How to Change the World

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." Those are the words of the first U.S. President, George Washington in his inaugural state of the union address. George Washington knew a thing or two about war. Over four decades of military service, he took part in a number of bloody battles. Among them, was the Battle of Trenton, in which American colonists battle German soldiers paid to fight for the British. The battle was depicted in the 2000 film, The Crossing. In scene after scene, the Americans thrust their bayonets into the Germans. They kill others with cannon and musket fire. Their enemies repeatedly try to regroup, but are forced to flee. Finally, the Germans realizing they cannot win, kneel in surrender.

The Crossing:

[foreign language 00:01:06].

Shankar Vedantam:

These scenes, like many depictions of war, can be hard to watch. But they also force us to face uncomfortable questions. Doesn't Washington's war and countless others like it, prove that the realists are right? That violence is the most effective means to change. That power does flow from the barrel of a gun.

This week on Hidden Brain, the surprising truth about what actually produces radical change and the profound implications for individuals and nations

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Many of us watch movies depicting war or TV shows where detectives saved the day by bursting in on the bad guys, guns blazing. These sorts of stories are based on an assumption: using force might be unpleasant, it might even be immoral - but it's highly effective, the surest way to get what you want. As war broke out in Eastern Europe this year, we've been reminded again of the brutal effectiveness of violence. At Harvard University, political scientist Erica Chenoweth studies whether this common assumption is true when it comes to mass movements for change. Erica Chenoweth, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Erica Chenoweth:

Thank you so much, Shankar.

Shankar Vedantam:

Erica, I want to look at your own journey into this area of research. When you were a kid, your mom bought you a book called Zlata's Diary. You were enthralled by this book. What was it about?

Erica Chenoweth:

Basically, this is the story written by Zlata Filipović about what it was like living as a child under siege, during the siege of Sarajevo. As a 13 year old kid, I couldn't help but be moved by the experiences of being a kid that were not going to be available to her, her friends and others because of the war.

Shankar Vedantam:

I mean, in many ways, it's like the fascination that many people have had over the years with The Diary of Anne Frank. It gives you a window into what it's like to go through the experience of war. Later on, I understand you became really interested in the history of World War I. You'd go to the public library with your family and you loved a book about World War I Medal of Honor winners. What was the appeal of the book?

Erica Chenoweth:

Well, I think I was always really fascinated with World War I. I can't actually remember the origins of the fascination to be honest, but from the time I can remember, I was looking at military history books and one that really caught my eye was the one about medal of honor winners - in part because it described these situations of heroism and courage but also these situations of just horrific war time conditions, trench warfare and the types of experiences that people had just serving in the war, on and off the battlefield.

Shankar Vedantam:

As an undergrad, I understand you took a military science class. So it sounds like you were developing a real interest here in military history.

Erica Chenoweth:

Yes. I was interested in potentially serving in the army after graduating from college and they had an ROTC program, which I didn't eventually enroll in, but I did take the military science course to find out whether it was a path for me.

Shankar Vedantam:

The September 11th terrorist attacks took place during Erica's senior year in college. They prompted Erica to go to graduate school to better understand the nature of terrorism.

Erica Chenoweth:

And there was a really influential article and later book published by a scholar named Robert Pape, who's at the University of Chicago. And he basically argued that suicide terrorism was on the increase because it was a remarkably effective technique. And there was a debate about this and another really important article instead of arguments was emerging from a fellow named Max Abrahms. And he was arguing that actually looking beyond just suicide terrorism, if you look at terrorist events and you look at sort of campaigns of terrorism or terrorist groups, and you look at how many of those groups have actually achieved what they said they wanted, it's a remarkably low number. And so he was saying that terrorism was not effective. And then there was this other political scientist saying that suicide terrorism in particular is very effective. So there was sort of a vibrant debate happening in the field. And my research was really on the question of why it is that people use terrorism in democracies specifically, where there are so many other methods of political expression that are available. So that's sort of where I was in the mid-2000s as well.

Shankar Vedantam:

Would it be fair to say that your broad belief at this point was that power indeed does flow, from the barrel of a gun, from your interest in military history and your knowledge of wars, past and present?

Erica Chenoweth:

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think I would qualify it somewhat just by saying that it flows from the barrel of many guns. And I think there are a lot of people that would make a similar assumption: that when violence failed, it was more a question of capacity, that rebel groups or terrorist groups were using violence, but didn't have really the capacity to back up their political might.

Shankar Vedantam:

I just want to stop for a second to note that the intuition that you had is I feel like an intuition that many people have in the culture, right? When we think about what succeeds in terms of bringing about change, whether that's change on an individual level or a group level or a political level, we see lots of examples - we see movies and books, which are all about the use of violence and war that basically achieve people's ends. And in some ways, it feels like that's that intuition sort of flows through our lives in a way that's often not questioned.

Erica Chenoweth:

I think that's true. I mean, I think from a very early time in life, at least in the United States, many children are encountering war stories. And whether that's about the founding of the country, whether it's about the Civil War, the Vietnam War, we encounter these fairly early on and they're sort of memorialized and mythologized in ways. To me, I guess I grew up with a sense that war was awful but necessary sometimes. Or it was something that was inevitable because of the nature of humanity. Yeah, I think you're right that as kind of a political culture, a national political culture, there's little questioning of the utility of violence.

Shankar Vedantam:

So in June 2006, you were, I believe working on your dissertation and you were attending an academic workshop but some of what you heard at this workshop made you skeptical. What was the workshop and what were people saying?

Erica Chenoweth:

It was a workshop that was put on by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which is an educational foundation based in D.C. The thing that was really surprising about it was that the content was all totally new to me. zsnd the basic claim, I would say, running through all of the content was that non-violent resistance when unarmed civilians use protests, boycotts, strikes, stay-aways, other forms of non-cooperation, that they can actually engage in collective action in a way that's as effective or even more effective than when they use armed insurgency. And the first thing that occurred to me is that when people would refer to particular cases like the People Power movement in the Philippines, or the Solidarity movement in Poland, or the anti-Pinochet movement in Chile. My immediate response was, those are very interesting cases, I hadn't really thought about them in terms of nonviolent collect action winning, compared to armed insurrection. But, for any example that someone brought up, I could think of a counter example of where an armed revolution had succeeded.

Shankar Vedantam:

Erica immediately also thought about non-violent protest movements that had failed, like the peaceful pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square in China in 1989.

Dan Rather:

As the world watches and listens in horror, the peaceful pro-democracy demonstration in China comes to a violent and bloody end: crushed by waves of Chinese military forces, hundreds of unarmed civilians hungry for freedom mode down in Beijing by gun firing socials.

Shankar Vedantam:

Tiananmen Square was not the only example of a failed non-violent uprising that occurred to Erica.

Erica Chenoweth:

Well, there's certainly plenty of examples more recently. The one that springs to mind immediately is the Syrian revolution. But that's another example of where you have a sustained mobilization that is up against a regime that effectively decided that it could roll the dice and use extreme brutality and suppress the movement effectively.

Shankar Vedantam:

And of course, even a cursory glance at history suggests numerous examples where violent interaction succeeded, I mean, and starting with the American Revolution or the French Revolution.

Erica Chenoweth:

Yes, absolutely. I mean, start with the Haitian Revolution and the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution. So we have many different examples that leap immediately to mind. Most people, I think wouldn't necessarily imagine that there's really anything about non-violent resistance that could make it even compete with that.

Shankar Vedantam:

As Erica marshaled example after example of violent revolutions that were effective or non-violent movements that had failed, another political scientist at the conference, Maria Stephan, threw down a challenge: examples showing violent and non-violent movements, succeeding or failing were just that. Examples, they were anecdotes. They weren't data. Now, it's never possible to rerun historical events. You couldn't ask question: would the French Revolution have succeeded if it had been non-violent? You couldn't rewind the clock of history, run the revolution differently and see if the outcome might have turned out another way. But Maria asked Erica, if there was still a way to scientifically test which approach was more effective.

Erica Chenoweth:

Basically, my answer to Maria was how I would do it, is I would collect data for a very long time period. I would use every country in the world as the universal potential cases and then I would look for comparable cases that were featuring primarily non-violent resistance and violent resistance. And by comparable cases, I mean cases that were seeking similar goals, and I would apply a hard standard to that and look only at cases that were seeking radical revolutionary goals.

In other words, not looking at say civil rights campaigns or different types of reform campaigns, but look at campaigns that were trying to overthrow the incumbent national government or campaigns that were trying to push for independence, either by expelling a foreign military occupation or colonial power or through succession. Because those are the types of goals that most people associate in their minds with armed revolution. And then let's apply a very strict definition of success, which is that the campaign had to have achieved its outcome within a year of the peak of its mobilization and it had to have had a decisive impact on the outcome and achieved what it said it wanted.

So in the case of independence campaigns, they can't just achieve autonomy. It has to be de jure and de facto independence. The reason to set it up that way is because, if you were a skeptic like me, you would want to compare the hard cases and you'd want to be able to come up with some kind of measure of the relative effectiveness, given those very strict criteria.

Shankar Vedantam:

Erica was proposing an incredibly high bar to test the effectiveness of non-violent movements. Maria Stephan's response: let's do it. Let's find all the cases of insurrections and revolutions over more than a century where groups of people sought to overthrow a regime. Let's classify them as violent or non-violent based on how the campaigns were predominantly carried out and see which ones succeeded. By comparing lots and lots of cases, the researchers could finally say something objective about the relative effectiveness of the two strategies. Erica said okay, but was quite sure what they would find. All the childhood books, all the military history Erica had absorbed pointed in the same direction. Non-violent movements might be high-minded, but violent movements would be more effective.

When we come back, what the political scientists found. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Erica Chenoweth grew up fascinated by stories of war and military heroism. Like many people, Erica recoiled at the horrors of war, but came to believe that violence was an effective way to accomplish one's goals. Popular culture endorsed this idea. Movies, books, and TV regularly tell us that if you really want to get your way on something, force is probably the most effective strategy.

In 2006, Erica met another political scientist, Maria Stephan, who threw down a challenge. If violence was really more effective than non-violence in enacting change, the historical data should prove it. If you compare the history of violent insurrections with nonviolent campaigns for change, you should find that the people who used guns were far more successful than the people who didn't use weapons.

Erica and Maria began to analyze hundreds of cases of conflict in rebellion starting in the year 1900. Erica, I want to start by looking at some of the cases you and Maria examined and let's start with this one. In October 2000, hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered in the city of Belgrade. There were massive demonstrations calling for government reform. One evening in October, a large crowd gathered in front of the city's parliament building. They chanted, "He's finished. He's finished." Who were they talking about?

Erica Chenoweth:

Well, they were talking about Slobodan Milošević - one of his nicknames is the Butcher of the Balkans - who had stolen an election that had taken place in the previous weeks. And the movement that organized in advance of the election had expected Milošević to lie about the results of the election and had set up these parallel vote tabulation and very well organized kind of verification processes to demonstrate the fraud.

Shankar Vedantam:

So the Serbian organization was called Otpor and Otpor really became famous for using humor and theatrics in their anti-Milošević protests. Once such campaign was called a Dinar for Change. Activists painted Milošević's face on a barrel and placed it in front of the Belgrade National Theater. People who passed by could pay a small amount of money to then hit the painting with a bat. It was like a game you play at a county fair. I want to play you a clip of one of the leaders, Srđa Popović, explaining the strategy in a TED talk.

Srđa Popović:

We put the big petrol barrel, with a portrait picture of Mr. President on it, in the middle of the mainstream, there was a hole on the top. So you could literally come, put the coin in, get the baseball bat and hit his face. Sounds loud. So we were sitting in a nearby cafe having coffee, and there was a queue of people waiting to do this lovely thing. Well, that's just the beginning of the show. The real show starts when the police appears. What they will do? Arrest the shoppers with kids? Doesn't make sense. Of course, you could bet, they've done the most stupid thing. They arrested the barrel. And now the picture of the smashed face on the barrel with the policeman dragging them to the police car, that was the best day for the photographers from newspapers that they ever will have.

Shankar Vedantam:

Was the effect of this campaign, Erica?

Erica Chenoweth:

There's no doubt that Otpor had a really important impact on opening people's minds to imagining a new future. One of the long term legacies of that campaign was the different types of tactical innovations that were experimented with there. In particular, the type of method that Srđa was just describing is called a dilemma action. And a dilemma action is something that Otpor really perfected. The dilemma is: what do you do? So do you just leave it and ignore it? Then you have all of these people smashing Milošević's face, or do you arrest somebody, anybody who's there, create a scene, it would look illegitimate, or do you put the barrel in the police car and then it's sort of this humiliating and absurd political theater. But it's a technique that is now used in a much more widespread way, I would think, because the logic of it is clearer to people.

And the other thing of course is the humor. And humor is really important as a way to really poke at the invincibility kind of myth or narrative that exists among many different autocrats or autocratic movements. And so, if there's one thing that we know that autocrats don't like, it's people laughing at them.

One of my favorite vignettes comes from Morocco, where there is an independence movement in Western Sahara, and it's illegal to fly the colors of the flag of the independence movement. And there was a group of protestors who wanted to mobilize an illegal flag flying protest and they announced in advance that this would be taking place so that the authorities would show up. But instead of themselves showing up to fly the flag, they basically rounded up a bunch of stray cats and tied the flags onto their tails, and then released them into a crowded area where then the riot police were like chasing them up and down narrow alleys and stuff. And this is a real dilemma action because it creates this like ludicrous scene of absurd political theater, but they also couldn't arrest anybody.

Shankar Vedantam:

Literally herding cats, huh?

Erica Chenoweth:

Exactly (laughs). Literally herding cats, but not able to really figure out who the real protest organizers were.

Shankar Vedantam:

So the Serbian police began to crack down on Otpor. They were arresting the protestors, many of whom were teenagers, and they were also calling the protestors terrorists. But increasingly, it wasn't just young people who were involved. Older people were getting increasingly drawn into the struggle. Why was that?

Erica Chenoweth:

Well, I think that the movement likely did a very good job of appealing to a wider and wider base of supporters. There was a period in which they were experiencing a pretty high degree of police repression and I was told by one activist there that they began organizing something called grandparents protests, which is when they would ask their retired grandparents to come and march or demonstrate with them. And at those marches, they noticed the police were much less likely to start swinging their batons at the crowd. There was just a taboo against beating the elderly in public and they exploited that taboo and by the way, also increased their numbers and the diversity of their campaign.

Shankar Vedantam:

What the final outcome of the protest? Did it work?

Erica Chenoweth:

It did. Milošević announced that he was retiring to spend more time with his grandson. He fled. He fled the square and the movement effectively walked through the line of policemen who obviously were not going to fire on them anymore and occupied the parliament building. And inside apparently, they found lots of ballots that were pre-marked for Milošević, so further demonstrating the fraud.

Shankar Vedantam:

Let's fast forward 20 years and turn from Eastern Europe to Africa. The country of Sudan was ruled for nearly 30 years by president Omar al-Bashir, who was a brutal dictator. He presided over the genocide in the Darfur region of Southern Sudan in the early 2000s. Now, there were periodic uprisings over the years, but the security forces quickly suppressed them. But then in December 2018, protests erupted across the country after the government raised fuel and prices.

Demonstrators:

(clapping and shouting)

Shankar Vedantam:

The demonstrations were organized by a group called the Sudanese Professionals Association. What were the techniques they used?

Erica Chenoweth:

One of the most important techniques that the SPA was able to organize and mass was a general strike and various other limited strikes and stay-aways. And stay-aways can be really important for movements that are facing brutal regimes because unlike mass demonstrations, they don't necessarily place people in positions of directly confronting the agents of repression. But, in this case, there were also mass demonstrations, sit-ins, marches, protests, they used a really wide range of non-violent methods in the course of that campaign.

Shankar Vedantam:

So soon after these protests really became widespread, al-Bashir was actually removed in a coup and the Sudanese military established a military council. But the SPA kept protesting, they wanted the co-leaders to hand over power to the people and establish a democracy. And this led to something that's now known as the Khartoum massacre. What happened, Erica?

Erica Chenoweth:

Yeah. So what was happening there is that there was a massive sit-in outside of the military headquarters, demanding that the civilians be represented in the new government and that a transition to democracy take place as soon as possible. And various security forces committed a mass atrocity. They killed and sexually assaulted and tortured over a hundred people. Some of whose bodies they dumped in the Nile river.

And, in the aftermath of that event, the SPA wisely, I think, called for a general strike and mass non-cooperation. And the reason I say it was incredibly wise and strategic is, again, it didn't necessarily put people in direct contact with those militias and security forces by calling for a massive 4 million strong demonstration, but instead say nobody's going to work until we have the opportunity to be at the table negotiating a peaceful transition to democracy.

And it was a remarkably effective maneuver. Because not only did it help to keep people involved and engaged, but it also disrupted the day-to-day order of things, so that the transitional junta didn't feel like it had a way out other than to work with some of the civilian representatives to negotiate an outcome.

Shankar Vedantam:

One of the other lessons that I'm getting from this, is that even highly repressive regimes, at some level, depend on the cooperation of the people being repressed in order to hold onto power. And when that cooperation is withheld or withdrawn, it becomes actually quite difficult for even very authoritarian regimes to hold onto power.

Erica Chenoweth:

That's right. I think that's the basic theory. The ruler does depend on so many people to stay in power. Like they're not doing it themselves. And when very large numbers of people refuse to continue supporting them, things collapse rather quickly. Movements have to do what Maria Stephan has argued, which is extend the non-violent battlefield into constituencies upon whose cooperation the regime does depend. That's one kind of tricky factor that explains some variation, I think, in the outcomes of non-violent movements.

Shankar Vedantam:

Now, years later, in Sudan, there's still ongoing turmoil. So in some ways, perhaps the outcome is not completely set and the path ahead might be bumpy. Demonstrators probably still face great danger. But, Erica, you count the protest in 2019 in Sudan as successful. How so? What happened?

Erica Chenoweth:

So the movement was successful in toppling Bashir and installing effectively a transitional government that made more strides toward a real democratic outcome than the country had seen in generations. Yes, you're right, that in the context of the pandemic and sort of under the cover of COVID lockdown and the military felt that it could really roll things back. And the outcome of that was organized mass resistance, which is still ongoing. So in terms of the way that I usually try to classify the outcomes of campaigns by our criteria, having overthrown the incumbent national leader, that would count as a success.

Shankar Vedantam:

So we've talked about a couple of movements that successfully utilized non-violent techniques to enact change. I want to look at an example of a largely non-violent movement that sometimes dabbled in violence and it's instructive to see what happened. In May 2011, there was a wave of protests in Spain calling for socioeconomic reform. These were largely peaceful. The movement called itself 15-M. It was named after May 15th, which is when these demonstrations began. People began occupying central squares in the main cities of Spain and a large percentage of the public, about 65% supported 15-M. Can you tell me what happened in the course of these protests that caused some of them to turn violent and the effects of this turn on public opinion?

Erica Chenoweth:

Basically, there was an episode in which some of the protestors were provoked into using violence in one way or the other. And there were a couple of social scientists who had been conducting surveys on opinions toward the movement before that event took place and then they were able to do surveys after that event took place as well. And what they found is that the average support for the movement dropped by about 12% in the aftermath of that event. And the findings were qualified somewhat, in the sense that among people who already were very supportive of the movement, there wasn't a very large drop in support. But among people who were kind of adjacent to the movement politically, who were sympathetic to the movement before, or who were kind of not affiliated with the movement in any way, there was a much bigger decline in support.

So in other words, the episode of violence tended to have very little effect on base solidarity. But it had a pretty big effect on alienating potential third party supporters of the movement that would've allowed it to expand its base. And so, I think the key takeaway of that study is that these types of incidents can be really risky for movements that are trying to expand their base of supporters. And expanding the base of supporters is one of the key things that non-violent resistance campaigns need to do to win. They need to grow in number and then the diversity of their supporters and in the links that their supporters have to different pillars of support.

Shankar Vedantam:

Yeah. So this was walked by the political scientists, Jordi Muñoz and Eva Anduiza. They happened to be in the area at the time studying 15-M, so they were able to survey the public both before and after the turn to violence. But I want to stay with this idea for a moment because, I suppose if your base is large enough, if the number of people whom you have on your side is a significant majority, then possibly turning to violence perhaps does not affect the outcome very much, because you already have a significant majority on your side. But if you are in a position where you are 20% of the population, you really need to recruit a significant number of people to come over to your side in order to make up a majority and it seems to be in those cases where turning to violence runs the risk of alienating people who might otherwise support you.

Erica Chenoweth:

Yes, that's exactly how I would read kind of the state of the literature on this one, which is that it's a much more risky political move to do when a movement is very small and trying to expand its base, than it is if a movement is already very large, enjoys a lot of popular support and critically the opponent is hated by lots and lots of people.

So if it's just a regime that's made so many missteps and has shattered its own legitimacy to such a large extent that basically 90% of the population one way or the other wants change, it may be less politically risky. But there still are a lot of risks. One of them is just the expansion of repression. It's much more likely to be really intense and to expand indiscriminately when movements do begin to mix non-violent and violent methods. And that's in part why so many regimes seem to try to deliberately provoke non-violent movements into kind of breaking down their discipline. Because they know that it helps bolster their own legitimacy, their own calls for the need for law and order and the restoration of stability. And they know that significant portions of the population will largely agree with that. So this is part of the reason why agents provocateurs, or incidents of repression meant to provoke people out of their discipline, are such a ubiquitous part of the autocratic toolkit.

Shankar Vedantam:

It's interesting that I think in these conflicts, you act actually have, in some ways, a test of discipline on both sides. Because the protestors, non-violent protestors are often also trying in some ways to incite the government authorities into overreacting, into cracking down into repression. Because I think they also recognize that repression reduces government support. It reduces the legitimacy of government authority. Just as the governments might realize that when protest movements result of violence, it tends to undermine their legitimacy and also undermine their mass appeal.

Erica Chenoweth:

Yes, I think that's a fair comparison. I also think that they're playing a similar game in the sense that they're both trying to divide and rule the other. So the logic of non-violent resistance is to grow the base in order to create these defections from the opponent's support base. So basically, the movement is effectively trying to divide the opponent and dislocate it from its pillars of support. And the regime is trying to do the same to the movement.

Shankar Vedantam:

So we looked at a few examples of cases where people used violence or non-violence or a combination of these tactics to try and enact change and obviously the specifics of each conflict are unique and cataloging conflicts as violent or non-violent probably involve some judgment, things may not be entirely black and white. But when you step back and look at the big picture of examples of both violent and non-violent protest movements over the span of the 20th century, what did you and Maria find?

Erica Chenoweth:

Well, the basic descriptive statistic that really jumped out is that the non-violent campaigns were twice as likely to have succeeded as their violent counterparts. And that the rates of success for non-violent campaigns had actually increased over the latter half of the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st. So, in other words, non-violent resistance was working much more than skeptics like myself would have expected. At the same time, that doesn't mean that it worked all the time. We found basically that about around half of the cases that we studied had succeeded and about 25% of the cases of armed resistance had succeeded. We also would never argue that violent resistance never works because clearly one out of four cases had succeeded as well. So, nevertheless, I at least was very surprised by the fact of this and it definitely motivated us to continue trying to figure out why.

Shankar Vedantam:

When we come back, the subtle psychological mechanisms that explain why non-violent movements might seem less likely to succeed than violent campaigns but end up being more effective in the long term. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At Harvard University, political scientist Erica Chenoweth studies the effectiveness of political protest. Along with Maria Stephan, Erica has studied more than a hundred years of struggles for radical change around the world. These included both violent and non-violent revolutions and insurrections. They found that non-violent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns. Violent forms of protest might get a lot of press and attention, but they tend to invite harsh repression from authorities and also to turn off potential allies. Erica and Maria have discovered four key factors that explain why non-violent movements appear to be increasingly more effective than violent insurrections.

Erica Chenoweth:

The first factor is mass participation. So movements that win tend to be much larger and more diverse than movements that don't and non-violent campaigns tend to be able to elicit much larger and more diverse participation than armed campaigns.

The second factor is the ability of the campaigns to divide and rule the opponent by shifting the loyalties of people within various pillars of support. So the larger the base becomes for a movement, the more likely it is that participants in the movement will have direct ties to people in the opponents pillars of support, like economic and business elites, important politicians, civil servants, state media, different types of police or security forces or other authorities, local government, and local authorities. The more those connections begin to be embedded within the movement, the more likely it is that the movement can maneuver in ways that begin to really shred the loyalties of people in those pillars of support.

The third factor is the ability of movements to tactically innovate, especially moving away from mass demonstrations, rallies, and protests, and more into forms of non-cooperation, like strikes, stay at homes, and kind of undermining power for the opponent. And that's really the main thing, is that these movements aren't out there to like melt the heart of the dictator. They're out there to remove the bases of the dictator support. That's a really key distinction and I think is probably what leads a lot of people to think that non-violent resistance campaigns are naive, is that they think they're trying to change the mind of a brutal dictator when they're not. They're trying to win a political fight among people who are neutral, who are kind of sympathetic to the regime but not actively supporting it and certainly among people that are sympathetic to the movement but not actively supporting it.

And then the fourth factor that seems to be really important is for the movement to be able to develop some kind of organizational resilience and discipline, so that when or if repression escalates, that the movement is able to continue to recruit, to continue to maneuver as it needs to without falling into disarray. And often what disarray means is some people start to say, we need to use violence now, and they just go do that without any kind of organizational cohesion. And so we know that organizational cohesion leads to lots of things that help movements including discipline.

Shankar Vedantam:

I just want to go back to one of the points you made, the idea that in some ways the central goal of these movements is to expand their base of support, to bring more people in to sort of feel like the movement is a mass movement. Talk a little bit about the work that you've done that examines how large a movement needs to be in order to be effective because when I saw this, I was actually struck by in some ways how small that number actually needs to be.

Erica Chenoweth:

Right. Maria Stephan and I analyzed about 323 cases of maximalist campaigns or revolutionary campaigns and I found that none of the campaigns seemed to have failed after mobilizing three and a half percent of the population. And three and a half percent is a small number in relative terms, but very large in absolute terms. So in the United States, that's like 11 and a half million people. In China, it's many tens of millions of people. And so then we start to get a sense of the scale.

Shankar Vedantam:

It's worth pausing for a moment and sitting with that finding. Erica found that movements that mobilized about three and a half percent of the population succeeded pretty much everywhere. But before you think it's easy to organize and execute a mass movement for change, Erica has a few caveats about that data point.

Erica Chenoweth:

That it only counts participation. It doesn't necessarily look at supporters of the movement or sympathizers with the movement and so it can be easy to sort of conclude, I think wrongly, that all you need is three and a half percent of the population on your side. I don't think that's what the data say. It says that countries in which there have been three and a half percent of the population actively mobilized, in a sort of peak period, are extremely unlikely to lose. But that could be because they have already elicited like 90% of the population support or something along those lines. So the way that I think about the three and a half percent rule is really more of a rule of thumb rather than an iron law. So those are the unknowns that make me cautious about kind of overinterpreting the rule.

Shankar Vedantam:

I want to look at one other idea, which is in some ways, violence sort of produces its own opposition. So the harsher you behave, yes, on the one hand you do get compliance and people do fall in line, people are afraid of you, but it's also the case that violence generates enemies. You have more enemies tomorrow than you did yesterday. And over time, you can see how it's effective in the short term, but it can end up having great costs for your campaign in the long term.

Erica Chenoweth:

Yeah. I mean, I think one helpful way to think about this is to think about tactical effects versus strategic outcomes. So if you think about that event that took place in Spain with the 15-M movement, the short term effects of those types of events are often really obvious, it's things like greater media coverage. Like maybe they wound up on the front page rather than on the 20th page or something of the newspaper, maybe there was a self-defense justification and so somebody was able to get away from that event who otherwise would've been beaten up by someone. There are short term tactical reasons why people often say, see that violence helped.

But then if you look at the long term strategic outcomes, it also has really important after effects. For example, the expansion of repression against people who are involved in the movement or their family members, whether they participated in the violence or not. It often has the effect of then expanding government powers of surveillance and infiltration and other types of things that actually are really challenging for movements to manage.

And then sometimes it alienates would-be supporters. It often creates a sense of unity and comradery among security forces, for example, rather than encouraging them to take a moment and think about what they think is going on in the country. So, yeah, I mean, I think most of what we know about incidents of violence is that it does harden the opposition rather than kind of softening the opposition and allowing it to fracture. And this is part of why a lot of the research, for example, on the impacts of terrorism on a political system are that it's very polarizing, but it generally leads the population to embrace more right wing political beliefs about what the government ought to be able to do to restore public order.

Shankar Vedantam:

So what's fascinating to me, Erica, is that our model, our mental model, I think, is still stuck in sort of what we see on television or in the movies, where we see that violent...people who have been unjustly treated resort to violence in order to get justice, or we see that groups that basically want their way sort of use violence to win. I'm not sure it's sort of a concerted effort to look the other way, but there really does seem to be a reluctance to grapple with these histories in a way that at least commensurate with the way we think about conventional military histories.

Erica Chenoweth:

Yeah, I think part of it is just basic misconceptions and myths about what non-violent resistance is. For example, when people use the term non-violence, I think that they often just associate that with a moral position and they think of it as something that's potentially noble but extremely naive. They don't think about it in terms of a strategy that's literally helped to shape the world we live in right now and that's available to anybody anywhere to a certain degree.

There's an interesting book called Recovering Nonviolent History that's edited by Maciej Bartkowski. And, there's an opening chapter in there about the myth of violence and how sort of appealing it is and how we memorialize it and mythologize it and make it part of our national histories. But that book is full of examples of non-violent campaigns that were formative in developing nations around the world, including in the United States.

So one of the chapters is actually a look at the American Revolution by Walter Conser. And in it, he argues that actually the most important part of the American Revolution came in the 10 years before armed hostilities broke out, where colonists were effectively using all kinds of different forms of economic non-cooperation and the development of alternative institutions like alternative judicial institutions, political conventions, and other things that otherwise would not be really allowed in a monarchy. And they effectively freed themselves, so to speak, before the hostilities broke out. In fact, if you tell the story that way, the war that took place between the colonists and the British was actually the counterrevolution. It was the attempt by the British to seize back what they thought was rightfully theirs after the Declaration of Independence took place.

So in a way, there's a real need to, I think, recover some of the histories of non-violent resistance that have defined our countries, our nations, our world, and that we're sort of the inheritors of but don't know it.

Shankar Vedantam:

Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist at Harvard University and the author of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, and with Maria Stephan, the book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Erica, thank you for joining us today on Hidden Brain.

Erica Chenoweth:

Thank you so much, Shankar.

Shankar Vedantam:

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

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