If you want to overthrow a dictator, resist an authoritarian regime, or create a movement that can change the national status quo, you don’t need half the country to join, you only need 3.5 percent of the population – but there are some caveats, and Erica Chenoweth, whose research led to the discovery of the 3.5 Percent Rule, explains them to us in this episode.

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Civil resistance works. In fact, boycotts, strikes, protests, and organized noncooperation are twice as effective as violent resistance when it comes to achieving the goals of an opposition moment.

Those are the findings of political scientists Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth whose paper, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” details their research into more 323 violent and nonviolent protests and resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006. They not only found that nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53 percent of the time compared to 26 percent of the time in the case of violent campaigns, but that every time a nonviolent movement grew to the point that 3.5 percent of the nation was taking part in the resistance, that resistance always succeeded in reaching its goals.

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION OF ERICA CHENOWETH’S BOOK

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories.

Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents’ erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. 

Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D. is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment and Academic Dean for Faculty Development at Harvard Kennedy School, a Faculty Dean at Pforzheimer House at Harvard College, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Chenoweth directs the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, where they study political violence and its alternatives. They are particularly interested in how people effectively resist authoritarianism and push for systemic change, and in using social science tools and evidence to support movement-led political transformation. Chenoweth’s current book project, The End of People Power, explores the puzzling decline in the success of civil resistance movements in the past decade, even as the technique has become more popular worldwide.

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Why Civil Resistance Works (the paper)

Why Civil Resistance Works (the book)

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