A paper by Clotilde Festuot, Legal & Policy Assistant
The release of UNPO’s policy paper, “Non-Violent Struggles for People’s Rights: Lessons from History and Today,” arrives at a critical juncture in global politics. Drawing on insights from the 2025 International Day of Non-Violence webinar, this analysis examines why nonviolent resistance has become not merely a moral preference but a strategic imperative for unrepresented nations and peoples navigating an increasingly hostile geopolitical landscape.
Introduction: The Paradox of Power in the 21st Century
The contemporary international system presents unrepresented nations and peoples with a profound paradox. At precisely the moment when technological connectivity promises unprecedented opportunities for mobilisation and advocacy, the architecture of state repression has evolved to meet (and often exceed) these opportunities. Digital surveillance, transnational authoritarianism, the weaponisation of counter-terrorism frameworks, and the selective instrumentalisation of self-determination rhetoric by states have fundamentally altered the environment in which struggles for collective rights unfold.
UNPO’s newly released policy paper emerges from this context, synthesising perspectives from movements in Tibet, East Turkestan, West Papua, and Assyria to argue that nonviolence represents far more than ethical positioning. Rather, it presents a novel perspective, one that acknowledges asymmetries of military power while leveraging legitimacy, narrative control, and international law. The paper’s main contribution is to reframe nonviolence not as constraint but as capacity: the deliberate construction of political agency under conditions designed to foreclose it.
This analysis examines three interconnected dimensions of that argument. First, it explores how contemporary forms of state repression, particularly digital surveillance and legal warfare, necessitate rather than merely enable nonviolent approaches. Second, it investigates how nonviolence functions as a mode of political production, generating institutions, identities, and governance structures that enact self-determination without requiring immediate sovereignty. Finally, it considers the geopolitical conditions that make nonviolence the most viable pathway for sustainable change, even as those same conditions make its practice increasingly perilous.
From Repression to Illegibility: Why Violence No Longer Computes
The traditional calculation underlying armed resistance, that asymmetric warfare can impose sufficient costs on occupying or repressive states to compel negotiation, has been fundamentally undermined by developments in state capacity over the past two decades. This shift is not merely quantitative (states possess more weapons, more soldiers, more resources) but qualitative: the nature of contemporary repression renders violent resistance strategically illegible within the frameworks that govern international politics.
Consider the progression documented in the policy paper’s analysis of how states frame and outlaw nonviolent dissent. Governments have become adept at collapsing the distinction between peaceful advocacy and existential threat, deploying what we might call a discursive strategy of “semantic encirclement.” Movements are preemptively labeled as separatist, terrorist, or instruments of foreign interference before they can establish independent narratives. Spain‘s prosecution of Catalan independence organisers under sedition charges despite the movement’s explicitly nonviolent character; Indonesia’s treatment of Morning Star flag displays as treasonous acts; Pakistan’s designation of peaceful Balochi activism as sedition, these examples illustrate a pattern in which the state’s discursive power precedes and enables its coercive power.
What makes this dynamic particularly insidious for unrepresented peoples is that violent resistance validates the very frames states deploy. When a movement engages in armed struggle, it provides empirical content to accusations of terrorism or separatist violence, allowing states to reposition repression as legitimate security response. The international community, operating within a state-centric system that privileges sovereignty and territorial integrity, typically sides with established governments when violence enters the equation, regardless of the underlying fairness of a people’s claims.
The policy paper’s examination of militarisation in regions like Balochistan, West Papua, and northern Myanmar reveals how this dynamic operates on the ground. Military occupation creates conditions in which any form of resistance (peaceful assembly, cultural expression, land defence) can be met with lethal force under emergency laws or counter-insurgency frameworks. Yet precisely because the military apparatus is omnipresent, armed resistance becomes ineffective rather than strategic. The overwhelming coercive advantage possessed by states means that violent confrontation produces not negotiating leverage but rather comprehensive defeat, often accompanied by collective punishment of entire communities.
Here lies the first strategic argument for nonviolence: it refuses the terms of engagement that states have designed to ensure movement failure. By maintaining discipline in the face of provocation, by documenting rather than reciprocating violence, nonviolent movements preserve a crucial distinction between legitimate claims for rights and security threats that violent resistance inherently collapses. This preservation is not merely semantic; it determines whether international actors, civil society organisations, and potential allies can engage with a movement without triggering their own diplomatic or legal exposure.
Digital Repression and the Transformation of Resistance
The policy paper’s analysis of digital surveillance and transnational repression introduces a second dimension of strategic necessity. Technology has fundamentally altered the environment within which resistance operates, creating both unprecedented opportunities and novel vulnerabilities that privilege nonviolent approaches.
The Chinese state’s surveillance apparatus in East Turkestan represents the apex of this transformation. Biometric data collection, AI-driven behavioural monitoring, predictive policing algorithms, and the integration of digital and physical control mechanisms have created what scholars call a “total information awareness” system. Under such conditions, the operational security required for armed resistance becomes nearly impossible to maintain. Cell structures can be penetrated through communications monitoring; weapon caches detected through transportation surveillance; recruitment patterns identified through social network analysis; and planning disrupted through preemptive arrest based on algorithmic risk assessment. Crucially, as the Uyghur experience demonstrates, this surveillance extends beyond territorial boundaries through transnational repression. The 2025 draft Ethnic Unity Law”s extraterritorial ambitions—extending ideological control to diaspora communities, academic discourse abroad, and online activities globally—illustrates how digital infrastructure enables states to project power across borders in ways that traditional military force cannot. Uyghur activists in Europe, North America, and Australia face cyber-attacks, family harassment, and coordinated disinformation campaigns that would be impossible to sustain without digital connectivity.
Yet this same technological landscape creates strategic opportunities that nonviolent movements are uniquely positioned to exploit. The paper’s discussion of digital resistance highlights how documentation, testimony, and narrative dissemination through encrypted platforms, decentralised networks, and diaspora coordination constitute forms of resistance that are simultaneously more sustainable and more impactful than armed struggle under conditions of total surveillance.
The Tibetan movement’s evolution illustrates this adaptive capacity. Faced with comprehensive censorship and monitoring inside Tibet, the movement has constructed what might be understood as a “digital government-in-exile”—a framework for governance enabled by technology rather than territory. This includes online platforms for democratic participation, virtual classrooms for language preservation, encrypted channels for testimony documentation, and social media campaigns that mobilize international solidarity. These practices transform diaspora displacement into distributed governance, enabling a form of political continuity that territorial occupation cannot fully suppress.
This adaptation reflects a deeper strategic insight: in an information-saturated global environment, narrative power and moral legitimacy constitute forms of leverage that can rival military capacity. Nonviolent movements generate content (images of peaceful protesters facing armed security forces, testimonies of repression, documentation of cultural vitality under threat) that circulates through international media and social networks in ways that violent resistance cannot match. The asymmetry here favours the ostensibly weaker party: a single video of disproportionate state violence can mobilise more international pressure than months of armed insurgency, which typically generates sympathy for state security concerns rather than solidarity with resistance movements.
The West Papuan case exemplifies how exile advocacy and digital resistance can compensate for severe domestic repression. With journalists largely excluded from West Papua, communications blackouts routines, and peaceful activism criminalised, the movement’s exile institutions (human rights documentation centres, diaspora radio programming, advocacy networks) function as alternative public spheres that keep the struggle visible internationally. Digital platforms enable coordination across dispersed communities, preservation of cultural memory, and direct communication with international actors that would be impossible through armed resistance, which typically operates in secrecy and generates information vacuums that states exploit.
Nonviolence as Political Production: Building Nations Without States
Perhaps the most analytically significant contribution of the policy paper is its reconceptualisation of nonviolence from resistance strategy to mode of political production. The traditional framing treats nonviolence primarily as a method for opposing oppression that exert pressure on existing power structures. The UNPO analysis, drawing particularly on Tibetan and assyrian experiences, suggests a more generative understanding: nonviolence as the construction of alternative institutions, identities, and governance structures that enact self-determination in the present rather than deferring it to some future moment of sovereignty.
Tibert’s “democracy without a state” represents the paradigmatic case. Since 1960, Tibetans in exile have maintained elected parliamentary institutions; since 2001, they have directly elected their executive leader through universal suffrage. The Central Tibetan Administration provides education, healthcare, and cultural preservation services to Tibetan communities globally. These are not merely symbolic gestures or perpetrator exercises for eventual statehood; they constitute the actual practice of self-governance, the performance of political capacity that refutes Chinese claims that Tibetans are incapable of self-rule. The strategic brilliance of this approach lies in its reversal of conventional sequencing. Rather than first achieving sovereignty and then constructing democratic institutions, Tibetan exiles have built the institutions first, using them to sustain collective identity and demonstrate governmental capacity under conditions of statelessness. This performative dimension is crucial: by enacting democracy, Tibetans constitute themselves as a demos, a self-determining political community, regardless of international recognition. The very fact of these institutions’ continuous operation over six decades becomes evidence of national vitality and political coherence.
What makes this possible is the movement’s foundational commitment to nonviolence. Armed resistance movements, by necessity, prioritise military effectiveness of democratic processes, operational security over transparency, hierarchical command over participatory decision-making. Nonviolent movements, by contrast, can embed democratic practice within resistance itself. Elections, deliberation, public debate, institutional rotation—these practices become simultaneously means of organising and expressions of the values that motivate organisation.
The Assyrian experience extends this logic into cultural and educational domains. Facing existential threats to linguistic and civilisational continuity, Assyrians have constructed elaborate networks of schools, publishing initiatives, cultural institutions, and now digital platforms that preserve and transmit identity across generations and borders. These institutions are not adjuncts to political struggle but constitute the struggle’s core: maintaining collective existence despite dispersion, marginalisation, and periodic violence. The policy paper’s analysis suggests that these practices exemplify what might be called “prefigurative politics”—the creation, within spaces of resistance, of the social relations and institutional forms that movements ultimately seek to establish. This reframing has profound strategic implications. It means that “success” need not be defined solely in terms of state recognition or territorial sovereignty, though these remain important goals. Success can also be measured in sustained collective existence, institutional continuity, cultural vitality, and the reproduction of political agency across generations.
Moreover, this mode of political production strengthens movements’ international standing in ways that armed resistance typically undermines. Functioning educational systems, democratic procedures, cultural institutions, and civil society organisations provide concrete evidence that a people possess the capacity for self-governance. They generate relationships with international partners that build constituencies for a movement’s cause. They create economic activity, intellectual production, and social goods that benefit not only the immediate community but also host societies, generating pragmatic as well as principles support.
Geopolitical Constraint and Strategic Adaptation
The policy paper’s examination of the current geopolitical moment reveals why these considerations have intensified. The international architecture established after World War II, premised on norms of self-determination and human rights, has faced systematic erosion through authoritarian resurgence, geopolitical polarisation, and the selective instrumentalisation of international law by powerful states. This erosion manifests in several interlocking trends. First, major powers (particularly China and Russia, but also increasingly democratic states) have prioritised stability, sovereignty, and counter-terrorism over human rights and self-determination when these principles conflict. Second, multilateral institutions have been weakened through strategic non-compliance, funding cuts, and the expansion of veto-wielding coalitions that block accountability mechanisms. Third, the post-Cold War moment of liberal ascendancy, during which some unrepresented peoples achieved recognition or autonomy, have definitely ended, replaced by a more transactional and state-centric order.
For unrepresented peoples, these shifts produce a “strategic closure”: the narrowing of pathways through which grievances can be legitimately expressed and remedied. Armed resistance, which was already a fraught option given military asymmetries, becomes even less viable as states frame all international dissent through security lenses that international actors increasingly accept. Violent tactics provide justification for comprehensive repression while triggering international indifference or even support for state counter-measures.
Nonviolence, in this context, represents not naive moralism but hard-headed realism. It is an acknowledgment that in a state-centric international system, non-state actors must compete in arenas where they possess comparative advantage. Military force is not such an arena—states will always dominate kinetic conflict. But moral legitimacy, narrative coherence, institutional credibility, and international law remain domains where unrepresented peoples can assert claims that states cannot simply suppress through violence. This is not a claim that international law consistently protects unrepresented peoples; the record demonstrates it frequently does not. Rather, it is a recognition that nonviolent movements can deploy legal and normative arguments in ways that violent movements cannot, preserving options that armed resistance forecloses.
Conclusion: Strategic Nonviolence and the Future of Self-Determination
The release of UNPO’s policy paper makes legible a set of strategic insights that have emerged gradually through decades of practice by unrepresented nations and peoples. Nonviolence, in the contemporary geopolitical environment, is neither passive nor merely principled. It is a calculated response to the asymmetries that structure international politics, the technological systems that enable unprecedented surveillance, and the discursive frameworks through which states delegitimise dissent.
The analysis presented here suggests three core strategic arguments for nonviolence that emerge from the paper’s synthesis. First, violent resistance has become operationally untenable under conditions of digital surveillance and overwhelming state military superiority, while also providing justification for the very repression it seeks to oppose. Second, nonviolence enables forms of political production that sustain collective identity and enact self-determination even without sovereignty. Third, in a state-centric international system, nonviolent movements preserve access to legal, normative, and diplomatic mechanisms that violent resistance necessarily abandons.
These arguments do not deny the extraordinary difficulties that nonviolent movements face, which the policy paper documents extensively. State violence against peaceful protesters, surveillance of civil society, criminalisation of advocacy, transnational repression of diaspora communities; these realities impose severe costs on those who maintain nonviolent discipline. Nor does this analysis suggest that nonviolence guarantees success in conventional terms of achieving statehood or even recognition; many movements may sustain themselves for generations without such outcomes. Rather, the claim is that for unrepresented peoples operating under contemporary conditions, nonviolence represents the most viable pathway for sustainable resistance that preserves both moral legitimacy and political agency. It is a strategy that acknowledges constraints while creating capacities, that turns vulnerability into organisation, and that transforms the necessity of operating without state power into innovative forms of political production.
As global authoritarianism intensifies, as surveillance proliferates, and as geopolitical competition overrides human rights considerations, the space for all forms of resistance will continue to narrow. In this environment, the sophisticated strategic nonviolence documented in UNPO’s policy paper offers not a guarantee for liberation but a methodology for sustaining struggle across generations. For peoples whose very existence is contested, such sustenance is itself a form of victory, and nonviolence remains the most effective means of achieving it.
