Civil resistance is a form of political action that relies on the use of nonviolent resistance by ordinary people to challenge a particular power, force, policy or regime. Civil resistance operates through appeals to the adversary, pressure and coercion: it can involve systematic attempts to undermine or expose the adversary's sources of power (or pillars of support, such as police, military, clergy, business elite, etc.). Forms of action have included demonstrations, vigils and petitions; strikes, go-slows, boycotts and emigration movements; and sit-ins, occupations, constructive program, and the creation of parallel institutions of government.

Some civil resistance movements' motivations for avoiding violence are generally related to context, including a society's values and its experience of war and violence, rather than to any absolute ethical principle. Civil resistance cases can be found throughout history and in many modern struggles, against both tyrannical rulers and democratically elected governments. Mahatma Gandhi led the first documented civil resistance campaign (using three primary tactics: civil disobedience, marches, and creation of parallel institutions) to free India from British imperialism. The phenomenon of civil resistance is often associated with the advancement of human rights and democracy.

Civil resistance is a long-standing and widespread phenomenon in human history. Several works on civil resistance adopt a historical approach to the analysis of the subject. Cases of civil resistance, both successful and unsuccessful, include:

Numerous other campaigns, both successful and unsuccessful, could be included in a longer listing. In 1967 Gene Sharp produced a list of 84 cases. He followed this with further surveys. In 2013 Maciej Bartkowski authored a long list of cases in the past 200 years, arranged alphabetically by country. The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict's (ICNC) website houses an enormous Resource Library with dozens of case studies and other resources about civil resistance campaigns and movements as well as the dynamics of civil resistance. ICNC's blog, Minds of the Movement, also serves as a thorough compendium of civil resistance campaigns and movements throughout history and today. Swarthmore's Global Nonviolent Action Database is an additional key resource documenting hundreds of civil resistance campaigns and movements.

It is not easy to devise a method of proving the relative success of different methods of struggle. Often there are problems in identifying a given campaign as successful or otherwise. In 2008 Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth produced a widely noted article on "Why Civil Resistance Works", the most thorough and detailed analysis (to that date) of the rate of success of civil resistance campaigns, as compared to violent resistance campaigns. After looking at over 300 cases of both types of campaign, from 1900 to 2006, they concluded that "nonviolent resistance methods are more likely to be successful than violent methods in achieving strategic objectives". Their article (later developed into a book) noted particularly that "resistance campaigns that compel loyalty shifts among security forces and civilian bureaucrats are likely to succeed". These findings have been highly influential within environmental and social movements, although their pertinence to campaigns not involving regime change has been questioned by researchers such as Kyle R. Matthews.

On the other hand, the evidence of several of the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa appears to provide contrasting pathways by which this logic may fail to materialise, with splits in the armed forces contributing towards civil war in Libya and Syria, and a shift in armed forces loyalty in Egypt failing to contribute towards enduring democratic reform. Criticisms of the central thesis of the book on Why Civil Resistance Works have included:

In July 2020, Erica Chenoweth's new research was published in the Journal of Democracy, in which she finds that the success rates of civil resistance have been dropping since the beginning of the 2010s. Some of the reasons identified include the authoritarian learning curve and over-reliance of activists on digital forms of organizing such as social media campaigns. What's more, the COVID-19 pandemic which began in 2020 led large numbers of movements worldwide to cancel public actions and instead shift focus on internal priorities, such as strategic planning.

Some leaders of civil resistance struggles have urged the use of nonviolent methods for primarily ethical reasons, while others have emphasized practical considerations. Some have indicated that both of these types of factor have to be taken into account – and that they necessarily overlap.