GuruDrew: A fine source for current news and thought regarding Nonviolent Revolution is the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (www.nonviolent-conflict.org/). On a related subject, I also suggest "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom" (athousandnations.com/). And now, Wikipedia: A nonviolent revolution is a revolution using mostly nonviolent protest against governments seen as entrenched and authoritarian to advocate democracy, liberalism or national independence in their nation. Nonviolent revolution is possible despite the controlling government taking brutal measures against protesters; the commonly held belief that most revolutions which have happened in dictatorial regimes were bloody or violent uprisings is not born out by historical analysis. Nonviolent revolutions in the 20th century increasingly became more successful and more common, especially as Cold War political alliances which supported status quo governance waned.

In the 1970s and 1980s, thinkers in the Soviet Union and other socialist dictatorships started strengthened the civil resistance and samizdat expanded. Two major revolutions during the 1980s strongly influenced political movements that followed. The first was the 1986 overthrow of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, from which the term people power became widely used, especially in Hispanic and Asian nations.

Three years later, the Revolutions of 1989 that ousted socialist dictatorships in the Eastern Block reinforced the concept (with the notable exception of the notoriously bloody Romanian Revolution), beginning with the victory of Solidarity opposition in that year's Polish legislative elections. The Revolutions of 1989 provided the template for the so-called color revolutions in mainly post-communist states, which use a color or flower as a symbol and named after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. In December 1989, inspired by the Eastern Block revolutions, the Mongolian Democratic Union (MDU) organized popular street protests and hunger strikes against the socialist dictatorship.

In 1990, thinkers in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic started civil resistance against the dictatorship, but was initially crushed by Red Army in the Black January massacre. Recent nonviolent revolutions include the Orange Revolution, which was highlighted by a series of acts of civil disobedience, sit-ins, and general strikes organized by the opposition movement.

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