The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance

https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/success-nonviolent-civil-resistance/

by ozdave • 7 years ago

64 96 7 years ago

baybal24• 7 years ago

The article says that nonviolent civil resistance is effective

But truth is that nonviolent civil resistance is not effective. The few "regimes" that were "toppled" by it never stood in ranks of real regimes, or were at their dying breath.

I wish authors of the article ever told that to Ugandans, North Koreans, and after all Chinese.

China sees sporadic riots nearly weekly (which are almost never covered by Western press.) I'd say that as a percentage of population, the amount of people who ever raised a hand on policeman/official person and served term should be around 5-7%.

That was way higher in eighties when forced sterilisation campaign was at its peak (imagine men having to stand still while a communist pokes his dirty finger into their wives'...)

fiala__• 7 years ago

Literally the first sentence of the video description:

Between 1900-2006, campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance were twice as successful as violent campaigns.

You're just saying "No." without providing anything more than an opinion and some anecdotal evidence. You're absolutely right that under many oppressive regimes like China pretty much any kind of protest beside outright civil war is suppressed, but that doesn't defeat the point of the article.

Also, saying things like

dirty communist pokes his finger ...

really doesn't help you here.

baybal24• 7 years ago

but that doesn't defeat the point of the article.

It does, very much. Read what is my point above. What argument they have against that?

Their reasoning is shallow, their data is very meticulously gathered, but is nevertheless massaged, and people behind the report... take a look at their bios and judge yourself.

I have a lot of anger for types of people calling for peaceful sit ins when crowds are already being showered by machine gun fire. Those share the blame for people's deaths as much as regimes doing the killing.

Doing that is an advocacy for moral frailty.

tremon• 7 years ago

What drivel.

Why is "toppling a regime" your only benchmark for measuring success?

What is your justification for favouring your own anecdata over the article's statistics?

How is "sporadic riots in China" an example of nonviolent resistance, and how does it further your argument?

devoply• 7 years ago

Nonviolent or violent civil resistance can easily be co-opted by other actors like the CIA or KGB for their own nefarious agendas. Be wary of being pawns for assholes. Transforming your country into a liberal, democratic country requires the fact the country evolved itself into some sort of democracy. Not someone forced that on you through a manufactured war or revolution.

notahacker• 7 years ago

Popular protest is part of the evolution of a country into some sort of democracy, and it's generally much bigger assholes complaining that every popular protest against them is backed by the CIA/KGB/Iran/Saudis/neighbours (even when that claim has a grain of truth to it...)

chriselles5• 7 years ago

CIA covertly backed Solidarity with non violent aid.

In that specific ring fences example, did anyone outside of the Soviet/Polish regimes have issue with it then or since?

Would any/many Poles consider it a mistake or criticise the effort or result?

crispinb6• 7 years ago

Same with Serbia's Otpor! IIRC there was a fair bit of criticism of them within Serbia for taking American (if not CIA?) funding, and who knows whether that specific act was the right decision. But the did get rid of Milosevic, remarkably peacefully given the nature of the regime.

cies2• 7 years ago

Next thing destruction of property is also called violence.

Let's think of the abolition of slavery as an example. This was a huge, important change that came about by civil resistance: slave owners were mostly backed by law during the period of resistance.

It was not non-violent, especially if destruction of property (e.g. freeing a slave) is counted as an act of violence against the slave owner/ law. I do not believe this change was easier to provoke non-violently and/or non-property-destructively.

sudoaza• 7 years ago

Another case of violent successful resistance is the cuban revolution. My guess is only small changes that can be coopted/incorporated into current system can do so non-violently.

tim3335• 7 years ago

If you are going to count freeing slaves as violent then you have an odd definition of violence.

cies2• 7 years ago

It was "loss of property" by law... It's not my def, it's the def-by-law of those days.

nsoonhui• 7 years ago

The nonviolent civil resistance is only effective when your opponent is a regime that is beholden to the opinion of its people or of the world. For oppressive opponents who don't actually care very much about human rights, nonviolent resistance is simply ineffective at all.

taneq3• 7 years ago

Exactly. Ghandi was very brave, it's true, but his success in India says as much about the British as it does about the power of nonviolence. Try the same stunt against ISIS or North Korea and you'll only achieve being shot out of hand.

crispinb6• 7 years ago

I have a feeling you haven't read much British colonial history. Amritsar? Boer concentration camps? Indian emancipation had nothing to do with British goodness. It had much to do with mass uprisings, clever tactics, and more than a few blown-up railway lines.

Super_Jambo3• 7 years ago

To think Indian independence came about with no threat of violence seems like a whitewashing of history. The British state chose to deal with the non-violent. But would they have bothered without the fear of violence?

quetzthecoatl5• 7 years ago

where do people get the idea that british were nice in India? They killed millions in WW2 famines alone (to fund the war campaign). The reprisals after 1857 mutiny is said to have killed 10 million Indians. Right there from two incidents you have 15 million deaths. British were much more save than the Nazis when it comes to genocide of "others", colonization, savagery etc. They get a free pass in the west as opposed to the Nazis simply because British killed Asians, Africans and Native Americans when Nazis killed fellow whites. This is pure racism.

watwut4• 7 years ago

There was more then Ghandi and non violence affecting politics back then. He was not the only player over there and there were violent people seeking in dependence too.

crispinb6• 7 years ago

As she explains in the video, that was Erica Chenoweth's a priori guess too, before looking at the data. Her study, looking at all the available data from every resistance movement involving more than 1000 people since 1900, apparently suggests otherwise.

Non-empirical 'commonsense' guesswork turns out to be wrong far more often than most people think. So it's great that the Chenoweth's of this world are curious enough to put their guesses to the test.

Super_Jambo3• 7 years ago

And the replication crisis showes that 'empirical' social science that contradicts common sense should not be taken as fact.

This seems especially true when the conclusions align closely with the incentives of people who have the power to get research friendly to their interests infront of you.

goto11• 7 years ago

In an interesting example, Nazi Germany actually scaled back their T4 "euthanasia" murder project because of popular protests.

ben_w5• 7 years ago

Fascinating — I’d never heard of that before, and it seemed strange that any public opinion could sway the Nazi regime, but the Wikipedia page has a lot of references: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4

thekid314• 7 years ago

Normally I would agree with you. But right now in Sudan a non-violent revolution is occurring. The civilians are demanding a civilian government from Hemeti, the head of a militia that is responsible for war crimes in Darfur. Hemeti doesn't care what the western governments think, he is only beholden to the Gulf governments who are propping up the economy with money. They Gulf governments would prefer he uses force quickly and ruthlessly. His troops have used some violence, 4+ died about a week ago. But they haven't cleared the sit-in with their full force yet.

I think this is because if Hemeti used full scale violence he wouldn't have a state to rule over. The non-violent protesters have enough support that a violent response would fracture the armed forces, militias, civilians, and government into non-governable chaos.

danso3• 7 years ago

The study claims, "between 1900-2006, campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance were twice as successful as violent campaigns", not that the former were always more successful than the latter.

fsloth• 7 years ago

Actually I would argue exactly the opposite.

If you are an oppressive regime, you likely have the maximum capability for violence many times over in your region.

Hence violent civil resistance will start off with a bad footing in two ways: 1. People are not so keen to take up arms 2. For any amount of violence, the government will likely respond with an overwhelming amount of violence.

Non-violent strategies, on the other hand beat these two stepping stones: 1. Non violent strategies, if they are at all popular, are way less riskier for individual participants and due to their non violent nature are easier for people to copy 2. Government has a way harder time to respond to non-localized non-violent influence strategies, as their oppressive regime is likely specialized in fielding force projection troops to localized events

chongli• 7 years ago

Yeah, the determinant of the success of nonviolent movements is not the oppressiveness of the regime, it's the relative dependence on resources vs labour. Since it's much harder for the government to force everyone to go back to work than it is to throw a few violent people in jail, nonviolent movements can paralyze an economy and hold the government to account.

This is not as effective in so called "resource-cursed" countries. There, the government does not care whether the population works, so long as the oil keeps flowing. It's much harder for a nonviolent movement to disrupt the economy in that case, and hence oppressive regimes tend to thrive in resource-cursed countries.

tim3335• 7 years ago

It's a messy example but in Myanmar/Burma the government used to be pretty uncaring and oppressive but eventually enacted democratic reforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%932015_Myanmar_poli...

skrebbel2• 7 years ago

Sidenote: if you're ever a dictator somewhere, move your capital away from the big population centers. Invent some nutcase reason like "God told me to do it in a dream". Make sure that most inhabitants of your new capital are civil servants, whose livelihoods directly depend on your government's stability. Civil Resistance, violent or not, will be significantly less effective.

Eg Naypidaw (Myanmar), Astana / Nur-Sultan[1] (Kazachstan), Brasilia, Islamabad (Pakistan), Ciudad de la Paz (Equatorial Guinea), etc.

I'm not sure if there's statistically sufficiently many capitals-in-the-middle-of-nowhere but I bet there's a direct correlation between "capital is also the major population center" and "success rate of uprisings". It even holds for functioning democracies. I don't think the "yellow vests" people in Paris would've had a similar impact in Australia, where the government is comfortably far away from Where People Live.

[1] Woa check the new name! It's like renaming Washington DC to "Donald". [2]

[2] EDIT: Omg I just realized that George Washington did exactly that. Some ego! I had always assumed that it had been founded/named long after Washington was dead, but nothing like that was the case. It's really the "Trump Hotel" of cities.

baybal24• 7 years ago

[1] Checked it, writing from there, and probably will be for few more months.

Been selling widgets to rapid transit company there. Can't wait to go back to China, but it seems that there is a new local client on the horizon =(

skrebbel2• 7 years ago

Wow, what was the popular response to the name change?

China can't stay behind now, can they? Can't wait for Beijing to be renamed to Jinping.

ReptileMan• 7 years ago

Ankara.

dangerbird2• 7 years ago

Ankara became the capital as a result of it being the headquarters of the Turkish National Movement during Turkey's War of Independence. During the war, Constantinople was under control of the Ottoman Sultan, who was at that point a protectorate of the Entendre. Because Ankara was the base of operations for the republican government since its creation, it made much more sense for it to be the postwar capital than Istanbul.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_War_of_Independence

ForHackernews• 7 years ago

Trump thought Washington should've named Mt. Vernon after himself https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/04/10/trump-wond...

If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump reportedly said. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you.”
On the subject of whether anyone remembers George Washington, The Washington Post, which is based in the capital city of Washington (not Washington state) near George Washington University, would refer readers to the fact that Washington has come in first or second in nearly every “best presidents” poll conducted, including the most recent one, in 2018, by Siena College Research Institute.

mikeash• 7 years ago

Washington County was formed in 1801, two years after George died.

tim3335• 7 years ago

Though if you are at risk of US intervention you might be better off surrounded by human shields and the like.

cf141q53252• 7 years ago

A while back I read "The failure of non violence" by Peter Gelderloos on the topic who argued for the opposite. Not an academic work but I found it interesting to read about a different point of view.

clydethefrog• 7 years ago

See also The Great Leveler by Scheidel:

"Deep and long-lasting levelling of both the absolute and relative degree of income and wealth inequality has found its place primarily in conjunction with the ‘Four Horsemen’ of levelling: namely, mass mobilisation warfare; transformative revolutions (such as communism); state collapse; and plague and pandemic episodes"

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/02/23/book-rev...

brlewis• 7 years ago

I skimmed the first 6 pages here: https://web.stanford.edu/group/peacejustice/Gelderloos-Failu...

It seems he's arguing that a diversity of tactics is more effective than nonviolence alone. Chenoweth's methodology if I understand correctly was to divide a lot of civil resistance campaigns into violent and nonviolent, and compare the success of the two groupings.

It's possible that they're both right, that a diversity of tactics wins, but is more likely to win when that diversity is skewed toward nonviolence.

jcims• 7 years ago

This seems incomplete.

Humans and most animals tend to naturally resist along a spectrum (sometimes referred to as the force continuum), and for most that spectrum will include violence at the extreme end.

Nonviolent civil resistance scales tends to scale more quickly because there is less at stake for the individual participants under most circumstances. But it's still resistance, and still an indicator that some percentage of the populace has less tolerance for provocation before things begin to turn violent. That's where i think at least some of the effectiveness of the nonviolent approach comes from...the threat of a lot more people turning violent.

About the only thing I would take away from this is that if I want to organize resistance, it might be more effective to spend time marketing it and scaling horizontally first than to flame out on a skirmish and scare possible supporters off. Once the tribe starts to grow, however, it becomes much easier to turn up the heat when necessary.

Also, no tiki torches.

chriselles5• 7 years ago

Solidarity in Poland would be an outstanding example of successful non violent civil resistance that was a catalyst for a cascade of largely(but not entirely) non violent revolutions across Eastern Europe and Russia between 89-91.

It is also a successful example of external non-violent support as the CIA provided strictly non violent support in the form of cash, communication, printing, and copying equipment and supplies.

Largely shipped covertly via Swedish maritime cargo and other means.

The key learning point, especially for governments interested in interfering in the affairs of other countries, is that it requires a committed and motivated existing and self sustaining organisation.

In the case of Solidarity/Poland, CIA simply provided some additional momentum to what already existed.

Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan also provides considerable moral support and political capital to put the spotlight on the existent Solidarity.

Not only are non violent movements twice as successful(on average) than violent revolutions, but they are also more sustainable/resilient.

There was an excellent course run out of Harvard JFK School called “Leading Non-Violent Movements for Social Change”.

It was led by Srdja Popovic, founder of Otpor! that helped remove Milosevic fro. Power in Serbia.

Check out CANVAS: https://canvasopedia.org/

Great free resources.

jcora3• 7 years ago

Not only are non violent movements twice as successful(on average)

This is a meaningless comparison because they aim at entirely different things. The French revolution was different than the fall of communism.

Funny enough, the October revolution was also largely a non-violent event, with just a few casualties. The ensuing Civil War, however...

chriselles5• 7 years ago

It is a perfectly meaningful comparison.

A domestic, intrinsically motivated movement, supported externally with non violent diplomatic, financial, and moral aid, acted as a catalyst to the largely non violent removal of many authoritarian repressive regimes.

All of which have largely avoided civil war with the exception of Ukraine due to a resurgent Russia responding to excessive NATO expansion.

Former Yugoslavia doesn’t count as it excluded itself from the Soviet Warsaw Pact sphere Nd attempted non alignment.

watwut4• 7 years ago

There was violence before October revolution and bulk of it performed by the same people who got violent after.

cf141q53252• 7 years ago

The statement about the successrate is based on the following database

To these ends, we constructed the Nonviolent andViolent Conºict Outcomes (NAVCO) data set, which includes aggregate dataon 323 violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006.35
The NAVCO data set contains a sample of resistance campaigns based on consensus data ofscholars of both violent and nonviolent conºict. Resistance campaigns include campaigns for do-mestic regime change, against foreign occupations, or for secession or self-determination. Omittedfrom the data set are major social and economic campaigns, such as the civil rights movement andthe populist movement in the United States. To gain inclusion into the NAVCO data set, the cam-paign must have a major and disruptive political objective, such as the ending of a current politicalregime, a foreign occupation, or secession. About ten campaigns (four nonviolent and six violent)did not ªt into any of these categories but were nevertheless included in the data set. The codingscheme assumes that each campaign has a uniªed goal, but most campaigns have multiple fac-tions. The dynamics created by these circumstances will be further explored in a later study

https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/file...

https://www.du.edu/korbel/sie/research/chenow_navco_data.htm...

Joeboy• 7 years ago

So it seems like you need some proprietary thing called Stata 11 to see the data. I think I'm just going to continue being profoundly sceptical.

danso3• 7 years ago

Stata is a pretty entrenched tool (never figured out myself what past colleagues got from using it, other than it was just what they had been trained on), but luckily there are software libraries that make it easy to import and then export to something else, such as R's `foreign`:

https://www.statmethods.net/input/importingdata.html

dagw• 7 years ago

In addition to the R reader already mentioned, Pandas (python) can also read Stata out of the box.

chiefalchemist• 7 years ago

I read it best put in the book "Blueprint for Revolution" (which, believe it or not, was mentioned in Adam Grants' "Originals").

Long to short, Popovic wrote: nonviolence is more successful because it casts a wider / deeper net. Adding violence to your tactic severely reduces the number who will embrace and participate in your change movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueprint_for_Revolution

tokai• 7 years ago

A black bloc uncle old me once, that in political struggle you need a militant and a civil/political branch. With as little direct connection between the two as possible. One of his reasons was the one you pointed out. The other that the persons that participates in violent struggle, are a bad fit for dialogue and building something lasting up afterwards.

bjourne• 7 years ago

This is probably the reason why the Israeli state is so fearful of the BDS movement. Violent resistance is easy to quell, but reduced trade due to the boycott is harder to do something about. It is also hard to motivate how people exercising their right to not purchase goods for ethical reasons are acting in bad faith.

I believe that is how South Africa's Apartheid system was brought down. The ANC actually engaged in terrorism - but that wasn't what ended the system - it was the global economic boycott.

hprotagonist• 7 years ago

We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?"

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

challenger22• 7 years ago

History class in U.S. high schools greatly emphasize the success of nonviolent protest, and it was surprising to me that they actually are twice as effective. I had recently come to the conclusion that this history lesson was mostly an intended plan to indoctrinate people away from tendencies to perform violent protest; it is nice to see that it is actually measureably correct.

Theodores• 7 years ago

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

So you can have a 'violent' movement that does not get round to using violence. The movement can be effective enough to not need to fire a single shot.

Because of this it is a bit silly to compare and categorise non-violent vs. violent resistance.

If you read The Art Of War then the keep the powder dry idea is quite key to winning. Timing and leadership matters more. How many 'leaderless' movements, e.g. Extinction Rebellion, Occupy Wall Street etc. have got anywhere? Precisely zero.

Modern day capitalism demands war and terrorism. It is all part of the illusion. Over the centuries UK/US interests have got to be good at it. The terrorism meme invariably gets rolled out but no genuine resistance movements ever use terror tactics. It is a sure way to lose popular support. The distinction between sabotage and terrorism isn't widely appreciated. So although 'burning down the parliament building' might be a perfectly valid act of sabotage it will always be an act of terror in the media whether it is Guy Fawkes or Hitler doing it.

I would be more interested in knowing what resistance movements succeeded based on their counter surveillance skills. If a movement has a non English language and other culture that is hard for spies to learn then success is much more likely.

The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance

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