Books
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. 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.”
Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know
“A sweeping overview of civil resistance movements around the world that explains what they are, how they work, why they are often effective, and why they can fail. Civil resistance is a method of conflict through which unarmed civilians use a variety of coordinated methods (strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, and many other tactics) to prosecute a conflict without directly harming or threatening to harm an opponent. It was been a central form of resistance in the 1989 revolutions and in the Arab Spring, and it is now being practiced widely in Trump’s America. In Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, Erica Chenoweth—one of the world’s leading scholars on the topic—explains what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance.”
Articles and Studies
- STUDY: How Public Opinion Information Changes Politicians’ Opinions and Behavior
- STUDY: The activist’s dilemma: Extreme protest actions reduce popular support for social movements (corresponding slide deck below)
- ARTICLE: What the Left can learn from the “Freedom Convoy”
- ARTICLE: You want people to do the right thing? Save them the guilt trip
- ARTICLE: The ‘3.5% rule’: How a small minority can change the world
- ARTICLE: Nonviolent resistance proves potent weapon
