TIL Erica Chenoweth et al. studied over 323 movements and found that in aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance was far more effective in producing change
TIL Erica Chenoweth et al. studied over 323 movements and found that in aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance was far more effective in producing change
Harvard Professor Erica Chenoweth discovers nonviolent civil resistance is far more successful in effecting change than violent campaigns.
Erica Chenoweth initially thought that only violent protests were effective. However after analyzing 323 movements the results were opposite of what Erica thought:
For the next two years, Chenoweth and Stephan collected data on all violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 that resulted in the overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation. They created a data set of 323 mass actions. Chenoweth analyzed nearly 160 variables related to success criteria, participant categories, state capacity, and more. The results turned her earlier paradigm on its head — in the aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance was far more effective in producing change.
If campaigns allow their repression to throw the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they’re essentially co-signing what the regime wants — for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they’re probably going to get totally crushed.
If nonviolence gets you want you want, you don't resort to violence in the first place. Did the author account for this and consider whether resistance categorized as violent began as nonviolent?
Every US protest which involved violence that I have looked into except one started peaceful and only became violent because of police starting the violence, provoking protestors to defend themselves by forcing them into dangerous situations, or police overreacting to instigators and agitators.
The only one where the protestors were the ones who instigated violence that I have come across was the Jan 6th insurrection. There could be more, but that is the only one I have found.
Of course civil resistance that doesn't end up with violence will be more successful. It is a lot harder to demonize protestors who didn't have to defend their lives when you can't pretend they were the violent ones.
Also, civil resistance historically only works because there were people sitting there saying "well yeah THEY'RE nonviolent, but if we don't get our change soon..."
The conclusions are more nuanced than the headlines. Her data shows that violent and non-violent methods often work in tandem. It tends to be different factions of the same movement using different methods, and they tend not to like each other. The more violent faction says the peaceful faction is naive, while the peaceful faction finds violent methods unconscionable.
More people will tend to join the peaceful faction, perhaps because it's easier to join the side that isn't asking morally gray things of them. However, the violent side plays a more direct role in undermining the system of oppression.
Her data shows that violent and non-violent methods often work in tandem
Does it? I read the whole interview in the OP post and it does not seem like this would be the opinion of the researcher:
The finding is that civil resistance campaigns often lead to longer-term reforms and changes that bring about democratization compared with violent campaigns. Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns — whether the campaigns succeeded or failed. This is because even though they “failed” in the short term, the nonviolent campaigns tended to empower moderates or reformers within the ruling elites who gradually began to initiate changes and liberalize the polity.
How do you justify the claim that her data shows the usefulness of violent civil resistance campaigns?
I read a bit of the book. There's some framing around it by the authors and popular press that I don't think quite matches up with the data. In the end, it is true that movements that are predominantly nonviolent tend to win more often, but there is often a violent element that plays a role.
(Apologies for any mistakes in my transcription from the book.)
To quote it:
Our central contention is that nonviolent campaigns have a participation advantage over violent insurgencies, which is an important factor in determining campaign outcomes. The moral, physical, informational, and commitment barriers to participation are much lower for nonviolent resistance than for violent insurgency. Higher levels of participation contribute to a number of mechanisms necessary for success, including enhanced resilience, higher probabilities of tactical innovation, expanded civic disruption (thereby raising the costs to the regime of maintaining the status quo), and loyalty shifts involving the opponent's erstwhile supporters, including members of security forces.
Which sounds like nonviolent campaigns win, right? Reading on shows it's not quite that simple.
It is appropriate here to briefly define the terms to which we will consistently refer in this book. First, we should distinguish violent and nonviolent tactics. As noted earlier, there are some difficulties with labeling one campaign as violent and another as nonviolent. In many cases, both nonviolent and violent campaigns exist simultaneously among competing groups. Often those who employ violence in mass movements are members of fringe groups who are acting independently, or in defiance of, the central leadership; or they are agents provocateurs used by the adversary to provoke the unarmed resistance to adopt violence (Zunes 1994). Alternative, often some groups use both nonviolent and violent methods of resistance over the course of their existence, as with the ANC in South Africa. Characterizing a campaign as violent or non-violent simplifies a complex constellation of resistance methods.
It is nevertheless possible to characterize a campaign as principally nonviolent based on the primacy of nonviolent resistance methods and the nature of the participation in that form of resistance.
Later in the chapter:
As one might expect, there are several good reasons why social scientists have avoided comparing the dynamics and outcomes of nonviolent and violent campaigns, including their relative effectiveness. First, the separation of campaigns into violent and nonviolent for analytical purposes is problematic. Few campaigns, historically, have been purely violent or nonviolent, and many resistance movements, particularly protracted ones, have had violent and nonviolent periods.
Classifying any given movement as strictly nonviolent would not have worked. The data is too messy for that.
Even the definition of success is tricky:
Success and failure are also complex outcomes, about which much has been written (Baldwin 2000). For our study, to be considered a "success" a campaign had to meet two conditions: the full achievement of its stated goals (regime change, antioccupation, or succession) within a year of the peak of activities and a discernible effect on the outcome, such that the outcome was a direct result of the campaign's activities (Pape 1997). The second qualification is important because in some cases the desired outcome occurred mainly because of other conditions. The Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation, for example, is not coded as a full success even though the Nazis ultimately withdrew from Greece. Although effective in many respects, the Greek resistance alone cannot be credited with the ultimate outcome of the end of Nazi influence over Greek resistance alone cannot be credited with the ultimate outcome of the end of Nazi influence over Greece since the Nazi withdrawal was the result of the Allied victory rather than solely Greek resistance.
In fact, they classify basically all resistance (nonviolent or violent) to the Nazi regime as a failure. There are a few exceptions, such as the Rosenstrasse Protest. However, the Nazis fell predominantly due to the actions of the armies of other nation states, not the local resistance groups (though they certainly played a role in helping, such as funneling intelligence to the Allies).
So effectively, what How to Blow Up a Pipeline has been proposing.
Pretty much what all anarchist theory has been proposing, at least when it comes to revolutionary action.
I suppose that's more sabotage than actual violence.
This is about what I expected of a study like this.
yeah, there has to be an "...or else" component
So.... Saw Gerrera versus the Rebel Alliance.
That’s cool n shit, but I’m for hanging tyrants by the balls.
I would ask her to correlate them with existence of violent movements alongside.
The MLK-Malcolm X dichotomy
In short, the presence of a militant option alongside your nonviolent option is quite useful in compelling the opposition to your side because the other option is the militant one.
And in that case, i would credit the violent movement with the success, and the "nonviolent" movement with giving them an ego saving out.
As a test: I would like to ask this researcher, peacefully, to cut the lib shit.
Sometimes violence can be necessary to start. But anything won or held by violence will also be lost by violence. Only that which is held through peace and understanding will ever be secure.
Every country in the world was started with violence and has been held with the threat of violence, your statement is a pretty nothing.
...all violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 that resulted in the overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation. They created a data set of 323 mass actions.
323, in over 100 years. And they are exuding campaigns that did not work? I would assume there have been 10s of thousands of protests in that time that where non-violent and also ineffective. Why are they not included? What would make a campaign go from non-violent to violent? What constitutes a campaign, is it non-violent in whole or only part? I would check but I need to buy their book.
I can not even think of any movement that resulted in territorial or government change that did not involve some form of violence. This study does not seem to pass the sniff test.
Yeah honestly, if you're only looking at the campaigns that led to overthrow of the government or territorial liberation then it should be somewhat self evident that nonviolent campaigns have better outcomes. They lead to less death and less destruction of infrastructure which is desirable for whatever comes next. Unfortunately, that's not always an option for people seeking liberation.
And wildly dishonest to try and spin every campaign as having some choice on whether or not to deploy violence. To top it off, the flat out writing off of all unsuccessful non-violent campaigns as if they don't matter (even though most failed campaigns of these types result in people in cells regardless of if violence was employed or not)
Oh. Yeah, totally. Successful violent campaign or successful nonviolent campaign, ill take the nonviolent every time.
The problem is...
I'm trying to find the data around the "data set of 323 mass actions. Chenoweth analyzed nearly 160 variables" and am not finding it. Closest I find is the excerpt from their book here https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760088 which tells a rather mixed story.
I understand this was posted within the context of ongoing events in LA. Of note in the research being shared here is the goal of "overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation" which I think is a very different scope. However, I would encourage reading their latest peer reviewed paper here which I believe does a better job of scoping the LA protests.
Of note is that it addresses the consistent conflating of "violent armed overthrow of the state" with "throwing rocks after getting shot at".
Utter bullshit methodology. Reference: Benjamin Case, "Street Rebellions" (2022). Goes through the entire dataset of Chenoweth tangle of garbage. Case shows that every case of 'civil resistance' involved 'non-violence' of the order of UNARMED riots with punches, rocks, and fires were involved. So indeed, civil resistance with non-violent marches, barricades, punches, rocks, and fires have contributed social progress change of decomposing mass-murder militarists governments. Slinging such desctructive false claims is likely to be effective at de-mobilizing people confused about acceptability of burning down unoccupied parts of a genocide and pollution funding bank and military station (cop station), for example, and to have very serious consequences against authors of that sort of garbage. Another problem about Chenoweth's methodology: they pretend intention of protesters of replacing a military hierarchist, heritage-based, fiction-book-based, racist pigs regime (asristocratic, 'demo'-oligarchic, duopolist) with another regime of the same type of garbage with another shuffle of names and addresses. Even a cursory review of literature and interviews with real protesters has shown a lot of demand for flat local networks run by local competent persons, usually referred to under contested name space of words like anarchism, direct democracy, co-operative societies, etc.
What about this kind of protest?
He isn't hurting anyone but himself.
Its kind of pithy but like we still live in a capitalist hellscape, so have any resistances really been successful?
Well it's illegal to enslave people, beat your spouse, or force your "possessions" to shit in each other's mouths as punishment, so I'm going to say we've had some minor successes, yes.
Except it isn't illegal to enslave people. It is 100% legal if used as punishment for a crime as decided by the state. It is literally encoded into the 13th Amendment
Those "successes" are simply concessions from the state to lull the population back into complacency.
The fourth element is especially important now. Don't engage on the playing field Trump set up on what is plain to see is a setup to authorize martial law powers for himself.
But it also means don't let government drive the conversation in media either. Keep standing up and keep the message clear that this is a stand against tyranny and let Trump and his admin flail, grasp at straws and reach for the Project2025 book of excuses. They look weak and unconvincing against the resolve of the peaceful resistance movement.
Based on the cases you have studied, what are the key elements necessary for a successful nonviolent campaign?
CHENOWETH: I think it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that’s sustained.
The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide how violent the confrontation with — and reaction to — the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo, and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that’s a decisive factor.
The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation in the methods they use.
The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed — which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes — they don’t either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they’re essentially co-signing what the regime wants — for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they’re probably going to get totally crushed.
Okay but also the second element is huge and we're not doing that yet
Look at all the criticism from Lemmings and Redditors when an upper class member is trying to side with the movement by spending their money in print media to get the "No Kings" message out. That appears to be in a step in line with that second point but some that support the cause are in opposition to these actions.
There has been a lot of encouragement of violence on Lemmy lately. When pressed, they're usually not Americans. Don't fall for it.
The day I stop advocating the potential for violence will be after I have left the US. All the authorities have to do to force unarmed protestors to turn "violent" is corral them into tighter and tighter spaces to where the protestors have no choice but to break windows and such just to have room to breathe.
Unarmed protestors are incapable of standing their ground in any meaningful way to prevent this. "Peaceful" vs "violent" protest is a false dichotomy.
Mark my words, this will end with blood in the streets. We just need to decide whose blood. The executive branch could do with a reminder that it has no monopoly on violence.
I will decide it to be my blood then
Are the two even comparable in terms of motivation? Violent resistance often stem from the motivation to bring replacement of the current system rather than reform. Often ending up as "resistance" because they lack logistics and resources.
They produce change but only incremental, impotent change that just temporarily assuages the protestor back into submission while fueling a false sense of accomplishment.
Its gonna happen again in the US and they will vote in more neoliberal shills while thinking they've won.
Violent change produces violent leaders.
Violence is a tool. It is neither inherently good nor bad. It is how that violence is used and perpetrated and the context around why it was employed is where the heart of the matter lies.
Someone who is violent against Nazis or those of equivalent ideology in self defense? Absolutely and unequivocally justifiable.
Someone employing state violence to detain civilians because they were born on the wrong side of an imaginary line? Absolutely unjustifiable and deserves to be stopped, even if it means employing violence in self/community defense.
You cant have violent change and then milquetoast leader. Violent suppression of Nazis has to continue for many years until things can be stabilized
Good thing unions peacefully protested for a 5 day work week and 8 hour days
Sure, when reality is sane. Not with Shitler at the helm.
Burn them all
The insane knuckledraggers currently in charge do not understand the concept of "peace".
The government deals in violence and knows how to handle groups of protestors, whether they originate as peaceful or violent. Don't play to their strengths by engaging them on that level and giving them a confrontation that they can escalate.
Non-participation, boycotts, malicious compliance, quiet quitting, anticonsumption, and birthstriking are more my style. It's not glamorous or quick, but governments are notoriously inept at dealing with situations that they can't just beat or shoot at. They don't know what to do when a hammer is an ineffective tool for the job.
I kind of wonder what Chenoweth, a they/them in a LGBTQ relationship, thinks about Stonewall?
