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.