Political Jiu-Jitsu: The Effect of Organisational Structure on Backlash of Regime Repression in Nonviolent Movements

Recent studies indicate that nonviolent movements differ importantly from their violent counterparts in their dynamics and outcomes. A major – yet surprisingly understudied – mechanism for nonviolence to work is backlash of regime repression on the regime itself, what has also been coined “political jiu-jitsu”. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on this repression-mobilisation nexus by investigating the effect of a campaign’s organisational structure on the likelihood of backlash, understood as increased mobilisation after repression. This study uses the NAVCO 2.0 dataset, and works with a subset of annual data on over 100 nonviolent campaigns from 1945 to 2006 with maximalist goals, i.e. regime change, anti-occupation, and secession. I argue that nonviolent campaigns with a non-hierarchical organisational structure are more likely to experience increased mobilisation after repression due to their tendency to operational resilience, internal unity, adoption of new media, favourable goals, and membership diversity. Conducting a series of logistic regression analyses, I make the findings that (1) a non-hierarchical campaign structure significantly increases the likelihood of backlash, as compared to a centralised, hierarchical campaign structure. This relation holds even when controlling for campaign size and campaign year, as well as a variety of other plausible campaign characteristics. And (2) no evidence is found for interaction effects of other campaign characteristics with non-hierarchical campaign structure in its effect on backlash. This study finds an effect previously unobserved by quantitative methods, thereby contributing to an understanding of a major mechanism of nonviolent resistance. The fruitfulness of a perspective oriented on movement characteristics, especially organisational structures, for enhancing the field’s understanding is supported.