The democratizing qualities of the Palestinian village Bil’in’s civil resistance campaign

Abstract

This paper deals with the quality of civil resistance and, in particular, the democratizing qualities of various civil resistance practices. There is a great amount of research on civil resistance and its capacities to foster social change, and in particular its impact on increased democracy. However, we still have an empirical bias in this research since these studies mainly focus on mass-mobilized breaking resistance. This paper provides an analysis of various civil resistance practices’ democratizing qualities based on a case study – namely the Palestinian village Bil’in’s campaign against the Israeli plans to build a ‘security barrier’‚ through the village’s farmlands. The process of the campaign began in 2002 and lasted until the Supreme Court of Israel’s decision from 2007 to re-route the building of the ‘security barrier’ away from the farmland from was implemented in 2011. Based on a ‘process tracing’ (PT) methodology, an analysis of, primarily, interviews that were made with Bil’in activists and proxy activists (mainly Israelis) is presented, where the tracing underlying mechanisms could explain why the campaign had an impact on democracy. Theoretically, the paper applies the concept of ‘democratizing qualities’ (Munck 2016), as well as the analytical toolbox that is labelled the ABC of civil resistance. The paper will conclude with a presentation of potential causal mechanisms that may explain why the civil resistance campaign impacted on democracy. The guiding overarching research question is: In what ways can different practices of civil resistance have democratizing qualities?