Commentary by Lyle Adley-Warrick
A myth-busting study by two political scientists proves it statistically and offers some insights into why it works. Their book, Why Civil Resistance Works, published in 2013 by Columbia University Press, is crammed with charts and graphs and will regrettably never be a best-seller. Regrettably, because the findings it reports deserve the widest possible audience.
Erica Chenoweth, a Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Maria Stephan, Co-Leader of the Horizon Project, analyzed 323 insurgencies, both violent and non-violent, occurring between 1900 and 2006. That time period was characterized by some formidably repressive and brutal regimes, including Nazi Germany, with which dissidents were faced. Nevertheless, Chenoweth and Stephan found that non-violent resistance campaigns succeeded approximately twice as often as armed insurgencies. Since popular wisdom is apt to regard this finding as counter-intuitive, much of the authors’ analysis examines the reasons behind those results.
Their key conclusion is that the sheer number of participants is what matters most, and here is where non-violence has the edge. People who are reluctant to take up arms will find ways to resist non-violently. Chenoweth and Stephen found that the average non-violent campaign involved 200,000 participants—four times the average number of guerilla fighters in an armed insurgency. And that figure represents only the visible participants, the ones willing to risk exposure at mass street demonstrations. As the authors note, it’s virtually impossible to count the people who feed and house protesters, act as messengers, etc.
Civil resistance is by no means limited to mass street rallies and such other public acts as sit-ins, building occupations, and street theater. Numerous forms of social, political, and economic non-cooperation may be involved. Here again, the ability of non-violent resistance campaigns to attract large numbers of participants is an advantage. Large aggregations of people will inevitably include a wide diversity of skills and many creative minds. That very diversity and creativity can be converted into strategic and tactical diversity for the resistance campaign.
Large numbers of participants also mean large social networks. Some participants in a civil resistance campaign may have connections, through friendship or kinship, to the incumbent power elite. Those connections may ultimately lead to defections from that same power elite.
Not content to simply document the successes of non-violent resistance campaigns, Chenoweth and Stephan examined the aftermath of successful insurgencies, both violent and non-violent. Significantly, they found that non-violent campaigns more often resulted in democratic governments. Furthermore, compared with states formed by armed insurgency, those formed by means of a successful non-violent campaign are less likely to revert to civil war.
Lyle Adley-Warrick is a contributing editor for the Triangle Free Press.