During times of injustice, some individuals or groups courageously resist maltreatment of all people, regardless of backgrounds. Using various case studies, this book introduces readers to the broad spectrum of courageous resistance and provides a framework for analyzing the factors that motivate and sustain opposition to human rights violations.

With so much evil in the world, it is of great importance to see the power of goodness. This important, well-written book gives compelling, emotionally engaging examples, and provides understanding of the roots of courageous resistance to social injustice by individuals and groups. It shows how people's values, their sense of effectiveness, their connections to other individuals, groups and institutions motivate them and enable them to act when members of some group are harmed or a community is threatened. The book offers powerful guidance and inspiration to empower ourselves, join with others, and become actors. Courageous Resistance is a valuable contribution to creating a better world. - Ervin Staub, author of The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence and The Psychology of Good and Evil: Why Children, Adults and Groups Help and Harm Others "This book is an especially welcome text for those teaching about human rights abuses. For those who study grave injustices such as human rights abuses, there is often a sense of despair and hopelessness regarding what people can and have done done to each other. Uniquely, what this book offers is hope. Pulling together research from multiple fields and providing a needed integrated interdisciplinary approach, this book explains how and when people choose to resist injustice. Drawing on rich case studies ranging from Rwanda to Nazi Germany, it builds a compelling and theoretically informed argument for understanding how ordinary people can and do resist injustices of all types as individuals and groups and through institutions." - Kathryn Sikkink, Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota Courgeous Resistance , remarkable in so many ways, is a major contribution to peace, conflict, and nonviolence studies, focusing on strategies for peacemaking employed by 'ordinary people' in extraordinary circumstances. Equally valuable are the psychological insights the book offers toward our understanding of how individuals in similar circumstances respond differently." - Michael True, Emeritus Professor, Assumption College, on the board of the International Peace Research Association Foundation, and Author of People Power: Fifty Peacemakers and Their Communities ' Courageous Resistance offers fresh confirmation that unjust rule and even violent repression can be resisted and eventually overturned, through nonviolent action by individuals and organized campaigns. It is a distinctive contribution to our understanding of this crucial form of political and social power that all people possess.' - Jack Duvall, President, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, co-author of A Force More Powerful