83 4 COMPETING THEORIES OF NONVIOLENT POLITICS KARUNA MANTENA Nonviolent political action is a distinctive genre of political pro- test identifed most closely with mass disobedience and radical acts of non-cooperation. As a self-conscious form of political action, it is primarily a twentieth-century invention. While instances and ideas of conscientious dissent and disobedience, non-resistance and passive resistance, as well as contentious politics in the form of boycotts, strikes, and work stoppages have longer histories and genealogies, it was M. K. Gandhi’s innovations that originated the modern theory and practice of nonviolent politics. 1 The name Gandhi designated to signal the novelty on nonviolent politics was the neologism satyagraha, which in the midcentury came to be translated as nonviolent direct action. Today, it is commonly referred to as nonviolent resistance or civil resistance. In the century that has passed since Gandhi’s frst mass satya- graha campaigns, activists have emulated and adapted nonviolent protest in various global settings, most prominently in the midcen- tury US Civil Rights Movement and in anti-authoritarian struggles from the 1980s to the Arab Spring. 2 In its globalization, how- ever, the meaning and practice of nonviolence has signifcantly changed. One especially notable development has been the rise to prominence of the school of strategic nonviolence. A key feature of classical nonviolence, associated most prominently with Gan- dhi and Martin Luther King, was the claim that nonviolent direct action was both morally and practically superior to violence in wag- ing political confict, overcoming oppression and injustice, and