We have already explored the Harlem Renaissance, a period in which African American artists, writers, and intellectuals forged new cultural expressions that challenged white normative standards and reimagined Black identity. In this chapter, we will see how the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s built on that intellectual and cultural groundwork, translating ideas of freedom, self-determination, and racial pride into mass political action. The Civil Rights era was the largest and most sustained movement of popular protest in US history, and it offers readers an opportunity to understand how African Americans mobilized to confront Jim Crow, reframe citizenship, and envision a more just democracy.

In this chapter, we will encounter the multiple ideological currents within the movement: nonviolent civil disobedience, Black nationalism, and Black Power. Figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and grassroots organizations like SNCC exemplified these different approaches. Whereas the Harlem Renaissance sought to assert Black cultural value in a society defined by white supremacy, the Civil Rights era assumed Black political agency and interrogated its implications in a society still dominated by racial hierarchy.

This chapter shows that the material presence of a public gathering is an embodied speech act whose performative effects are conditioned by the social meanings attached to the gathering's physical qualities. Based on the fact that public audiences paid significant attention to the physical elements of the Riots/Uprising and anti-Prop. 187 march, the chapter posits materiality as a criterion of protest. It reconstructs ordinary conventions of protest that concern the material: spatial location and physical peace and order, as well as participants’ racial embodiment. While radical democratic thought holds that popular assemblies can felicitously enact social changes such as constituting the people, this chapter shows that these ordinary conventions, as well as the social meanings that a gathering’s specific location, physical activities, and racializations carry, constrain that performative enactment. The anti-Prop. 187 march was politically legible as an orderly gathering that took place in politically significant areas of Los Angeles. Within the same terms, the Riots/Uprising appeared to be violent, chaotic, and politically senseless, especially given dominant frames of Blackness.

This chapter, the first of Part 5, explores the world Martin Luther King is facing by early March, 1964. His treasured philosophy of nonviolence is teetering. The Civil Rights Bill is facing a near-certain filibuster in the Senate. There are all manner of internal stresses, ranging from his own frenetic schedule, to increasing FBI scrutiny, to a turbulent personal life.

King realizes that he needs one more stage to dramatize racial injustice as the Civil Rights Bill is up for grabs. His staff makes several cases of places that would be suitable for direct action. One of those, pushed by Hosea Williams, is St. Augustine.

Meanwhile, Robert Hayling has begun reaching out to civil rights leaders in search of an organization to back his efforts for equality in the city. On March 6, when King and his SCLC staff are expected at a meeting in Orlando, Hayling drives out to meet them.

Set on March 26, 1964, Chapter 23 depicts two scenes.

One takes place at the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C., where Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. have converged to observe the beginning of the debate on the pivotal Civil Rights Act of 1964. The lobby of the Senate serves as the meeting place for the two leaders. Their interaction is brief, little more than a photo opportunity, but it is rife with symbolism at this incredibly consequential moment in American civil rights. The meeting is the first between Malcolm and Martin. They will never meet again.

The second setting is in St. Augustine, where one of King’s “lieutenants” with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—Hosea Williams—has been dispatched to organize the first wave of SCLC nonviolent action in the city. Williams is introduced to a packed room at the Elk’s Rest by Dr. Robert Hayling, the erstwhile adviser to the local NAACP Youth Council. Hayling has grudgingly accepted nonviolence as a precondition of SCLC’s involvement in the city. Williams’ speech, recorded for posterity by WGBH, is a fiery call to action that electrifies the room.

This chapter summarizes the main findings, arguments, and contributions of the book. It reviews the theoretical arguments and discusses promising avenues for further research on revolution and counterrevolution. Then it explains how the book’s findings speak to a number of scholarly and public debates. First, for scholars of violence and nonviolence, who have argued that unarmed civil resistance is more effective at toppling autocrats than armed conflict, the book raises questions about the tenacity of the regimes established through these nonviolent movements. Second, it speaks to scholarship on democratization, highlighting the important differences between transitions effected through elite pacts versus those brought about through revolutionary mobilization. Third, it offers lessons about how foreign powers can help or hinder the consolidation of new democracies. Next, the chapter discusses implications for Egypt and the broader Middle East, including the possibility that future revolutions might avoid the disappointing fates of the 2011 revolutions. The chapter ends by reflecting on what the book has to say about our current historical moment, when rising rates of counterrevolution appear to be only one manifestation of a broader resurgence of authoritarian populism and reactionary politics worldwide.

Chapter 1 introduces the main arguments, findings, and contributions of the book. Counterrevolution is a subject that has often been overlooked by scholars, even as counterrevolutions have been responsible for establishing some of history’s most brutal regimes, for cutting short experiments in democracy and radical change, and for perpetuating vicious cycles of conflict and instability. The chapter reveals some of the most important statistics from the book’s original dataset of counterrevolution worldwide. These statistics raise a number of puzzling questions, which motivate the theoretical argument about counterrevolutionary emergence and success. After previewing this argument, the chapter discusses the main contributions of the book, including to theories of revolution, democratization, and nonviolence; to ongoing debates about Egypt’s revolution and the failures of the 2011 Arab Spring; and to our understanding of the present-day resurgence of authoritarianism worldwide. It finishes by laying out the multi-method research strategy and providing an overview of the chapters to come.

This chapter problematises popular and Orientalist discourses concerning ‘Islam and Peace’, recognising that both are heterogeneous and contested concepts in the fields of Islamic studies and moral philosophy. It proposes a more fruitful approach founded on systematic philosophical reflection on specific exemplars within their respective cultural and historical contexts.

This chapter analyses the spiritual ideas on universal peace developed by Sri Lankan teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen in terms of their South Asian and North American cultural syncretism and his development of classical Sufi ideas of the microcosmic ‘Perfect Man’ into a globalised but decidedly anti-modern ‘cosmopiety’.

This chapter develops an account of prolific Indian author and peace activist Wahiduddin Khan in terms of his approach to exegesis, his apologetics in relation to the natural sciences, his Islamocentric conception to historical teleology, his approach to political quietism, and his valorisation of the principle of strategic concession.

This chapter traces the development of Iranian Shi’ite revolutionary Ali Shariati in his conception of a nonviolent Islam encompassing humanist, existentialist, and socialist ethics in pursuit of an egalitarian ‘System of Abel’. This is in turn placed in tension with his valorisation of ‘alter-inflicted violence’ as a means to altruistic self-transcendence.

This chapter critiques past attempts at developing models of Islamic nonviolence which rely on key concepts and scriptural loci classici. Instead, it identifies structural commonalities flowing from a classically Islamic approach to ethical evaluation which regards the actor’s dispositional intention [niyyah] as coequal with the criteria of means and ends more commonly discussed in secular writing on nonviolence. The consequences of this are then examined in relation both to their praxis and to their commensurability with dominant secular models.

This chapter comprises interviews with contemporary advocates for Islamic nonviolence concerning their understandings of ‘peace’ as a concept, their views on the moral status of war and violent self-defence, the connection (if any) between peace and justice, the nature of nonviolence in civil, familial, and inter-personal contexts, and the implications of nonviolence towards nature and non-human animals.

This chapter examines the nonviolent projects of ‘Pride of the Afghans’ Indian independence activist Bacha Khan. It engages both with his personal and institutional praxis within their Pashtun cultural context and with the historiographical challenges posed both by his suppression by the state and his proximity to Mahatma Gandhi.

This chapter explores the nonviolence of Senegalese Sufi Amadou Bamba in terms of its critiques of racism and political domination, its pedagogy of productive service, and the relationship between spiritual hierarchy and its apparent ambivalence between absolute nonviolence and defensive warfare.

This chapter investigates the life and ideas of Syrian dissident thinker Jawdat Said, who attempts to balance an absolute moral obligation to bear witness with a systematic rejection of political compulsion through scriptural models from Abel to Bilal ibn Rabah.

Martin Luther King Jr. argues that means and ends must be commensurable. If one wants to bring about a more equitable society, one must do so by equitable means. This means-ends principle is reiterated in the writings of Gandhi and King, but it has often been treated as something mysterious. A pragmatic case can be made for it if we pay attention to the dynamics of communication. Gandhi and King argue for an approach to social conflict that combines compassion for the needs of their opponents with a resolute opposition to the injustices these opponents perpetrate. Respect and respectability without challenge and protest will not contribute to the development of a more equitable society. But neither will challenge and protest without respect and respectability. By attending to how nonviolent direct actionists combine these two pressures, I develop an alternative to the dominant perspectives in communication ethics, but one that shares their concerns for morality, effectiveness, and nonviolence.

Many of the unofficial advocates for states-in-waiting were individuals affiliated or identified with the international peace movement. These transnational advocates often found themselves championing independence struggles in states-in-waiting that were situated within newly decolonized postcolonial nation-states. While some within these postcolonial state governments may themselves have relied on these advocates during their own independence struggles, they opposed such advocacy after they won their independence, since it had the potential to undermine their own state sovereignty. The 1963 Friendship March – launched by the World Peace Brigade, a transnational civil society organization set up to find peaceful solutions to global decolonization, exemplified this contradiction. The Friendship March started in New Delhi, India, and intended to cross the Chinese border in the immediate aftermath of the 1962 Sino-Indian War.