<
https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/lasting-power-nonviolent-resistance>
"When they started their predoctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center for
Science and International Affairs in 2006, Erica Chenoweth believed in the
strategic logic of armed resistance. They had studied terrorism, civil war, and
major revolutions—Russian, French, Algerian, and American—and suspected that
only violent force had achieved major social and political change. So, when a
workshop challenged Chenoweth to prove that violent resistance was more
successful than nonviolent resistance, they thought: of course. The question
had never been addressed systematically, so with their colleague Maria J.
Stephan, turned it into a research project.
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 territorial liberation. They created a dataset of 323 mass
actions, and, leaving no angle unexamined, Chenoweth analyzed and regressed
nearly 160 different variables related to success criteria, categories of
participants, state capacity, and more. The results turned Chenoweth’s
long-held paradigm on its head—in the aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance
campaigns were far more successful in effecting change than violent ones.
The Weatherhead Center sat down with Chenoweth, a new Faculty Associate who
recently returned to Harvard Kennedy School this year as a professor of public
policy, and asked them to explain their findings and share their goals for
future research."
Via Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
