Who Overturns Nonviolent Revolutions?

This project examines why organizations who participated in successful civil resistance later overturn democracy

Overview

Why do organizations that participated in pro-democracy civil resistance campaigns later overturn the very democracy that they fought to achieve? In this project we seek to understand this puzzling outcome.

Methods

For this project we have created a global dataset of attempts to overturn democracy in civil resistance transitions, as well as a dataset recording the post-civil resistance campaign behavior of all organizations that the NAVCO 2.1 dataset records as having participated in a successful civil resistance campaign.

Funding

This research was supported by generous internal funding through the University of Texas at Dallas’s Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) and political science department special research funds (affectionately referred to as the Brunell fund).

Outputs

• The Resistance Overturning Attempts Dataset (ROAD)
• Naela Elmore, Kashmiri Medhi, Giuseppe Peressotti, and Jonathan Pinckney. 2026. “Mapping the ROAD to Democracy: A Global Dataset of Overturning Attempts and Organizations in Civil Resistance Transitions.” Journal of Peace Research
• Giuseppe Peressotti, Naela Elmore, Kashmiri Medhi, and Jonathan Pinckney. “Watch Your Back: Identifying Overturning Organizations in Civil Resistance Transitions.” Manuscript in Progress