Why nonviolent resistance beats violent force in effecting social, political change
news.harvard.edu
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.

  • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
    772·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      191·
      2 days ago

      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?

      • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
        9·
        2 days ago

        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).

        • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          Thanks for taking the time to go through that. These quotes show difficulty disambiguating violent vs nonviolent movements and their outcomes in the data, but I’d say that doesn’t quite justify your implied claim that the data points to violent civil resistance methods as successfully “play[ing] a more direct role in undermining the system of oppression.”

      • Squizzy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        The rebels were just better functioning and more democratic. Saw was an idealistic lunatic. The rebels were idealistic prgamatists, mostly.

          • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
            6·
            2 days ago

            Eh, it’s a fun meme, but the whole thing was Palps playing both sides. Even Dooku was just a patsy in the end.

            Now, Mon Mothma did go on to setup the New Republic in both canon and Legends. Neither version really worked out. Say what you will about Saw Gerrera, but he did recognize that the Republic wouldn’t have fallen if it governed well in the first place, and going back to that was a mistake.