Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
- Submitted by: Love Knowledge
- Category: Justice
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
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.
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Customer Reviews 20 of 22 people found the following review helpful A game changer, March 4, 2012 By Justin Whelan – See all my reviews This highly detailed book is a potential game changer in scholarly debates about the effectiveness of violent vs. nonviolent methods of struggle. Eschewing any interest in the morality questions about violence, Chenoworth and Stephan set out to demonstrate that the evidence is clear that nonviolent struggle (‘civil resistance’ as they call it) has the strategic edge. But rather than making arguments, they go back and look at the historical record.
Their evidence is overwhelming. By cataloging 323 campaigns from 1900-2006, the authors are able to demonstrate that civil resistance has been trice as likely to succeed as armed struggle in overthrowing regimes and resisting foreign occupations. Importantly, they find that the strategic advantage of civil resistance holds across all continents, across time (increasing each decade), across regime capacity and regardless of the level of repression used against the insurgency. In other words, even in the most difficult circumstances, civil resistance is a smarter option than violence. They also cover a range of potential explanations and caveats to their argument, systematically answering each in turn with yet more data. The authors certainly cannot be faulted for effort – they seem to have covered every possible angle. Other key findings include: civil resistance is ten times as likely to lead to democratic outcomes as violence; pre-existing structural conditions have little impact on success (sorry, social movement theorists); international support has no significant impact on success for civil resistance campaigns but does for violent campaigns; and civil resistance campaigns are much less likely to be followed by ongoing violent conflict (something we are already beginning to see in Libya, the so-called ‘success story’ for violent intervention in recent times). The book is densely populated with statistical tables, and there is an online appendix with even more data for scholars to dissect for themselves. The case studies in the middle of the book help illuminate their statistical arguments, showing for example how unsuccessful violent campaigns failed but civil resistance worked in Iran and the Philippines, how civil resistance has achieved more than violence in Palestine, and examining the failure of both violence and civil resistance to date in Burma. Other brief examples are spread throughout each chapter as a helpful way of making sense of their findings. This book is not for casual readers, but it is highly recommended for social movement scholars (for whom it will challenge many assumptions), foreign policy circles, and most importantly, movements around the world seeking to overthrow authoritarian regimes. most important book on nonviolence, November 28, 2011 By Marc Simon (Ohio, USA) – See all my reviews 
This is the most important book on nonviolence since Gene Sharp’s Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973). Stephan and Chenoweth have given academic credibility to arguments that activists have been making for years. Nonviolent strategies are indeed more likely to succeed than violent ones; also, nonviolent revolutions are more likely to produce democratic outcomes; and nonviolent revolutions are less likely to see a recurrence of civil war. Their dataset of violent and nonviolent campaigns will lead others to build on these findings. Additional analysis and case studies show that nonviolence is more effective than violence because it is better able to mobilize more people. Though this seems rather simple, it turns out that people are the source of people power.
Brilliant and inspiring!, October 30, 2011 By Ohmygoodness – See all my reviews Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This is an excellent read for individuals aspiring to learn more about nonviolent conflict. It would be a great addition to any classroom discussion on the issue. The authors of this book are brilliant offering inspiring evidence about civil resistance with every turn of a page.
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