Resistance to Contemporary Military Occupation and Colonization: An Overview of the Existing Literature

This article is a literature review that overviews existing theories and perspectives of strategies used in contemporary Indigenous unarmed resistance to military occupation and colonization. We aim to summarize and categorize the existing literature and identify the gaps and necessary avenues for future research. The purpose is to contribute to the knowledge and strategies of how Indigenous peoples can liberate themselves from a combined burden of military occupation and colonization by foreign states. In identifying the current gaps in the research, it is our intention for this completed literature review to support further research into the topic. This project is affiliated with both the Resistance Studies Initiative and the Occupied Peoples’ Forum. In the initial stages of research on the subject of nonviolent resistance campaigns in military occupied territories, we identified that a majority of existing research is focused on individual case studies and the role of nationality, often from an International Relations background and is geared towards guiding states in how to best conduct an occupation in order to prevent uprisings/resistance. Many of these articles reflected a post-9/11 concern of preventing and managing "terrorism" in the South West Asia / North Africa. This bias exists to the extent that there were a number of texts in our early research in which contemporary military occupations are not even viewed as "colonialism" at all, but are instead framed as "counter-insurgency", "anti-terrorism", "humanitarian interventions", "democracy enforcement", "responsibility to protect", "security", or something similar. Authors writing on how to minimize humanitarian violations of military occupation were typically affiliated with the study of international law and politics such as David M. Edelstein who is an Associate Professor of International Affairs (Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Center for Security Studies, and Department of Government at Georgetown University) and Adam Roberts who is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations (University of Oxford, a senior research fellow in Oxford University's Department of Politics and International Relations). These men have written many of the principal texts on “occupation.” However, these “key” texts reflect a major problem with the existing literature—which is that it tends to take the perspective of the occupier, not the occupied Indigenous people. Other prominent gaps in the research were identified as a lack of comparison between different cases; a lack of investigations of a cohesive, overarching strategy for resistance to occupation; and very few discussions of resistance against not just individual occupiers but against the colonial systems they uphold. Where strategies were present within texts, they tend to be regionally and culturally specific, as opposed to being focused on the synthesis of case studies in order to draw broader conclusions regarding the nature of nonviolent/unarmed resistance as a whole. These individual case studies tend to focus on issues of nationalism and cultivating state identity, often owing to the author’s academic background being in sociology, peace and conflict studies, or else localized to the areas in which they write about. An example of such a scholar would be Jacob Mundy, Assistant Professor and Director of Peace and Conflict Studies (Colgate University). His research has a specific focus on Western Sahara. Another relevant scholar would be Aide Esu, Professor of Sociology (Department of Social Sciences and Institutions, Faculty of Political Science at the University of Cagliari) who has a strong background in ethnographic research. As we move forward, it is our intention as researchers to engage in the process of synthesis, attempting to draw upon similarities within regionally specific strategies of resisting occupiers. More recent research has revealed two articles that are extremely relevant to the structure of this project, comparing case studies of resistance movements. The authors of these key texts, are Mason Daniel Herson-Hord, Program Director of the Institute for Social Ecology and Maria J. Stephan, Political Scientist. We have also overviewed a number of sources focused solely on individual case studies of resistance, prioritising sources with a decolonial lens. It is our intention to build off existing research, utilising case studies of contemporary nonviolent resistance in the following territories: Palestine, Western Sahara, Tibet, Kashmir, West Papua, Puerto Rico, and Kurdistan. Our initial conclusions point towards the significance of cultural symbolism and parallel institutions in sustaining movements in the longterm, particularly in opposition to military occupation. In a working summary of the information we gathered, we can conclude that there is no currently existing overview of a general strategy for resistance and its outcomes, particularly for unarmed resistance, nor a comparative study of cases, and little of connections to contemporary colonialism, or a comparison of how resistance today is different to the historical experience of occupation/colonialism. Therefore, to us it seems there is a clear need for further research: Both a development of a general theoretical framework of how to understand unarmed resistance within the particular context of military occupation and colonialism today, and an empirically oriented comparative case study that analyses how different strategies and tactics work. To us, it seems obvious there is both a theoretical and empirical gap, particularly from the perspective of occupied people. References: What is a Military Occupation?, Adam Roberts (1985) Powerful Peacemaking: A Strategy for a Living Revolution, George Lakey (1987) Nonviolence and the Case of the Extremely Ruthless Opponent, Ralph Summy (1994) The Role of Power in Nonviolent Struggle, Gene Sharp (2000) Nonviolent Action and Its Misconceptions: Insights for Social Scientists, Kurt Schock (2003) Economic Conditions and Resistance to Occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: There is a Causal Connection, Basel A. Saleh (2004) The End of Occupation: Iraq 2004, Adam Roberts (2005) Fighting for Statehood: The Role of Civilian-Based Resistance in the East Timorese, Palestinian, and Kosovo Albanian Self-Determination Movements, Maria J. Stephan (2006) Occupational Hazards: Why Military Occupations Succeed or Fail, David M. Eldestein (2006) A Battlefield Transformed: From Guerilla Resistance to Mass Nonviolent Struggle in Western Sahara, Jacob Mundy, Maria J. Stephan (2006) Autonomy & Intifadah: New Horizons in Western Saharan Nationalism, Jacob Mundy (2006) Resistance to alien rule in Taiwan and Korea, Chris Hale, Ioana Emy Matesan, Michael Hechter (2009) "Struggles for Ex-Base Lands in Puerto Rico", Deborah Berman Santana (2010) Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Erica Chenoweth, Maria J. Stephan (2011) Western Sahara and Palestine: A Comparative Study of Colonialisms, Occupations, and Nationalisms; Rana B. Khoury (2011) The Ultimate Protest: Women Self-Immolate in Tibet, Gloria S. Rivera (2012) Understanding Resistance to Foreign Occupation, Simon Collard-Wexler (2013) Memory and Mobilization? Identity, Narrative and Nonviolent Resistance in the Palestinian Intifadas, Julie Norman (2013) Do Foreign Occupations Cause Suicide Attacks?, Costantino Pischedda, Michael G. Smith, Simon Collard-Wexler (2013) Political Devolution and Resistance to Foreign Rule: A Natural Experiment, Jeremy Ferwerda, Nicholas L. Miller (2014) What would it take?: How a strategy of unarmed resistance could win freedom in West Papua, Jason MacLeod (2014) Waiting for Disruption: The Western Sahara Stalemate, Jacob Mundy (2014) SUMUD TO INTIFADA: Community Struggle in Palestine and the Western Sahara, Mason Daniel Herson-Hord (2015) Then and Now: Haitian Journalism as Resistance to US Occupation and US-Led Reconstruction, Shearon Roberts (2015) The Tibetan བོད་སྐད་ Nonviolent Struggle: A Strategic and Historical Analysis, Tenzin Dorjee (2015) ‘Occupied territory is occupied territory’: James Baldwin, Palestine and the possibilities of transnational solidarity, Timothy Seidel (2016) Assessing Nonviolence in the Palestinian Rights Struggle, Richard Falk & Victoria Mason (2016) The Puzzle of Nonviolence in Western Sahara, Matthew Porges & Christian Leuprecht (2016) Constructive Resistance in Northern Kurdistan: Exploring the Peace, Development, and Resistance Nexus, Minoo Koefoed (2017) The Art of Enacting the Impossible: A Conceptual, Empirical, and Methodological Exploration of Constructive Resistance by the Kurdish Movement in Turkey; Minoo Koefoed (2018) “Protest” Photography in Kashmir: Between Resistance and Resilience, Durdana Bhat, Hafsa Kanjwal, Masrat Zahra (2018) Occupying Creole: The Crisis of Language under the US Occupation of Haiti, Matthew Robertshaw (2018) From National Liberation to Radical Democracy: Exploring the Shift in the Kurdish Liberation Movement in Turkey, Simin Fadaee & Camilla Brancolini (2019) Strategizing Kashmiri Freedom Struggle Through Nonviolent Means, Khurram Abbas (2019) The Role of Internal Third-Party Interveners in Civil Resistance Campaigns, L. Fleischmann (2019) “A Foras, Out”: Youth antimilitarism engagement in Sardini, Aide Esu (2020) Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, Erica Chenoweth (2021)