Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement

Wendy Pearlman

tet 2011 · Cambridge University Press

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Why do some national movements use violent protest and others nonviolent protest? Wendy Pearlman shows that much of the answer lies inside movements themselves. Nonviolent protest requires coordination and restraint, which only a cohesive movement can provide. When, by contrast, a movement is fragmented, factional competition generates new incentives for violence and authority structures are too weak to constrain escalation. Pearlman reveals these patterns across one hundred years in the Palestinian national movement, with comparisons to South Africa and Northern Ireland. To those who ask why there is no Palestinian Gandhi, Pearlman demonstrates that nonviolence is not simply a matter of leadership. Nor is violence attributable only to religion, emotions or stark instrumentality. Instead, a movement's organizational structure mediates the strategies that it employs. By taking readers on a journey from civil disobedience to suicide bombings, this book offers fresh insight into the dynamics of conflict and mobilization.

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Wendy Pearlman is the Crown Junior Chair in Middle East Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in History from Brown University and earned her Ph.D. in Government at Harvard University, where she was the Karl Deutsch Fellow. Pearlman is the author of Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada, which was a Boston Globe and Washington Post best-seller and was featured on C-Span's Booknotes. She has published articles in International Security and Journal of Palestine Studies, as well as commentaries in the Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer, among other newspapers. Pearlman was a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, a Junior Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and a postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is also the winner of the 2011 Deborah Gerner Grant for Professional Development.