AMSCO 8.7 Global Resistance to Established Power Structure Notes

Overview

AMSCO Topic 8.7, "Global Resistance to Established Power Structures," covers how individuals, groups, and states challenged existing political order after 1900, from Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns to terrorist groups like Shining Path and al-Qaeda. The chapter (AMSCO p. 599-604) sits near the end of Unit 8 (Cold War and Decolonization, 1900-present) and shows the flip side of the unit's wars: some people resisted conflict peacefully, while others, including militarized states, made conflicts worse. The big idea to hold onto is that resistance took three main forms: nonviolence, violence against civilians, and state crackdowns backed by military power.

Timeline of Global Resistance to Power Structures. Image courtesy of Riya Patel.

Nonviolent Resistance as a Path to Change

Three movements led by visionary leaders proved that nonviolence could actually overturn entrenched power. These three names show up constantly on the AP World exam, so know what each one resisted and how.

Mohandas Gandhi

• Led nonviolent marches, boycotts, and fasts against British colonial rule in India.
• India won independence in 1947. This connects directly to the decolonization story in AMSCO 8.5.

Martin Luther King Jr.

A Baptist minister, King was the most prominent African American civil rights leader of the 1950s and 1960s. The movement's tactics included:

• Court decisions, like Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which banned forced racial segregation in U.S. schools
• The Montgomery bus boycott (1955-1956), a year-long boycott that ended segregation on public transit
• Massive marches, including the 250,000-person March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

These tactics laid the foundation for landmark civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.

Nelson Mandela

• In South Africa, the white-minority government wrote racial segregation into law as apartheid.
• Mandela (1918-2013), a socialist lawyer, led the black resistance. Early in life he sometimes supported sabotage, but he became known for leading nonviolent protests against apartheid.

Challenges to Soviet Power in Eastern Europe

In the 1950s and 1960s, reformers in Soviet satellite states tried to loosen Moscow's grip, and the Soviets usually clamped down hard. The pattern to remember: reform attempt, then Soviet response. (For background on how these satellites formed, see AMSCO 8.2 on the Cold War.)

Poland (1956)

• Polish workers demonstrated against Soviet domination and demanded better living conditions.
• Wladyslaw Gomulka became the new secretary of the Polish Communist Party. He pursued an independent domestic policy but stayed loyal to the USSR and kept Soviet troops in Poland.
• Forced collectivization of farms ended. Poland got partial reform without an invasion.

Hungary (1956)

• Protesters pushed leader Imre Nagy to declare Hungary free from Soviet control, demand Soviet troop withdrawal, promise free multiparty elections, declare Cold War neutrality, and withdraw from the Warsaw Pact.
• The Soviets invaded, took Budapest in 1956, and captured and executed Nagy. Many Hungarians fled west as refugees.

Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring (1968)

• Alexander Dubcek, first secretary of the Communist Party, expanded freedom of speech, press, and travel and agreed to democratize the political system.
• Armies of four Warsaw Pact nations crushed the Prague Spring.
• The Soviets justified the invasion with the Brezhnev Doctrine (named for Leonid Brezhnev): the USSR and its allies would intervene if one socialist country's actions threatened other socialist countries. In plain terms, once you're in the Soviet bloc, you don't get to leave.

1968: The Year of Revolt

Protests erupted worldwide in 1968, much of it on university campuses. After World War II, higher education opened up to far more people in Western society, facilities got crowded, and by the 1960s student discontent was boiling over alongside movements for civil rights, women's rights, workers' rights, and opposition to the Vietnam War.

• Yugoslavia: students marched against authoritarian government.
• Poland and Northern Ireland: protests over religious issues.
• Brazil: marchers demanded better public education and fairer treatment of workers.
• Japan: students protested university financial policies and government support for the U.S. war in Vietnam.
• Mexico: armored vehicles rolled into Mexico City to suppress the student movement two months before the 1968 Olympics.

France

Hundreds of thousands of students took to the streets of Paris in 1968, and violence broke out when police moved in. Roughly 10 million French workers went on strike in sympathy, the largest general strike in French history. President Charles de Gaulle called new elections and kept his office when his party won.

The United States

Americans demonstrated for women's rights and African American rights, but the largest protests targeted the Vietnam War. On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard members killed four unarmed students during an antiwar demonstration at Kent State University. Students and faculty at hundreds of U.S. colleges went on strike in response.

An Age of Terrorism

After the Cold War, open war between sovereign states became rare. Instead, individuals unaffiliated with any government used terrorism, the use of violence to achieve political ends, against civilians in Western Europe, South America, the Islamic world, and the United States.

Northern Ireland

• Most of Ireland (majority Roman Catholic) became independent from the UK in 1922, but Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland stayed British. Catholics there faced discrimination and many wanted to join the Irish Republic; Protestants refused.
• The conflict turned violent in the 1960s: Catholics fought with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Protestants with the Ulster Defence Association. Some 3,500 people died between 1969 and 1994.
• The IRA set off bombs in London and other English cities. A cease-fire came in 1994, and the IRA later renounced violence and turned to politics.

Basque Separatists in Spain

• Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA), founded in 1959, wanted independence for the Basque region of northern Spain.
• ETA killed more than 800 people, including Francisco Franco's hand-picked successor in 1973.
• In 2011, ETA declared an end to violence and promised to work within the political system.

Peru's Shining Path

• Former philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán built Shining Path in the 1970s on the ideas of Mao Zedong and Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.
• Starting in 1980, the group used bombings and assassinations to try to replace Peru's government with a communist one. Roughly 37,000 people died over 20 years of terrorism.
• Guzmán was arrested and sentenced to life in prison in 1992. A top leader admitted defeat and began negotiating with Peru's government in 2011.

Islamic Terrorism

• Small groups used a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, widely condemned by mainstream Muslims, to justify terrorism: Boko Haram (West Africa), al-Shabaab (East Africa), ISIL (Middle East), and the Taliban (Afghanistan). Most victims were Muslims. High-profile attacks hit Madrid, London, and Paris.
• Al-Qaeda, financed by Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden, was among the deadliest. On September 11, 2001, hijackers crashed planes in New York City, near Washington, D.C., and in rural Pennsylvania, killing more than 3,000 people. Most of the world, even bitter U.S. foes like Iran, rallied behind the United States. Allied efforts severely weakened al-Qaeda, and bin Laden was killed in a 2011 raid.

Terrorism Inside the United States

Domestic terrorism also struck the U.S., some of it tied to white-nationalist or extreme right-wing views. In 1995, two anti-government extremists bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Other attacks targeted Muslims, Jews, and blacks.

Militarized States and the Military-Industrial Complex

Military dictatorships tended to respond to internal conflict in ways that made it worse. AMSCO highlights two examples.

Franco's Spain (1939-1975)

• Francisco Franco took power by overthrowing a popularly elected government that included many leftists.
• His fierce anti-communism made him a U.S. ally, but it also drove his government to execute, imprison, or send hundreds of thousands of political dissenters to labor camps.
• Opposition persisted, and after Franco died in 1975, Spain moved toward democracy.

Idi Amin's Uganda (1971-1979)

• Amin, a military dictator nicknamed the "Butcher of Uganda," declared himself president for life. He was aligned with Western democracies early on but later backed by the Soviet Union and East Germany.
• In 1972 he expelled 60,000 Asians (most of Indian descent) and handed their businesses to his supporters. He is believed responsible for up to 500,000 deaths among targeted ethnic groups.
• When Amin threatened Tanzania, Ugandan nationalists joined Tanzanian troops and forced him into exile.

Eisenhower's Warning

Threatened countries like the U.S. and USSR built huge militaries, which required massive defense factories, and the international weapons trade boomed since many countries couldn't make their own arms. As defense industries grew, so did the jobs depending on them, making spending cuts politically painful. In 1961, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, himself a decorated WWII general, named this combination of government defense departments and private suppliers the military-industrial complex and warned it could grow powerful enough to threaten American democracy.

Key Terms to Know

Practice and Next Steps

For the College Board framing of this topic, read the 8.7 Global Resistance to Established Power Structures study guide, then continue to AMSCO 8.8 End of the Cold War notes to see how the Soviet bloc these reformers challenged finally collapsed. The full chapter sequence lives on the AP World AMSCO notes page.

To check yourself, run Unit 8 questions in guided practice, try a comparison or continuity prompt in FRQ practice with instant scoring, and review tricky vocab in the key terms glossary.