By Leonard Chan (parts of the text is from Erica Chenoweth’s own words spoken during this radio interview)

In an episode of the radio program “Hidden Brain” (called “How to Change the World”), they interview Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth on whether violent or nonviolent movements are more successful at changing the world.

In a world dominated by violence, we may have the impression that violence often succeeds at controlling the outcome. When we look at history, it often appears that violent revolutions are more successful than nonviolent protests. Even in our fiction, most heroes resort to the use of violence and come out victorious.

However, debates among scholars and organizations in the field made Erica Chenoweth want to examine the results of more than 100 years of revolutions and insurrections to answer the question of which method really was more successful.

Here are some of the findings of Professor Chenoweth.

Chenoweth’s research team looked at over 300 insurrections and revolutions around the world, starting in 1900 up to the date of their study (more than a century’s worth of data). They looked at campaigns that were trying to overthrow the incumbent national government or campaigns that were trying to push for independence, either by expelling a foreign military occupation or colonial power, or authority through succession. Their definition for a successful campaign was that it had to have achieved what they said it wanted within a year of the peak of its mobilization and it had to have a decisive impact on the outcome.

They classified the campaigns as either predominately violent or nonviolent and tallied their results. Along with this data, they studied the causes of the successes and failures of these campaigns.

After all their research, Chenoweth’s team concluded that nonviolent campaigns succeeded twice as often as violent ones. Overall, nonviolent campaigns succeeded around half the time and armed resistance campaigns succeeded around 25% of the time. Additionally, the rates of success for nonviolent campaigns had actually increased over the latter half of the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st.

Their research found four key factors that explain why non-violent movements appear to be increasingly more effective than violent insurrections.

Factor one – successful campaigns have large and more diverse participation. Nonviolent movements tend to elicit much larger and more diverse participation than armed campaigns.

Factor two – successful campaigns are able to cleave off and win the support of those that used to support the ones in power. Nonviolent campaigns are more successful at doing this.

Factor three – successful movements have the ability to tactically innovate, especially moving away from mass demonstrations, rallies, and protests, and more into forms of non-cooperation, like strikes, stay-at-homes, and undermining power for the opponent. These movements aren't trying to melt the heart of the dictator. They're out there to remove the bases of the dictator support. They're trying to win a political fight among people who are neutral, who are kind of sympathetic to the regime but not actively supporting it, and certainly among people that are sympathetic to the movement but not actively supporting it.

Factor four - successful nonviolent campaigns are able to develop organizational resilience and discipline, so that when or if repression escalates, the movement is able to continue to recruit and maneuver as it needs to without falling into disarray. Often disarray means that members of the movement start to think that violent means become necessary.

Another discovery is that campaigns that were able to mobilize three and a half percent of the population never failed. Although this is only a measure of active members, the research did not have a good account of those that passively supported these movements. Chenoweth’s belief is that the passive support could be as high as 90%.

Chenoweth cites a book called “Recovering Nonviolent History” by Walter Conser who argues that the most important part of the American Revolution came in the ten years before armed hostilities broke out, where colonists were effectively using all kinds of different forms of economic non-cooperation and the development of alternative institutions like alternative judicial institutions, political conventions, and other things that otherwise would not be allowed in a monarchy. Thus the colonists freed themselves before the hostilities broke out. If you look at it that way, the war that took place between the colonists and the British was actually the counterrevolution. It was the attempt by the British to seize back what they thought was rightfully theirs after the Declaration of Independence was enacted.

There is much more to this interesting discussion with several example campaigns examined. So please listen or read the whole Hidden Brain episode on “How to Change the World.” 

You can also check out some of the additional resources listed on this Hidden Brain page, including Erica Chenoweth’s book, “Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know.”