Unit 8.7 — Global Resistance to Established Order After 1900

Topic 8.6 covered the difficult transition from independence to genuine sovereignty. Topic 8.7 broadens the lens beyond formerly colonized states entirely: resistance to established power structures after 1900 wasn't limited to anti-colonial movements — it included challenges to entrenched domestic power within already-independent, even wealthy, states. The exam wants you to recognize that 20th-century resistance drew on a shared toolkit of ideas (socialism, nationalism, feminism, indigenous rights, liberation theology) applied to very different specific targets.

Nonviolent resistance as a transferable method

You've already met Gandhi's satyagraha in Topic 8.5 as a colonial-independence tool — this topic shows the same nonviolent civil-disobedience method transferred directly into domestic struggles against entrenched power within an already-independent country. The American civil rights movement is the exam's clearest case: the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education court decision banned forced racial segregation in US public schools, the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) ended segregated public transit in that city, and the 1963 March on Washington — drawing roughly 250,000 participants demanding jobs and freedom — used mass, organized, nonviolent demonstration to press for civil rights legislation. Martin Luther King Jr. is worth naming directly as the movement's most prominent figure and as a leader who explicitly drew on Gandhi's methods, a genuine, citable case of one resistance movement's tactics diffusing into another decades later and an ocean away.

South Africa: apartheid and the long resistance to it

In South Africa, the white-minority government codified racial segregation into law as apartheid, an entrenched domestic power structure resisted over decades by movements including the African National Congress. Nelson Mandela is the exam's central figure here — imprisoned for over two decades for his opposition to apartheid before his eventual release and apartheid's formal end in the 1990s, making South Africa a case where nonviolent and more confrontational resistance methods combined over a genuinely long time horizon rather than producing quick change.

Armed and violent resistance: the other end of the spectrum

Not all resistance to established power in this period was nonviolent. Armed insurgencies and militant groups — the exam names groups like Peru's Shining Path and, in a later era, Al-Qaeda — pursued their goals through violence rather than civil disobedience, showing the same broad category of "resistance to established order" spanned genuinely opposite tactical approaches depending on the specific movement and context.

Repressive regimes that intensified rather than resolved conflict

A distinct and important case worth naming: some resistance movements were met not with negotiation or reform but with intensified repression under military or authoritarian regimes — Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Francisco Franco in Spain, and Idi Amin in Uganda are the exam's standard named examples of leaders whose response to domestic resistance or political opposition was severe repression rather than accommodation, which frequently escalated conflict rather than resolving it.

Why this matters for the exam

Topic 8.7 rewards recognizing that "resistance to established order" is a single analytical category covering genuinely different targets (colonial rule, domestic racial segregation, authoritarian regimes), genuinely different ideological toolkits (nonviolent civil disobedience, feminism, socialism, armed insurgency), and genuinely different outcomes (the civil rights movement's legislative wins, apartheid's decades-long resistance before ending, repressive regimes that escalated rather than resolved conflict). Keep Gandhi, King, and Mandela together as the exam's three central nonviolent-resistance figures, and know their movements' specific dated milestones precisely.

Sources: Albert.io AP World History Review, Fiveable — Global Resistance to Power Structures.