinate their activities because sometimes the biggest problems in mass mobilizations is that the external actors are fundamentally not coordinated. They're doing different things, have different approaches have different priorities. So donor coordination and embassy coordination in these moments I think is really key and using whatever levers security forces defense officials have to mitigate repression and targeting activists I think is really, really important during that phase. In the post that's where bringing in the skill sets of how to get involved in constitutional development processes, electoral reform processes, anti-corruption mechanisms kind of bringing the worlds of the technocratic skills together with the mobilizing and organizing I think is particularly helpful during the post period. Great Nancy about the collusion with the you know between activists and military. I have a different reading than what you put it. I mean I think the conclusion is the same but it sounded like we're seeing that the military was setting out there and the activists went to them and said like please come and help us. That never happened. It was actually the opposite. It's from the very beginning of the 18 days of the revolution in January 2011 it is actually the military decided to go to the street and they played and the message for them is like we will never shoot anyone and we are peaceful and everything and again that was an over idealization because like there were people who were being captured and tortured by the military during that time. And then of course like one of the most disappointing moments for me is the day of February 11th when the military decided to take over the transition and then told the people in Tahir Square like go home we're gonna take over let's swipe away the graffiti and everything and clean up the square. I think this is one of the biggest problem and yet even the activists at that time did not surrender to that. It is actually because of the continuous mobilization in the street the weeks after because at the beginning Mubarak just moved to Sharma Sheikh. He was not going to be tried and it's because of the continuous protesting and mobilization and pressure is that they decided to actually put him on trial. I mean of course he's out now but at that time that was effective. I think the other thing is like we keep on talking about like the internal dynamics but I think the role of international actors are usually I would say more harmful than useful because at the end of the day international actors or international policy makers they always want to think of the direct easy fast track and I would say if I want to summarize it and what I would say a little bit of messiness is actually healthy but that was not allowed in Egypt. They wanted to have what I would say like what I would call like procedural democracy. I remember yesterday was the anniversary the 7th anniversary of the Mesopotamia massacre where military tanks ran over Christian protest, peaceful Christian protestors and at that time few months later when again like there was the time of Muhammad Mahmoud Batal where people were protesting in the street, 50 were killed and thrown in the garbage, I was talking to one of the top officials in the US and it's just like being puzzled by like the continuous unconditional support to the Supreme Council of Armed Forces who was taking over the transition at that time and the response was like don't worry about it it's like once there are elections and there's a present all this will be resolved and that moment I knew things are incredibly going into the wrong direction and the same thing when we talk about June 30th in 2013 it wasn't particularly that the people went to the military is like please come and remove Morsi and help us. It was actually a continuous frustration by the collusion of the Muslim Brotherhood and the military together and was actually the oversight on a lot of the malpractices and the torture and imprisonment conducted by the military that the Muslim Brotherhood decided to overlook and overlook fact-finding commissions reports and put them away and the military was going to do that anyways of course as any military coup they always play on like a popular support they don't go into the street on their own and remove people there is always like the people hailing them so and the thing about this I'm not saying that the reading is just wrong it's also unrealistic when we say people colluding with the military there is an unequal relationship here like you have a whole military with power and tanks and guns why would they have to listen to activists who are coming to say let's do that it's a good idea so Nancy can actually activists somehow prepared for possible military takeover is there anything on the part of activists in Egypt that they could have done better or differently in order basically to resist that takeover or it was inevitable that military would have done that anyway I wouldn't say it's inevitable but with the benefit of hindsight I think there would have been some missed opportunities of some creating some allegiances that would help put pressure that would stop the direction that we were going through and I think also again the interference and I would say like more of the meddling of international actors at that time would I would say like it's hindered the ability for people to actually act this way and again it's very difficult to think of how would they do that because as Maria rightly and spot on pointed out it is the lack of focus on the structure and the condition it's not about supporting particular activists or the activists but is supporting an environment that is conducive to a democratic movement the pressure on the freedom of the press anti-corruption commissions fact-finding commissions things that is like that enables the environment where people like changing the rules of the game basically not the players and I think that was the main problem in each of them yes so I would say that in the case of Ukraine the opposite is true about the international donor community without the international donor community we would not have seen the progress that Ukraine has made over the last four and a half years the international donor community with Ukrainian civil society and with reformers in government have squeezed the government to do the right thing oftentimes when it didn't want to I can give you many specific examples of all kinds of institutions that were put in place because of the squeeze and without the pressure from the international donor community good luck the two of you were talking I had another thought about transitions and we tend to treat these periods as they're endless they're not endless we're talking about people and people have expectations and if you don't fulfill those expectations they're gonna say I'm not really up for the austerity stuff you want me to sign up for so I would just from my perspective of watching these transitions in Ukraine there's a limited window in which you can ask people to put up with austerity and tough conditions until they see you know the results and I really worry about Ukraine that you sort of hit that window and that people are not going to be willing to put up with you know austerity for much longer if they don't see some results on your question on the same old faces absolutely it's very depressing there are young faces in the pipeline I write about them all the time please read our blog but let's be real 2019 really big elections in Ukraine parliamentary presidential right now there's something between 24 and 27 candidates who've declared mmm not much new blood right now if you put a gun to my head I'm gonna tell you the second round is probably Yulia Timoshenko former vice president or former prime minister or president Poroshenko the incumbent so you're probably looking at the same old faces I am not I am very very impatient so I find this ironic that I have to say this but give them time there are good people good ethical people who are moving up the system and Ukraine again it's gonna be a generational project it's not a four or five or six year transition and the US government and the donor community needs to stand with these people who are doing the right thing and continue to exactly what Maria said to keep supporting the anti-corruption agenda that's absolutely crucial to support these new institutions like the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine the organization that's trying to put high level crooks behind bars and we also need to do something else the state department I hope you're listening they need to find someone like former president Biden who has a relationship and can call Poroshenko and say what the hell are you doing we're watching you we need to establish a better relationship the Obama administration did this very well with Biden and put them on notice we care about civil society we care about the direction your country is going in and we know what's going on just because it's domestic politics doesn't mean you get a free pass yeah I mean yes the role of external actors are very important we might be at the same time putting too much trust and hope in those external actors and I think that you know the transitions transitions eventually the outcomes of the transitions are really driven by the grassroots and yes external actors are important but you know looking at in the case of Poland there is so much that depends on the strategies and tactics that are undertaken by the civil society that are pushing those transitions forward with the help and assistance of the external actors so I would like to thank the panelists and I would like to keep them here on the stage why I open right now floor to questions I see Peter Ackermann there in the back Peter can you take three yes oh yes so yes we'll take three questions and then so Peter go ahead Jonathan great really great presentation great presentation from all of you when I did my thesis 400 years ago I looked at the most different idea that you're presenting but only one dimension a planned movement and a completely spontaneous movement India versus the first Russia revolution my question to you is that you've taken three cases and you've now determined that they're the most different I love to know how you think about identifying in general what the most different is and the second point I'd like to make with my friend talking about Egypt I think it's very dangerous to think of I think thinking about the revolution being to hear square is a mistake we just did a movie that I invite you all to look at called Egypt Revolution Interrupted if you go back to the five or seven eight years prior to that there were coalitions being formed amongst judges amongst students amongst union members and amongst the Muslim brotherhood we ICNC was invited into the Caldoun Center in 2007 and we had 40 odd people talking about nonviolent resistance that we do with workshops and all those interests were represented I think what you look and see what happened in Egypt is that ultimately that coalition was broken up because the military and Muslim brotherhood created a relationship and that created other tensions the point being is that it's I think it's you know what one of the things that's very important in the work we do is to basically counter the argument that prior conditions determine the outcomes of these movements and what we try to work on and to illustrate is that it's not the prior conditions it's the choices in the middle of the conflict that ultimately determine the outcome and there were choices made and there's choices that can be unmade in Egypt or in any other conflict so to get to the work my way back to one point you made is that it's important to maintain the ability to think strategically post a conflict let's remember what strategy is strategy is how to basically sequence tactical encounters in favor of larger goals with an adversary's reaction in mind you can't think about strategy without an adversary the adversary prior to the end of a conflict might be obvious the adversary post a conflict might be less obvious but much more in my friend here's work on corruption that is the adversary but you can't think about strategy without an adversary and an adversary is always contextual so the promotion of the idea of strategic thinking is like a coach who basically works on an athlete to have them exercise their strategic thinking it's not a matter of talking about strategy in the context of all sorts of cases but talking about strategy as a planning exercise in one case thank you Peter Barbara you can take the mic thank you for holding this space open in Washington DC for this conversation which is too rare in policy circles thank you for your wonderful monograph and what a stellar panel thank you I wonder if we could measure the presence of labor unions as one of the key factors in increasing our propensity for democratic transition I'm thinking specifically of Tunisia and Chile and of course Poland under Lake Valencia and there are probably others I'm overlooking in the interest of time and also the presence of strong women's movements I wonder if we could isolate that data I don't know if they were in your data set but as I look around the world where nonviolent civil resistance is more likely to succeed and be resilient and sustained I see the presence of those two factors as someone who worked inside 32 labor unions they go all the way down to the factory level as you know or in the agricultural sector or in the US government and other government bureaucrats who were unionized were also a huge bulk work and that's just authoritarianism thank you one more question let's see here the lady next to Barbara Mariel Hi Rosie Rose My name is Rosie Berman I'm with the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission I have two questions first for Jonathan I'm interested in your commentary on the potential backsliding in Brazil particularly Yair Bolsonaro and Melinda I am interested in how you are analyzing the recent attacks on LGBTQ and Roma and other civil society activists by far right groups in Ukraine thank you okay I leave up to you to decide which questions you want to address Jonathan maybe we can start from you thanks so much for the wonderful questions Peter thanks so much for that so in the I suppose most different is a bit of a I'm trying to sort of simplify down a somewhat more complex research design technically what I'm doing is nested analysis so I start with nested analysis so I start with the large end analysis find a robust relationship and then look for cases that are kind of on the regression line to see whether when I examine those cases qualitatively the mechanisms that I'm proposing theoretically in the statistical analysis actually obtain and make sense and I pick cases that are very very different from one another in terms of the time period in which the transition happened the previous regime a sort of connection to other democratic powers etc be cut to have a certain external validity to show that this is not simply a you know say a South Asian story or a Latin American story but that we see kind of these similar dynamics at work across many many different cases so that's kind of that's kind of the logic behind behind that case selection I'm sorry I don't know your name Barbara thank you so much for your question I love it because it gives me the opportunity to talk about the research product I'm doing right now that data does not currently exist but it will soon yeah I'm currently I'm currently working on a project called the anatomy of resistance campaigns where we are collecting systematic data on all of the organizations that have participated in nonviolent resistance movements we are currently doing data collection in Africa from 1990 through 2015 and depending on funding opportunities if any of you work for the National Science Foundation that would be you know it's a it's a worthy project because depending on funding we will be expanding to other parts of the world as well and we actually have the sort of first paper using that data does actually focus exactly on specifically the role of labor unions we haven't looked at women's movements specifically yet finding indeed there is a fairly consistent robust relationship between labor union participation and democratic progress so your intuition is exactly correct at least in terms of the research that we have done thus far and are hoping to expand we know definitely not women's movements are incredibly crucial I've had the privilege because I was at the University of Denver to attend the well some meetings of the Inclusive Global Leadership Institute which is something which is a wonderful initiative run by Erica Chenoweth and Marie Berry who are two professors there where they bring in groups of women activists from around the world giving them training in nonviolent resistance talking about principles of activism that sort of thing as well and yes, role is absolutely crucial and I don't know what's going to happen in Brazil I mean I think in relation to this work I would say and I think for an American audience this is also useful to keep in mind democracy is only as good if you keep fighting for it Good and one of the panelists would like to take a nail there Sure, I'll answer the attack on activists very briefly since 2017 there have been at least 57 attacks on activists 57 including one last week on the head of the Kiev City Council Sergei Gusovsky who was attacked with green antiseptic liquid there have been acid thrown at activists outside of Kiev the problem is that these stories are not being told in the mainstream press one of the big problems with Ukraine is that there are few there are so few journalists, western journalists left telling the story people have, you know, we have a short attention span newspapers are getting smaller people have gone back to Moscow, they've gone on to other beats so it's please Lanto's commission, please help us make noise the activists in Kiev and in Harkiv and in Odessa in these smaller places are depending on us to say their names and to remind the Ukrainian government that we know and that the culture of impunity has not ended and we're waiting on them to do the right thing Just a quick nail to Peter's comment I think we shouldn't talk about preconditions because I mean when we talk about preconditions it makes it as if like resistance or uprising is a decision that people make and say okay let's go and we're gonna move against this government today there is the event but there is also like the movement that's behind that and if you're saying this happened in 2007 and it happened to be there then but it's also way before that even since 2002 when we were like fighting for changing the NGO law and fighting for the changes in the judiciary that was happening in Egypt my point was about the condition, the post uprising conditions that is maintained and supported mostly by the international community and international policy makers because they want things to be settled and cleared and removed and that was the point I just want to say like your point about labor unions is spot on and as obvious as it is sometimes and most of the time it's overlooked and I would say there's something about labor unions that's very important first of all because by nature they're the most organized non-political actors and they're effective but also most importantly the movement of labor is one of the strongest points that dismantle the narrative of the government because the government always presents that the civil society organization and NGOs those are people who are working for western ideals that does not speak to the actual needs of the people the people who want bread on their table and they want to bring their kids to school but when it comes from labor it's completely dismantled this narrative that they want to present and they fear it the most I mean if some of you know the story of Giulio Ruggini the Italian researchers who went to Egypt and he was studying labor unions and he of course like he was captured and tortured to death and thrown in the street and nothing was done about that but yes I completely agree with you on that point Yes I'm mindful of the time and I will take really two questions and I will then ask the panelists to answer those questions as well as give kind of concluding thoughts and comments now you would be able to approach panelists on your own we are not kind of running away immediately after the event so please do that Yes we are Yes we are Are we going to learn from after this? Most of them will stay if not all Okay, the lady in the back Good morning and Amira Woods and thank you to USIP and to ICNC for all the work that you all do and your leadership on this issue Great research and analysis and the report the only area I wanted to kind of push a little bit on is on the question of extreme which I felt like was sort of touched on I mean I've just kind of glanced through the report but I would love to hear a little bit more because the examples that you draw on especially general strikes are a really critical tool in the toolkit for nonviolent resistors so I'm thinking especially about Senegal led by Yanimar the strikes there and as well as Burkina Faso there are a couple of examples that come to mind where the strikes have been pivotal in terms of bringing others on and sustaining the movements so I guess I wanted to hear a little bit more on that and maybe push back that you need all the tools in the toolkit and taking out that one seems like a bit I would question that Thank you Great and the gentleman here in the blue Yeah, sure Hi my name is Rory Coleman Thank you for this amazing presentation I look forward to reading the report I was wondering if you have any remarks on the implications of this report for like mobilization in terms of resisting democratic backsliding or furthering democracy in partial democracies and how to do that without undermining the current democratic institutions Okay, so I will ask a panelist to kind of answer the questions and then bring kind of concluding thoughts and ideas and that will be I will conclude our event Jonathan, maybe you can start So general strikes and democratic backsliding I completely agree that general strikes are an important part of the nonviolent resistance toolkit and indeed one of the perhaps one of the most powerful tools that a nonviolent resistance movement can employ but I do also I think general strikes are kind of the nuclear option for nonviolent resistance particularly if you're talking about a perpetual, indefinite general strike and so it's an extremely powerful tool but one to be used very cautiously particularly when we're talking about the context of a transition rather than a movement against a against a dictatorship So if you're fighting against a dictatorship and there's sort of widespread buy-in for that then the maximum force may be called for in that particular circumstance but when you're talking about a transition when the primary things that people are fighting over are what the specific institutional arrangements are going to be temporary advantages of power then employing employing these extremely effective tools like general strikes can be disruptive and lead to the undermining of faith in the transition process So I would say it is an important tool but it's just contextually its use is contextually defined and democratic backsliding I have a lot of thoughts on the question I don't know if I have thoughts that are cogent I mean I think in general I have a lot of faith in the potential of nonviolent resistance to spur sort of civic trust and to bring people together to prevent democratic backsliding I think there is good data out there to support that that participation in these kinds of movements is one way that disparate sectors of society can be brought together through shared faith in a brighter future which I think is a very crucial factor in preventing democratic backsliding but again context really matters the academics cop out I'll just briefly flag a resource on the issue of addressing backsliding and how to maintain mobilization in partial transitions and corruption that has come a lot in our conversation so Shaska Birely who's in the back has written a really amazing book supported by ICNC called curtailing corruption people power for justice and accountability and it looks at specific campaigns and cases where people have mobilized to address corruption which I think is just a perennial problem in backsliding and in not achieving full democratization so I'll just leave it there thank you well I mean I think again congratulations Jonathan for the monograph it gives us a lot of reflection and points to reflect on especially with what we're seeing actually here in the United States one of the important points that I really struck me as I was reading that it was very clear on the distinction between resistance and movement and in a way I think it wasn't really spelt out but there was like sort of an understanding that they're not the same because a lot of people look at peaceful protest as the movement which is not and it over burdens it with high expectations that does not match actually the actual incident and I think your book gives us a lot of points to think and reflect on with regards to this and thank you thank you Nancy Melinda Maria Jonathan thank you so much for the excellent panel and I would like to thank the audience for staying with us until now we've got the copy of the monograph outside for you to pick up as well as you can download my monograph from ICNC website thank you again to everyone Nancy thank you so much we need to talk a bit more about Tamara and the role of