Anna Ohanyan
In Armenia, a small nation of three million located just south of Russia,
spring has ushered in mass protests. Thousands of people, young and
elderly, women and men, have taken to the streets to rally against the
ruling regime, newly gussied-up in a revamped parliamentary system.
The movement has been challenging outgoing President Serzh
Sargsyan, who took over as prime minister on Tuesday. In his second, and
final term as president, Sargsyan led the effort to replace the
semi-presidential system with a parliamentary one in order to avoid the
term limits set by the constitution.
The move enhanced the powers of the prime minister and
relegated the presidency to a ceremonial role. The president and his
Republican Party argued that this change was necessary in order to
democratise Armenia's political system, insisting that Sargsyan did not
intend to assume the office of prime minister.
With authoritarianism on the rise worldwide, such
constitutional engineering has been a favoured instrument by
authoritarian leaders who wish to consolidate their power. Sargsyan was
successful in usurping power, but with his actions, he also managed to
push thousands to the streets of the country. In Armenia, so confident was the ruling party, that its parliamentary majority granted Sargsyan perpetual
ownership of the hitherto publicly owned presidential residence in
early April; on Thursday, after public outrage, he announced he was
giving up the property.
The protests have been led by opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan,
who has deftly built and maintain a well-networked self-organising
movement across the country. Removing Sargsyan as prime minister has
been the main demand of the protests, but their importance goes beyond
that: It is about preserving democratic institutions and resisting
budding authoritarianism.
A very potent non-violent movement
This recent wave of mass civil disobedience is only the latest
in a long record of peaceful protests over the course of a decade or so.
Indeed, tiny Armenia has become a laboratory of peaceful resistance and
civil society in an increasingly authoritarian part of the world.
This spring's movement, however, is different. It is larger in
scale and is geographically broad. It is organisationally
sophisticated, grassroots-driven, with an extraordinary degree of
self-governance.
Both the movement's leaders and participants have demonstrated a
high level of discipline, and have been quite successful in applying
non-violent protest strategies. Over the years, these protest efforts
have extended both within the country and outside - reaching the
dispersed Armenian diaspora across the globe.
The security implications of this movement are immediate. There
is convincing academic and empirical evidence that non-violence as an
instrument of political action is superior to violence in achieving a
movement's articulated goals. In the case of Armenia, such non-violence
on a large scale is particularly potent and consequential, occurring in a
post-Soviet region plagued by inter-state conflict and violence.
The organic emergence and consolidation of non-violent civil
movements challenges and weakens the political future of warfare as an
instrument of foreign policy. It does so by deepening the norms of
non-violence and by creating capacities for constructive conflict
resolution. Such movements inspire and empower the broader civil
society, and endow broader coalitions a voice in otherwise closed
decisions of war and peace.
Russia vs the West
It is true that external security concerns often fuel internal
democratic declines in nations large and small, democratic and
authoritarian. In the specific case of Armenia, large-scale civil
disobedience and grassroots democracy movements have the potential to
add to the strength of the state by offering the government much-needed
leverage in dealing with hegemonic regional powers in their
neighbourhoods.
There is one catch: It is far from clear whether governments
will choose to embrace the geopolitical leverage offered to them by
their civil societies. In fractured regions such as the South Caucasus,
ruling elites have historically sought such leverage from myriad
external actors, primarily from outside the region.
Governments in fractured regions, struggling with low levels of
internal legitimacy, have been willing partners for external regional
powers. Smaller states pushing back against larger players remain the
exception and not the rule. Non-violent civil action is, contrary to
what these governments believe, a political asset for strong statecraft
in fractured regions. Suppressing it in Armenia will hurt the very
institutional foundation of this very young state.
"Al-Jazeera," April 21, 2018 (https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/potent-protest-movement-emerging-armenia-180419135116999.html)
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