| Abstrak/Abstract |
Nonviolence has become the power of the weak in tearing down autocracies, while bringing about democracy. But what about the after-phase of democratic transition? Some scholars believe that transition to democracy is just one phase of democratization. The challenge usually comes after, when it gets to sustaining democracy. Does nonviolence help democracy to mature and endure? How do nonviolent struggles contribute to democratic consolidation? This is the point where the current nonviolence studies might fall a little short. The majority of existing nonviolence literature have done a brilliant job at explaining the effectiveness of nonviolence in bringing about regime change (Ackerman and Duvall 2000; Martin, Varney, and Vickers 2001; Stephan and Chenoweth 2008; Nepstad 2011), as well as how people can organize nonviolent resistance (Popovic et al. 2007) and why movements decide to shift from armed to nonviolent struggles (Dudouet 2015). Few studies, however, discuss the way nonviolent struggles can play a role in sustaining democracies—hence the minimum analytical framework to assess the connection between nonviolence and democratic consolidation. This research attempts to do just so: to explore the existing studies on nonviolence and democratization while finding meeting points which later can be used to formulate a framework to analyze whether and how nonviolence can actually contribute to democratic consolidation. |
