ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in an age when civilian-based street rebellion has become the standard for revolutionary social movement mobilizations, abstract categories of “violence” and “nonviolence” are neither mutually exclusive nor inherently antagonistic in movement repertoires. It aims to probe the violence/nonviolence dichotomy, and in doing so, perhaps open a space to analyze social movements and revolutions in terms that are more empirically accurate and appropriate for how protests actually unfold in the twenty-first century. The chapter presents evidence of the failures of the violence/nonviolence approach to accurately capture the realities of social movement formations. It draws on the most prominent quantitative study of civil resistance to date, Erica Chenoweth’s Nonviolent and Violent Conflicts and Outcomes dataset, as well as a variety of recent examples. The chapter explores the violence/nonviolence dichotomy in terms of Kuhnian paradigmatic science and its development based in a previous era of revolutionary political struggle.
