Maintaining nonviolent selfdiscipline in hostile protest environments: evidence from the 2019 Baghdad protests

ABSTRACT

Successful civil resistance requires an enduring commitment to nonviolent selfdiscipline, often in response to repressive and provocative government tactics. We examine dedication to nonviolent collective action using the case of recent protests in Baghdad, Iraq. Based on a sample of 300 activists from 2019 anti-government protests across different locations in Baghdad, we find that those who have been exposed to violence by government forces are more willing to justify violent responses. However, more experienced protesters, reflected in present and past protest activity, display greater commitment to nonviolent activism and less willingness to reciprocate violence despite government provocations. We attribute this to possible socialization effects within activist communities which help transcend identity cleavages and associational divisions within the movement, reinforcing protest commitment and dedication to nonviolence. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for civil resistance as an alternative to violence in conflict-prone environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Nonviolent selfdiscipline
• protest commitment
• experience
• socialization
• Baghdad
• Iraq

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2022.2070466.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank D.T. for outstanding field work for this project. We also thank the editors and anonymous reviewers at SMS for their valuable comments. Any errors are ours alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Replication data for this study are available at is available at Harvard Dataverse https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VYJ5PM

Notes

1. As a counterhypothesis, protest experience could also lead to increased burnout and disillusionment with protest causes (Gorski, 2019). We regard protest commitment and experience as potentially endogenous, but not tautological to one another.

2. Fillieule (2013) identifies four major theoretical models of socialization: a persistence model which rests on the lasting impacts of early childhood experience and has been criticized for its rigidity; an impressionable years model, which focuses on the lasting influences of experiences in late adolescence and early adulthood and has been used to explain a number of generational effects; a life-cycle model which emphasizes stages of life adaptations (ex. youth radicalism, conservatism among older adults); and finally a lifelong openness model, which we apply here.

3. Violent protesters could also self-select out due to injuries sustained from their use of violence.

4. See the online appendix for game theory perspectives on activist vs authority strategies.

5. Government tactics included mass shootings, mass arrests and disappearances, imposing curfews, shutting down or restricting communications (TV, internet), banning public gatherings. Female demonstrators were subject to sexual harassment and assault. Some protest leaders were also subject to targeted assassinations by unknown assailants. See the online appendix for more details.

6. The protesters strategies involved occupation of visible, symbolic public spaces such as Tahrir Square. Protesters also organized using Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Messenger, which facilitated the growth of the protest movements beyond Baghdad to other cities across Iraq. Lovotti and Proserpio (2021) credit the movement’s success to a decentralized organizational structure.

7. We do not specify what types of violent acts protesters might support (ex. throwing rocks, using firearms). Future research should clarify what protesters might understand as justifiable violent responses. For example, see our online appendix for a ‘Protester Violence’ survey experiment involving rock throwing.

8. In future research we hope to test whether protesters would be willing to intervene to prevent others in the movement from using violence.

9. The negative effects of indirect exposure to violence reduces concerns about selection bias due to people with severe injuries being excluded from the study.

10. Past protest experience also strongly predicts protest commitment in the experiment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a sabbatical research grant from High Point University.

Notes on contributors

Vera Mironova

Vera Mironova received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Maryland in 2017. She is currently a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute. She has conducted field research in numerous countries including Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, the DRC, and Myanmar.

Sam Whitt

Sam Whitt received his PhD in Political Science from Vanderbilt University in 2005. He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at High Point University. His research interests include survey and experimental field research in conflict and post-conflict environments.