Published in Howard Clark (ed.), People Power: Unarmed Resistance and Global Solidarity (London: Pluto Press, 2009), pp. 93-97. This chapter made available by the author.
Why is accompaniment - sending international teams to support resisters who are under threat - effective? And what can be done to make it more effective?
Liam Mahony and Luis Enrique Eguren (1997), in their study of international accompaniment, say that it works through deterrence: aggressors decide that the negative consequences of bad publicity and international pressure outweigh advantages of attacking activists. Accompaniment can expand the political space available to activists and limit the actions aggressors can take with what they consider "acceptable" costs. Other studies of nonviolent intervention (Moser-Puangsuwan and Weber, 2000; Müller, 2006) include examples of accompaniment with rich detail about actions and their consequences, but give less attention to how it works.
There is, however, another framework for understanding why accompaniment can often be effective, which I call "backfire" (Martin, 2005, 2007). This builds on the insights that can be obtained by exploring the process called political jiu-jitsu.