People are
in the streets protesting Donald Trump. But when does protest actually work?
Students march against President-elect Donald Trump on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles on Nov. 10. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)
The politics
of dissent is back in the United States. Since 2011, the country has witnessed
the resurgence of popular action — from Occupy Wall Street to Flood Wall Street
to Black Lives Matter to Standing Rock. Since Nov. 8, many Americans have participated in protests and marches in
nearly every major city in opposition to Donald Trump’s election — or to counterprotest in defense of it.
Recent data from around the world
suggest that popular action is here to stay. In particular, civil resistance —
where unarmed civilians confront opponents using protests, strikes, boycotts,
stay-aways and other forms of nonviolent contention — is the most common form
of struggle today.
The United
States’ own recent tumult is part of this global resurgence of civil
resistance, as Maria Stephan and I argued at the Monkey Cage in January. And
yet, this resurgence is commonly misunderstood or misrepresented. Here
I offer up 10 established social science insights about unarmed dissent that
everyone should know.
1.
Historically speaking, nonviolent struggle is a
more effective technique than violent struggle. Among
movements aimed at a country’s central leadership, nonviolent resistance has
been twice as likely to succeed as armed
struggle in the short term. Kathleen Cunningham has also found that nonviolent action is
more successful than armed action in self-determination disputes. Moreover,
nonviolent resistance campaigns are 10 times more likely to usher in democratic
institutions than violent ones. Armed resistance actually tends to weaken
democracy in previously democratic countries, while nonviolence resistance has
no such effect.
2.
The number and diversity of mass movements
matters. The success of mass movements is largely driven by their size. The average
nonviolent campaign is about 11 times as large (as a proportion of the
population) than the average violent campaign. An increase in the number and
diversity of participants may signal the movement’s potential to succeed. This
is particularly true if people who are not ordinarily activists begin to
participate — and if various classes, ethnicities, ages, genders, geographies
and other social categories are represented.
3.
Nonviolent discipline is crucial — especially
when the dissidents represent a minority. Every movement that seriously
challenges the status quo eventually experiences repression. How the
movement responds to repression helps determine its staying power. Movements
that respond to repression with rioting or street fighting tend to fizzle out. Those that respond by
turning to armed insurgency tend to fail as well — often after long, bloody
conflicts that kill many innocent people. But movements that respond to such
repression with unity, resolve and discipline often succeed. Nonviolent
discipline in the face of repression often requires advance coordination, training, preparation and decentralization.
4.
Mixing violence with nonviolent action rarely
leads to change. Adopting or embracing “violent flanks” — where some
protesters use violence while the majority of the movement remains nonviolent —
does not generally help nonviolent campaigns succeed. Those that do succeed
with violent flanks tend to do so despite the violent flanks. (See Omar
Wasow’s study of how riots and violent protests
altered public opinion and voting behavior in the United States from 1960
to 1975, and Emiliano Huet-Vaughn’s study of the effect of violence on the
success of protests in France.) People who argue that violence and property
destruction are necessary for success are dangerously misinformed.
5.
Flexible and innovative techniques are key. Movements
that rely too much on single methods — such
as protests, petitions or rallies — are less likely to win in the end. Nor
does “clicktivism” necessarily equate to
successful resistance. Kurt Schock’s work tells us that movements need to
shift their techniques — particularly between concentrated methods such
as demonstrations and dispersed methods such as strikes and
stay-aways — to succeed. In particular, movements tend to be likelier to
succeed when they shift to lower-risk tactics, such as stay-aways, when
repression becomes intense. Or, as in the case of the Nashville lunch-counter
sit-ins of 1958, some movements use silent marches as a way to both show
tremendous symbolic power while maintaining nonviolent discipline in the face
of tragedy.
6.
The aim is to change incentives, not to melt
hearts. Notably, dissidents rarely win because of appeals to their
opponents’ conscience or attacks on the morality of their adversary. Instead, a
key insight from Gene Sharp’s work (and Hannah Arendt’s before him) is that no power
holders can maintain the status quo without the support and acquiescence of
thousands — or even millions — of people who routinely cooperate with them.
This can include economic elites, civil servants, cultural authorities and
security forces. Successful movements tend to shift the allegiances of various
elites and loyalists within these societal pillars. Defection, desertion or
noncooperation by security forces can be especially
important. For example, in one well-known episode, Serbian police refused to
fire on protesters demanding Slobodan Milosevic’s resignation in October 2000.
When asked, those police remarked that they didn’t shoot because they saw
familiar faces — including their children — in the crowd.
7.
Success takes time. The
average nonviolent campaign takes about three years to run its course
(that’s more than three times as short as the average violent campaign, by the
way). These things do not unfold overnight.
8.
Planning and staying on the offensive is more
effective than improvising on the defensive. It’s crucial to have a strategy — with a
defined end goal — from which tactics flow. For instance, movements with an
overarching organization are more likely to succeed despite government
crackdowns than are disorganized protests. There are several practical guides
to developing strategy, including this one put together by veteran
activists or this one put together by War Resisters’
International. Of course, this also means that effective nonviolent action is
more about meetings, planning and coordination than it is about the actions
themselves. A veteran activist once told me that “95 percent of our time
was spent in planning and preparation; 5 percent of our time was spent
doing actions.”
9.
The jury is still out regarding the most
effective form of movement organization. On the one hand, scholars agree that internal cohesion and
a collective vision are necessary for movement success and resilience. On the
other hand, concentrating leadership into a single figurehead can be extremely dangerous for movements.
Overall, what consensus has emerged suggests that movements need leadership,
but diffused or shared leadership is more resilient than elevating a
charismatic leader. The key is to have enough coherence to be able to move together
and enough decentralization to produce innovation and evade the most severe
forms of repression.
10.People used
nonviolent resistance against Hitler — and it saved countless lives. Although it
took a world war to conquer Hitler’s rule and end the Holocaust, acts of civil
disobedience were crucial to the survival of tens of thousands of people under
Nazi occupation — an astonishing feat in the face of a determined,
exterminatory regime. The best accounting of these coordinated and
uncoordinated acts of civil resistance against the Nazis appears in the work of Jacques Sémelin.
There are
numerous resources available for those interested in teaching and learning
about nonviolent resistance. I recommend the useful resources available at
the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, the Albert Einstein
Institution and the Swarthmore
Global Nonviolent Action Database. Various other readings are
listed here.
Erica
Chenoweth is a professor in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at
the University of Denver and research fellow at the One Earth Future
Foundation. Her next book, “Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know,”
will appear next year from Oxford University Press. Some parts of this
post were adapted from an earlier post at
Political Violence @ a Glance.
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Erica Chenoweth is Associate
Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University
of Denver and an Associate Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute of
Oslo (PRIO). Along with Barbara F. Walter of UCSD, Chenoweth hosts the
award-winning blog Political Violence @ a Glance.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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