Fight or Flight: How Authoritarian Leaders Respond to Nonviolent Resistance Movements
Journal: Journal of Perpetrator Research
Year: 2025

Nonviolent resistance scholarship predominantly focuses on the structural opportunities within a country and the choices of dissidents, while the considerations of the opposing authoritarian regime are largely overlooked. We aim to create a multi-level theoretical framework that can be used to analyse why some authoritarian leaders cede power when protests commence while others use violence. We argue that, given the high costs of repression, it is only used if authoritarian leaders deem it absol