Spiritual Resistance

Although the Great Unity Herald was the Manchukuo State Council's official newspaper, hundreds of works of resistance literature were published in four supplements, where intellectuals wrote their history and expressed a spirit of resistance via literary channels. Supplements to the Great Unity Herald demonstrate strong deviations from political and cultural identities fostered by the Manchukuo state. This study excavates and analyses supplements and works of resistance literature, finding that Manchukuo authorities oppressed at least 49 editors, journalists, and authors, resulting in arrest, execution, or forced exile for the majority. With support of resistance organizations, and despite official oppression, a prevalent phenomenon of divergence from state narratives developed in supplements within Manchukuo's Chinese newspapers.

Reconceptualizing resistance organizations and outcomes: Introducing the Revolutionary and Militant Organizations dataset (REVMOD)

In recent years, scholars of various forms of conflict involving revolutionary and militant organizations (such as terrorism, civil war, and nonviolent contestation) recognized that arbitrary organizational categories and typologies often leave large-N studies incomplete and biased. In moving away from nominal categorical boundaries that produce such selection biases and looking to a more generalized conception of resistance organizations, I constructed an original dataset that aims to bridge the gap between conflict literatures. Transcending traditional classifications, the Revolutionary and Militant Organizations dataset (REVMOD) consists of over 500 resistance organizations operative sometime between the years 1940 and 2014 and includes a diverse array of types of resistance organizations – many of which utilize a multitude of tactics, operate in various conflict contexts, and/or confront numerous target types. The dataset documents organizational attributes, allies, and adversaries at annual intervals (organization-years), making reliable time-series analyses possible. Tracking variables like organizational outcome-goal type and degree of achievement, political capacity, leader/s, constituent identity group, violence and demonstration levels, size, organization aliases, and several others, REVMOD breaks new ground in the collection of information on resistance organizations and can spur countless studies. A preliminary data analysis demonstrates that differences in organizational political capacity explain variation in resistance outcomes generally and in particular contexts such as civil war, terrorism, and nonviolent revolutions. REVMOD provides a unique opportunity to develop a new research paradigm for resistance studies that employs large-N empirical analyses to uncover generalities between different forms of political contention in the contemporary era, as well as to better understand why and how distinct resistance processes may produce specific outcomes.

Constituency and Leadership in the Evolution of Resistance Organizations

This chapter examines the way old and new movement organizations addressed strategic dilemmas regarding constituency and leadership in the Trump Era. This chapter examines two case organizations to illustrate how long-standing and new organizations grappled with two particular challenges: (1) How would they define their constituencies, and what is the extent to which they will put questions of race at the center (or not)? And (2) Will they invest resources in leadership development, and how will that investment be balanced with strategies to mobilize “at scale”? The cases are ISAIAH, a long-standing faith-based community organization in Minnesota, and Indivisible, a new national organization that emerged after the 2016 election. This chapter thus illuminates the way two organizations reacted to changing political conditions in the Trump Era and the key strategic dilemmas that emerged.

Resistance

This chapter examines resistance as a Jewish survival strategy during the Holocaust. Jewish resistance has historically been of interest to Holocaust scholars, mainly due to the desire to counter accusations that Jews were passive, complacent, and went “like lambs to the slaughter.” Holocaust historians, especially those based in Israel, have explored the Jews' resistance to Nazi persecution. They argue that armed resistance was infrequent, but equating resistance with violence is unnecessarily restrictive, and that the Jews had almost unanimously engaged in amidah (“standing up against” in Hebrew), or unarmed resistance. The chapter looks at Jewish resistance organizations in the ghettos of Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok and suggests that people with a history of pre–World War II political activism were significantly overrepresented in the resistance. It explains why some resistance groups failed early on, while others managed to put up a sustained fight.