Off-Script

Ukrainian President Yanukovych abandoned his office on Saturday, his regime has collapsed, the protestors have won, and it looks like there's two responses to these events: uncertainty or "so what else is on?"  Ukraine has dropped off CNN.com's front page and "trending" banner, and the last I saw of it was a side feature next to Samsung's new phone and the end of the "Got Milk?" ads the other night.

Meanwhile more scholarly websites are trying to make sense of recent events: the Council for Foreign Relations have a transcript of a teleconference on that topic, and Foreign Affairs has a letter from Kiev that mentions protestors staying put in case their discontent is needed again.  An analysis from Slate makes me glad I didn't try to comment on Ukraine over the weekend, since the author ended up updating it every few hours as the situation went from "the president signed a power sharing deal" to "the president has legged it" to "so who's in charge right now?"

As for me, I'm curious how this will be presented in future international relations textbooks.

For my Peace and Conflict Resolution class I got to read Chenoweth and Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works, which argues that nonviolent campaigns are more effective than violent insurgencies.  The main point is that it's easier for your average oppressed citizen to take to the streets in a demonstration for a few days than it is for him to run off to the hills and join a guerrilla movement, and the revolution that results from such mass, popular efforts will be more durable, more democratic and more peaceful than what results from a revolutionary war. 

There are issues with data - the authors admit that they can't measure the revolutions that never got going for one reason for another, while some from my class raised dubious eyebrows at the graphs and charts used to support the central argument - but I think the book's worth reading just for the case studies.  Four are presented to illustrate the ways nonviolence can work, or not work.

Their best example is the Philippines' "People Power" movement, where the nonviolent demonstrators mobilized the middle class, thus negating their oppressors' claims that the revolutionaries were a communist minority.  The movement also courted defectors from the army or security forces, protecting rebel barracks with praying human shields, while keeping the demonstrations nonviolent.  Ultimately the People Power revolution succeeded in ousting Ferdinand Marcos from power, something Marxist and Islamic guerrillas had been failing to do for years.

That is the only case study where everything went right, however: the Iranian Revolution is listed as an example where the "mass mobilization" and "capture the country's military" went according to plan, only for a lack of cohesion among the resistance to allow an Islamist minority to hijack the revolution and introduce a new kind of tyranny.  The First Intifada shows how such a hijacking can occur even before the revolution happens, where initially successful and sympathetic nonviolent protests were derailed when the PLO ran in and tried to turn it into an armed uprising.  And then there's the failed Burmese uprising, where not only was the regime able to successfully quash any cohesion among the resistance, but a would-be rebel leader explicitly told her followers not to try and recruit the military to their cause, and continued to praise the armed forces butchering her countrymen.

Ukraine doesn't quite fit any of these molds, and it's probably a stretch to call the recent revolution "nonviolent," what with the riots and burning buildings and battles between police and protesters.  The Ukrainian military didn't get involved, and eventually the police withdrew and went home, so I suppose that might count as the revolution "capturing" the security forces of the regime - it's more important that they not fire on protestors than it is that they take part in the marches, I'd wager.

Russia eventually withdrew its support from the Yanukovych regime when it became clear that it was losing control of the country, much like how increasing international pressure and Marcos' dwindling supports forced America to tell its former champion of democracy to give up power in the Philippines.  But Marcos and Yanukovych left power a little differently - the former defiantly renewed his oath of office even while the opposition was setting up a parallel government, but when the last state-controlled TV station fell to rebels, that combined with US pressure and Marcos' hemorrhaging support drove the dictator to negotiate for his flight from the country.

In Ukraine's case, Yanukovych actually signed a power-sharing deal that would have let him stay in power, only to be threatened with an "armed surge" from the protestors unless he resigned, which led to his flight.  This doesn't fit the narrative of "dictator bows to overwhelming nonviolent pressure," plus we don't know where the guy is, and he's still vowed to keep fighting somehow.

There is an element of mass mobilization in that even Yanukovych's party turned on him, declaring him and his cronies to be corrupt criminals, but this of course raises concerns about the unity of the post-revolutionary government, or that extremists might be able to hijack the revolution.  Already there's a couple of factions among Ukraine's would-be reformers, and though Russia loves to throw around the word "fascist" without a trace of irony, one of the Ukrainian minority parties is descended from Nazi-aligned partisans and has talked about a "Jewish-Russian mafia" controlling their country.  And of course, discontent with the former president notwithstanding, Ukraine is hardly united when it comes to deciding where to go from here.  Plenty of people would be happy to have an authoritarian Russian puppet if he were less corrupt than the last guy.

So a qualitative comparison to historical cases isn't exceptionally useful, in other words.  The most we can say is that the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution is sort of like a couple of past revolutions that ended up going in very different directions.  The good news is that Ukraine gets to make its own path, the bad news is that we don't know where that path is going.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than something quantitative, where I'd stick a bunch of variables into STATA and say with "confidence" that there's a 45.992% chance of enduring democracy and an ERROR percent chance that things will get worse.