Inter­est­ing to see Eri­ca Chenoweth’s recent research ref­er­enced in a NYTimes in an arti­cle by Max Fish­er on protests in Chi­na. Non­vi­o­lence activists (includ­ing many Quak­ers) loved the con­clu­sions of her ini­tial research, which implied that non­vi­o­lent, people-power protests were not just moral­ly supe­ri­or but also prag­mat­i­cal­ly more effec­tive — sug­gest­ing that Gand­hi and King and the pan­theon of peace activists were right all along.

For years, a sting­ing crit­i­cism of non­vi­o­lence strat­e­gy has been that it’s root­ed in com­fort­able elite com­mu­ni­ties and has spent too much time lec­tur­ing resis­tance move­ments that turn to vio­lence. Chenoweth’s hard num­bers and aca­d­e­m­ic rig­or gave us a bit of cov­er: See!, non­vi­o­lence works more often than not! Her more recent research makes that prag­mat­ic argu­ment more complicated. 

Activists have also tried to apply the data to very dif­fer­ent types of social action. Chenoweth’s data was look­ing at regime change – over­throw­ing dic­ta­tors or an occu­pied ter­ri­to­ry. How it does and does­n’t apply to reform move­ments is an open ques­tion (hat tip Macken­z­ian for a great con­vo on this and this link).

The next part of the Times’ arti­cle ref­er­ences Zeynep Tufekci’s the­o­ry that the last decade’s era of social-media protests can cre­ate instant, large-scale chal­lenges to gov­ern­ment pow­er that are dra­mat­ic but essen­tial­ly lead­er­less and don’t come out of strate­gic, long-term vision­ing. These are more like­ly to fiz­zle out. I’m remind­ed of a 2010 blog post of mine, Glad­well and strong tie social media net­works, where I talked about the orga­niz­ing that needs to go on in the back­ground of a social net­work to make it more effective.

While this arti­cle focus­es on Chi­na, the ele­phant for non­vi­o­lence activists today is the war in Ukraine. Peo­ple pow­er was­n’t going to stop Russ­ian tanks head­ed toward Kiev in Feb­ru­ary. The best one could hope for is Ukraini­ans gum­ming up the sys­tem – employ­ing strate­gies like blow­ing up bridges dur­ing the inva­sion and slow-walking Russ­ian orders after­wards. But with­out a mil­i­tary defense, there was almost cer­tain­ly going to be a long (per­haps decades long) peri­od of occu­pa­tion and repres­sion. Activists can still sup­port relief work and con­sci­en­tious objec­tors, etc., but I hon­est­ly don’t know what tools we had to offer in regards to the inva­sion itself.