Last year many said Syria was proof that nonviolent struggle could not overthrow a truly ruthless dictator — as if the likes of Mubarak, Marcos and Milosevic were bastions of civility.
Never mind that the latter two ordered their armed forces to fire upon unarmed protestors just like Assad, only to find the generals, thanks to a range of tactics from the revolutionaries, refusing to carry them out. No doubt Mubarak would have tried the same but the Egyptian army had made it clear early on it would refuse to do so.
There were a number of weaknesses in the strategic choices being made by the Syrian democracy movement. The almost exclusive use of street demonstrations was an admirable show of defiance and courage but it made it easier for the regime to arrest and later violently repress the participants.
Unlike Egypt and almost all other successful revolutions, there was a dearth of alternative tactics aimed at mass participation in a dispersed form (which is much harder to crack down on), such as labour strikes and boycotts.
It was as if the Syrians, in trying to capture the momentum of the Arab Spring, looked at Egypt and saw only Tahrir Square, and not the wide range of tactics and many years of struggle that predated those incredible 17 days. If so, they did no worse than the vast majority of the world's media.
Nevertheless, as the nonviolent movement came under sustained violent repression, some people inside Syria decided to take up arms. In doing so, they have unwittingly opened a Pandora's Box.
Violence has its own internal logic and momentum. Although in cases like Syria it is taken up in response to a perceived failure of nonviolent struggle and to widespread violent repression by the regime, violent insurgencies radically increase the rate of civilian and movement actor casualties.
This is because insurgent violence makes it much easier for the regime to increase its repression of even the nonviolent parts of the movement while maintaining legitimacy among its support base and neutrals.
Violent struggles often draw in outside powers, through material assistance, provision of weapons or other supplies, and sometimes through direct military support. Of course, these outside powers bring their own agendas, which rarely align with those of the original pro-democracy movement leaders.
The Syrian conflict now has active participation from the governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States. Iran and Israel are also posturing, threatening direct military intervention to prevent their enemies gaining the upper hand.
And in the Middle East, 'regional powers' also include al Qaeda, which has a persistent tendency to show up wherever there is violent conflict and throw its own incendiary cocktail into the mix. In the case of Syria, this complicates matters for the likes of the US government, who want to support the insurgents but do not want al Qaeda to benefit from the conflict.
Added to these factors is the significant ethnic and religious polarisation of Syria's population. The Assad regime represents the minority Alawites, who make up almost all of the regime's 'pillars of support' (e.g. the military, judiciary, senior government officials, et al.). Most people in this group believe they have no future without him.
Indeed, some parts of the Free Syrian Army have begun summarily executing important Alawite families seen as backing the regime, further entrenching this polarisation and making it impossible for more moderate leaders to reach out to these pillars of support to assure them they have a role to play in a post-Assad Syria. This dynamic is entirely consistent with violent struggles elsewhere.
Last year, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan published a ground-breaking study Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic on Nonviolent Struggle, comparing violent and nonviolent struggles to overthrow authoritarian governments and foreign occupations.
Their comprehensive analysis of 323 campaigns from 1900–2006 found that nonviolent struggle was twice as likely to succeed as violence in achieving movement goals. They also found that successful nonviolent struggles were ten times as likely to lead to reasonably robust democracies as successful violent campaigns, and 50 per cent less likely to fall into civil war over the ensuing ten years.
And they found that the 'strategic advantage' of nonviolent struggle was increasing over time, especially after the end of the Cold War, and is present even against the most powerful and violent regimes.
In looking for the contributors to success, Chenoweth and Stephan found that the greatest single indicator of success was participation rate. Here, nonviolent struggle has a clear advantage: almost everyone can participate in street demonstrations, labour strikes and boycotts, but only a few can and will take up arms.
Furthermore, the addition of a violent 'wing', as the Free Syrian Army started out, has been shown to decrease participation by nonviolent actors. We see this in Syria where street demonstrations and the like have disappeared, with everyone too afraid to step outside. Thus the nonviolent part of the revolution has been completely sidelined and the likelihood of a democratic outcome becomes ever more remote.
There is some prospect (but no guarantee) that the civil war could end Assad's rule. But both history and the myriad local factors give us no reason to hope that such an outcome would lead to a democratic, or even significantly less authoritarian, regime in Syria.
Justin Whelan has been researching and teaching about nonviolent social movements for the past eight years. His Masters thesis examined the anti-war movement in Australia in the lead up to the Iraq War. Justin has written articles on a range of public policy and justice issues in both peer review and popular journals, and appeared on ABC Sunday Nights with John Cleary as a commentator on nonviolent protest.