Civil resistance, which has occurred in various forms throughout history, has become particularly prominent in the past hundred years. Three great overlapping causes—decolonization, democratization, and racial equality—have been ad-vanced by campaigns of civil resistance characterized by extensive use of non-violent action. So have many other causes: workers’ rights, protection of the environment, gender equality, religious and indigenous rights, defence of national cultures and political systems against foreign encroachments, and opposition to wars and weaponry. Civil resistance was one factor in the ending of communist party rule in many countries in 1989–91, and hence in ending the Cold War. The world today has been shaped signiWcantly by this mode of political action. However, understanding exactly how civil resistance has shaped the world is a challenge. The explorations in this book are based on two core propositions. First, that civil resistance cannot be considered in isolation from all the other factors of power, domestic and foreign, civil and military, which help to determine out-comes. And second, that civil resistance, while it has had many successes, can sometimes contribute to adverse, or at least ambiguous, outcomes. The very question of what constitutes success or failure may have no immediate or obvious answer. There have been episodes—as in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet-led intervention in 1968—in which the cause could easily seem to have been lost, yet ultimately the reverberations of an apparent failure contributed, twenty-one years later and in diVerent circumstances, to a successful transfer from commun-ist party rule. In other cases there have been apparent successes—as in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004—where subsequent political developments have dis-appointed many of the hopes of the demonstrators.