ABSTRACT
Nonviolence is one kind of choice and it is a bundle of strategies and tactics midway between electoral and interest-group politics and organized violence. The author states that leaders of social movements choose nonviolence when they find it to be more attractive than the alternatives of armed rebellion or conventional politics. Leaders of movements for minority rights and national self-determination make choices about how best to pursue the interests of their peoples. He examined what led groups in Western democracies to rebel between 1945 and 1989 and he found an average of thirteen years elapsed between the first recorded instances of political activism by a minority group and the group's first resort to violent protest or terrorism. So it was that Freedom Rides, modeled on the voter registration drives of the US civil rights movement. Nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities represent the second type of ethnopolitical struggle that has increasingly been resolved peacefully.
