CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Masullo, Juan |
|---|---|
| Title | Non-Violent Resistance in Civil Wars as Contentious Politics. The Case of the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, Colombia |
| Summary | This study aims to examine, in a theoretically and empirically informed manner, the ways in which non-violent resistance originates and develops in the midst of the violent dynamics of an irregular civil war. As an initial exploratory exercise, it analyzes one of the most salient cases of non-violent resistance in the history of Colombia’s civil war: the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartadó (PCA). With both descriptive and explanatory pretensions, it has two specific objectives: (i) map the most significant contentious performances through which the PCA was declared, has made claims to the different armed groups, and has sustained its non-violent resistance; and (ii) identify, both at the domestic and international level, key mechanisms and processes that helped set the PCA into motion and that have fostered its development. This analysis builds on the conceptual and theoretical framework of contentious politics and follows a mechanism-process approach to contention. Additionally, it is informed by the emergent research program on the micro-dynamics of civil wars in its understandings of the dynamics of violence and the actors’ individual and collective behavior. Even though the findings of this study are still preliminary and bounded to a single case, they provide useful tools to move towards a sub-national case-oriented comparative analysis through which robustness can be tested and internal and external validity assessed. What we discovered here about the PCA signals potential recurrences as well as sources of variation and, thus, can serve as a steppingstone to learn more about non-violent collective action in violent contexts and progress on the exercise of theorizing resistance in civil wars. |
| Supervisor | Greskovits, Bela |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/masullo_juan.pdf |
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