Civil Disobedience Across Contexts: Gandhi’s Methods and Eastern European Resistance Movements

By Parvesh KUMAR, DAKSH

Abstract
This paper looks at how civil disobedience was practised by Mahatma Gandhi and how the non-violence strategy paralleled or influenced twentieth-century peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, such as the Solidarity Movement in Poland, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the Peaceful Revolution in East Germany. In a qualitative historical-comparative design, the study uses the primary sources of Gandhi, movement documents and secondary sources of academic literature to determine strategic similarities and differences between selected resistance movements by employing a structured case study approach. The study shows many conceptual and strategic parallels, especially in the realms of nonviolent discipline, mass civilian mobilisation, withdrawal of consent from oppressive authority and building alternative democratic institutions. Gene Sharp’s theory of non-violent action emerges as a critical intellectual bridge between Eastern European dissident practice and the Gandhian theory. Although based on three cases and mainly secondary sources, pertinent to in authoritarian contexts as a historically proven way
to achieve democratic transition that can be characterised as disciplined nonviolent resistance. This paper seeks to fill the research void by exploring the topic of civil disobedience practiced by Gandhi in relation to the experiences of Eastern Europe by using a comparative analysis approach.

Keywords: Civil disobedience, Satyagraha, nonviolent resistance, Eastern Europe, democratic transition, Gandhi