This article explores how humor can be used as one aspect of a strategy of nonviolent resistance to oppression and dictatorship. It combines sociological and philosophical theories about humor's duality and incongruity with theories of nonviolent resistance to oppression in order to investigate the links between topics that have previously been considered unrelated. Experiences from the Serbian Otpor movement, which used humorous actions as a part of its strategy to bring down Slobodan Milošević from power, serve to illustrate the dynamics of humor as a form of resistance. Empirical examples and existing theory are combined to make an outline of an innovative theory of the functions of humor in nonviolent resistance.

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This article investigates what culture means for nonviolent resistance. While literature on nonviolence has had a tendency to look instrumentally at culture, this article suggests an intertwined relationship. Activists are themselves embedded in their own cultures, and there is no ''outside culture.'' The authors suggest an innovative model of three strategies for analyzing the cultural aspects of a nonviolent struggle: (1) occasionally borrowing existing powerful symbols and cultural elements, such as flags or religious symbols, which is then applied; (2) partially remodeling ''old'' culture in the spirit of nonviolence. This strategy is illustrated through the Khudai Khidmatgar of the North-West Frontier Province in the 1930s and shows how the nonviolent struggle there, was ''negotiated'' with Islam and a traditional code of honor; and finally, (3) systematically creating a nonviolent movement culture, which is a much more complex process, is illustrated through the movement for landless workers in Brazil, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra.

Escalation of confl ict is frequently deemed undesirable and problematic, as it is often assumed to refer to the escalation of violence. However, there exists a diff erent form of escalation that we call "nonviolent confl ict escalation." Th is occurs when previously unrecognized confl icts are intensifi ed using nonviolent means to a point where the confl ict can no longer be ignored. Five aspects of nonviolent escalations of methods are examined through case studies, showing how diff erent forms of intensifi cation can work together to escalate the confl ict. Nonviolent escalations of unrecognized confl icts can serve as potent tools in struggles against tyranny, injustice, and human rights violations.Th e authors would like to thank the editor of Confl ict Resolution Quarterly, as well as the anonymous reviewers for conversations and comments on drafts which helped us clarify our thinking about nonviolent confl ict escalation. We are also grateful to Sarah Freeman-Woolpert who assisted in improving the language considerably.

Activists in both dictatorships and democracies use humor as a method of nonviolent resistance, and its special way of appealing to emotions and imagination through ambiguity frequently sets it apart from other forms of nonviolent action. This study analyzes three examples from twentieth‐century Sweden of the political uses of humor according to the ability of each to facilitate dialogue, break power, serve as an utopian enactment, and be a normative regulation. In these cases, humor is found to have a particular ability to break the power of dominant discourses, because their ambiguity makes them ideal as “guerrilla attacks” in the ongoing discursive guerrilla war the activists are waging.