Fight or Flight: How Authoritarian Leaders Respond to Nonviolent Resistance Movements

Nonviolent resistance scholarship predominantly focuses on the structural opportunities within a country and the choices of dissidents, while the considerations of the opposing authoritarian regime are largely overlooked. We aim to create a multi-level theoretical framework that can be used to analyse why some authoritarian leaders cede power when protests commence while others use violence. We argue that, given the high costs of repression, it is only used if authoritarian leaders deem it absolutely necessary, when they estimate the costs and backlash to be manageable, and when they have the resources. What the costs are, where the authoritarian leader gets their resources from, and what impacts their decision-making will be analysed on three levels. At the macro level, we will focus on the role of the international community, at the meso level on the regime, and at the micro level on the decision-making process. Finally, the interaction between these levels, and between the authoritarian leader and the nonviolent resistance movement, will be discussed. This framework serves as a heuristic tool that can be used to systematically analyse the choices of authoritarian leaders that are confronted with nonviolent resistance, highlighting which factors are important in their decision whether or not to use repression. To illustrate the function of the theoretical framework as a heuristic tool, we will apply it to the uprisings in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and in Belarus in 2020.