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Alessandra Seiter: We are living in an age of mass political participation. Two-thirds of eligible us voters cast a ballot in the 2020 election, as much as 10% of the us population participated in demonstrations over the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans during the summer of 2020 according to polls. In 2018, nearly 500,000 workers were involved in strikes and other work stoppages, the highest figure since 1986. Beyond the US, mass movements in Sudan and Algeria even overthrew standing dictators in recent years and secured access to reproductive healthcare in both Argentina and Ireland.

Since the early 2000s, Erica Chenoweth, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, has systematically and empirically assessed historical and contemporary mass movements, hocusing on the efficacy of nonviolent campaigns. The latest in Professor Chenoweth's extensive work on the topic is shaped by both the questions they fielded about civil resistance, as well as the lessons they've learned from activists over the course of their own participation in nonviolent movements in the US. On this episode of Behind the Book, we speak with Professor Chenoweth about their new book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know.

Professor Chenoweth's goal was to synthesize and analyze the robust scholarship on civil resistance, to make it more accessible for practical use. They start by laying out what civil resistance is...

Erica Chenoweth: Civil resistance is a technique of struggle where unarmed civilians use a wide variety of methods to actively confront an oppressive opponent without using violence or the threat of violence.

AS: ...and what civil resistance can look like.

EC: These methods can be protests, boycotts, strikes, go-slow, stay-aways, and various other forms of economic, social, and political non-cooperation. It can be the creation of illegal or transgressive alternative institutions like alternative constitutional conventions, or judicial systems, or schools, or alternative media. The idea is that when people use these types of techniques and sequences that increase their political pressure over time against the opponent, while also managing the risk for people for participating, that they can achieve extraordinary political, social, and economic breakthroughs. That kind of surprises observers who kind of maybe underestimated how powerful people power can actually be.

AS: Professor Chenoweth thinks that observers tend to be surprised at the success of civil resistance movements because they're organized by marginalized members of society - in other words, by those who have been barred from traditional positions of power. But civil resistance movements enact a different kind of power, one contingent on mass participation at the grassroots level.

EC: The theory of change is that there's no such thing as an opponent that is monolithic. And there's no such thing as an opponent that has total control of the population all the time. Instead, opponents rely on basically everybody in the society to just go along with things, and that when people actually stop cooperating, and stop going along, and stop thinking that it's in their own best interest to just play along with the power-holder - that's when you start seeing these openings where dramatic transformations can take place.

AS: Professor Chenoweth has seen a lot of variability in civil resistance movements. For example, in their leadership structures, their use of digital media and technology, and importantly, their origins.

EC: One of the most interesting things is how totally unpredictable they are. So there are very few factors that seem to systematically predict the onset of a mass uprising, but the most important relate to the capacity of the population to mobilize effectively because of a recent history of say, labor strikes or protests, because of a growing youth population, because of the distribution of cell phones, for example, which helped people to communicate. And then notably, the beginning of authoritarian backsliding.

AS: Professor Chenoweth is often asked whether nonviolent resistance is at all effective against an authoritarian regime or an overwhelming military power. Professor Chenoweth's research suggests that the answer is often yes.

Professor Chenoweth outlines four key things non-violent resistance campaigns do well that violent campaigns do not. The first is that nonviolent campaigns are much better at eliciting broad and diverse participation, which gives them more social power. The second thing is that nonviolent campaigns are more effective at causing defections, particularly among elites and security forces. These defections can lead to key moments of political crisis for those holding power. The third thing nonviolent campaigns do well is create a large and varied enough movement that they have a much wider set of available tactics to draw upon than do violent movements. Lastly, nonviolent campaigns maintain discipline in the face of escalating state repression more effectively than violent campaigns, allowing them to deter the worst kinds of state violence.

In fact, Professor Chenoweth has found that over half of the non-violent campaigns undertaken between 1900 and 2019 have succeeded. Only a quarter of the violent movements during the same period succeeded. Not only have civil resistance movements seen more success than armed uprisings, they've also suffered fewer fatalities at a ratio of 22:1.

But Professor Chenoweth is careful not to assign moral weight to nonviolent techniques over violent ones. They believe oppressed peoples around the world should use whatever strategies they think are most appropriate to protect themselves and their communities.

EC: What this book is trying to do is document and amplify the various different strategic pathways that people have used in those circumstances besides using violence, which is well-documented by many other people to good effect.

AS: Professor Chenoweth is also careful to highlight that bodily violence is used much more often in response to civilian uprisings rather than by them, and that state actors often try to strategically provoke participants of civil resistance into violent action.

EC: Regimes really do try to de-legitimize these movements using the various epithets, one of which is that they're terrorists or a coup-plotters or thugs. It's very informative what the state shows it's afraid of.

AS: Beyond their scholarly interest in the topic, Professor Chenoweth finds hope in the masses of people worldwide who continue to engage in innovative modes of civil resistance in order to overcome unthinkable circumstances.

EC: More people are using these techniques today than in any other period in recorded human history. That is an amazing fact, and it's an incredible kind of privilege to be alive during this time.

AS: The book is, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, written by Erica Chenoweth, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School. It's published by Oxford University Press. This has been Behind the Book, a production of Library and Knowledge Services at Harvard Kennedy School. Find past and future episodes of Behind the Book by subscribing to Harvard Kennedy School on YouTube, following us on Twitter at @hkslibrary, and visiting our website.