George Floyd protests had more than that (closer to 8%) and they didn’t really change anything.
Movements are not the same as protests, movements have leadership that has explicitly defined asks that the followers agree with. iirc the organizers had challenges with this, so their default asks were awareness and they got that.
So then by any reasonable metric it was a failure. Just that the failure was at the leadership level and had zero chance at success because of that no matter what happened
Most of that I put on our ineffectual Democratic leadership who are supposed to represent the people. We had a mandate of millions and I don’t remember a single, actual dramatic effort to reshape policy by our elected leaders.
At that time, many people still believed Democrats were actually the opposition group to conservative fascism, and not the checked-out wine-mom getting alimony checks every month from the right.
This refers to Chenoweth’s research, and I’m somewhat familiar with their work. I think it’s good to clarify what non-violent means to them, as it’s non-obvious. For example, are economic boycotts violence? They harm businesses and keep food of the tables of workers. I don’t think that’s violence, but some people do, and what really matters here is what Chenoweth thinks violence is, and what they mean when they say “nonviolent tactics are more effective”.
At the end of “civil resistance: what everyone needs to know”, Chenoweth lists a number of campaigns which they’ve marked as violent/nonviolent and successful/unsuccessful. Let’s look at them and the tactics employed tonfigure out what exactly Chenoweth is advocating for. Please do not read this as a condemnation of their work, or of the protests that follow. This is just an investigation into what “nonviolence” means to Chenoweth.
Euromaidan: successful, nonviolent. In these protests, protestors threw molotov cocktails and bricks and at the police. I remember seeing a video of an apc getting absolutely melted by 10 or so molotovs cocktails.
The anti-Pinochet campaign: successful, nonviolent. This involved at least one attempt on Pinochet’s life.
Gwangju uprising in South Korea: unsuccessful, nonviolent. Car plowed into police officers, 4 dead.
Anti-Duvalier campaign in Haiti: successful, nonviolent. Destruction of government offices.
To summarize, here’s some means that are included in Chenoweth’s research:
- throwing bricks at the police
- throwing molotov cocktails at the police
- assassination attempts
- driving a car into police officers
- destroying government offices
The point here is not that these protests were wrong, they weren’t. The point is that they employed violent tactics in the face of state violence. Self-defense is not violence, and this article completely ignores this context, and heavily and knowingly implies that sitting in a circle and singing kumbaya is the way to beat oppression. It isn’t.
Is there a list available?
At this point I’m curious what they consider violent. Straight up military uprising and civil war?
What about the arab spring?
They consider it non-violent.
Well… ok… then let’s do the “NONVIOLENT” protests and stop doing these sit ins.
I mean do they consider it a success?
What does Chenoweth consider is violent?
Where’s the line where she would classify your movement as violent (and therefore likely to fail)?
If I have to be completely honest with you, and this is an indictment of their research, it seems heavily dependent on what the protest is for or against.
thanks. that was great.
Based on the article “no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of a population has ever failed” has the caveat of “we only look at 3 of them, and those 3 worked”.
So their overall sample size is small, and the 3.5% sample size is just 3. Further, those 3 had no idea someone in the vague future would retroactively measure their participation to declare it a rock solid threshold.
I think the broader takeaway is that number of people seems to matter more than degree of violence, and violence seems to alienate people that might have otherwise participated.
Also, the “no violence” thing has a LOT to do with what the mobilizing group is trying to accomplish.
Changing policies and ousting leadership that isn’t performing? Hell yeah, peaceful marches and protests all the way.
Want to remove a hostile and oppressive militarized regime? That shit is NEVER pretty, and turns even the best of people into monsters by necessity.
feels awfully close second one… especially now that i found out they’re deputizing bounty hunters to impersonate federal officers, with masks on… and paying them >$1,000 per brown person they kidnap…
i mean i knew it something extra odd was happening but a lot of these guys are contractors… and ofc white supremacists…
A lot of violent protests have succeeded too. Such as the suffragettes gaining the right to vote for women or unions gaining the right to exist, and the 8 hour work day.
Idk, that French deal seemed to work out pretty well.
Because they were trying to topple the entire system, not voice disapproval or change policies.
There’s no peaceful way to do that without a level of coordinated effort that we will NEVER get from groups of humans. To say nothing of the fact that even after the revolution, you have to share space with the people and sympathizers of those ousted, so sending a message of severe, popular consequence for regression is almost a necessity for lasting change.
The problem when it comes to the current situation in the US, is that these protests already came baked in to the Project 2025 plan from the start.
They’re not going to change their minds on anything as a result of the protests because they already knew there’d be mass protests before Trump signed a single order.
The problem with the statement from the title is that a non-violent movement that big won’t happen in many countries, or sometimes won’t happen without turning violent. Both should be accounted for when talking about this.
I’ve been fed up with logic, common sense and such as opposed to stats at some point, because I was mostly reading ancap stuff and ancaps are a bit too detached in that direction.
But it’s rightfully said often that throwing stats is just another kind of lies. Interpreting statistics is too complex, most people can’t do that, common sense and logic are indeed more important.
The average person doesn’t like violent civil unrest, shocking.
Also, I bet you can mess with the numbers to mean about anything you want by changing what classifies as “violent”. A lot of people include property destruction in their definition of violence. But a lot of other people don’t and only consider that property damage.
Why Civil Resistance Works the book that 2x figure comes from has some major controversy about cherry picking data as well as playing with the definition of peaceful protest.
If peaceful protests worked (as good as this article suggestions) the BBC wouldn’t be writing about them.
Peaceful protest works great under two conditions:
-
Just a metric fuckton of participants
-
The implicit threat of violent protest (e.g. Malcom X behind MLK)
- Your opposition has empathy
Meaning they aren’t somehow making money off whatever you’re protesting…
-
The article pointedly says that non violent protests were more successful because a lot more people were involved than in the violent protests.
This is actually rewriting history.
The Philippines had multiple militant movements but notably the Reform the Armed Forces which had orchestrated and abandoned a coup that had popular support kicking off the protest movement.
Sudan was a military coup that overthrew bashir and then massacred protestors and was actually backed by American OSI NGOs.
Algiers street protests were illegal and they combined general strikes with police clashes and riots even though they were subjected to mass arrests.
For Ghandi MLK jr and others mentioned there were armed militant groups adding pressure. My take away is you need both approaches.
Without demonstrating the ability to defend your nonviolent protest with devastating results it just gets crushed. If you are militant with no populist public movement backing your ideals you get labeled as terrorists and assinated by the feds.
And you need backing of the mass public. Keyboard warriors who sit on their ass and don’t get out there won’t work.
are 2x more likely
Meaning, there can be instances where it’s true or not true.
66% of the time it works every time.
This is a really common misunderstanding of how nonviolent movements actually work, and frankly gets the causality backwards.
You’re right that successful movements often have both violent and nonviolent wings - but the nonviolent components don’t succeed because of the violent ones. They succeed despite them. The research is pretty clear on this: nonviolent campaigns are actually more likely to achieve their goals than violent ones, and they’re more likely to lead to stable democratic outcomes.
Nonviolent movements get labeled as extremist precisely when they’re associated with violence, not when they’re separate from it. The Civil Rights Movement’s greatest victories came when they maintained strict nonviolent discipline - Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington. Every time violence entered the picture, it gave opponents ammunition to dismiss the entire movement.
The “good cop/bad cop” theory sounds intuitive but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. What actually makes nonviolent resistance effective is mass participation, strategic planning, and moral leverage - not the threat of violence lurking in the background.
You talk about research, so I’m curious: has any nonviolent campaign succeeded without an accompanying violent campaign?
Yes, but it’s complicated. I’ll use Iran’s long tradition of nonviolence as a case study.
In the late 1800’s when the shah tried to sell out tobacco farmers to foreign exploitation, and virtually everyone in the country opposed it, resulting in a tobacco boycott. Virtually everyone in the country participated it, including members of the shah’s own harem, and religious leaders issued a fatwa condemning anyone who violated it. The shah was forced to cave to pressure and reversed the decision.
This boycott movement helped for organization that would set the stage for later (largely peaceful) protests that led to the shah signing a constitution and establishing a democratic parliament. Unfortunately, he died shortly afterwards, and his son was much less cooperative, and called on foreign assistance to shell parliament, and successfully restored himself to power.
During WWI, Iran was invaded by the Ottoman, British, and Russian Empires, and the country suffered greatly from disease, famine, and the Armenian genocide, leading to over 2 million civilian deaths during the period. The Qajar dynasty collapsed, as did the Ottoman and Russian Empires, allowing Britain to dominate the power vacuum. They supported the new Pahlavi dynasty into power, there was a parliament, but the shah generally appointed whoever the British told him to as prime minister.
At this point, oil had been discovered in Iran, and the Iranians were stuck with an awful, exploitative deal that the previous dynasty had signed, as part of their general policy of selling out every part of the country to foreign colonizers so the shah could have a bigger harem. This deal was substantially worse than the general deal the US offered (which was generally 50/50 between the country that owned the oil and the country that built the infrastructure to extract it). But the terms didn’t actually matter because the British violated them all the time, vastly underreporting how much oil they were extracting so that they paid virtually nothing, and the Iranians had zero oversight of their records. Britain relied on this oil to be one of the richest and most powerful nations on the planet, while the Iranians remained some of the poorest people in the world.
For the next several decades, the Iranian people repeatedly asked Britain very nicely if they would possibly consider not stealing all their oil. And for those decades, the British completely stonewalled them, refused to consider any sorts of concessions whatsoever. Even with their own, hand-picked prime ministers, they still stonewalled them.
Finally, in the 1950’s, and a peaceful democratic movement successfully pressured the shah to appoint a popular leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, as prime minister - the shah finally became more afraid of popular discontent than he was of the British. Mosaddegh, after making attempts to negotiate, made a decision with overwhelming popular support, to nationalize the oil industry. This, however, led the British to impose a blockade, crippling the country’s economy.
Mosaddegh was an idealist, and he believed the Americans would see his cause as just, connect it to their own revolution, and back him up against the British. At this point, most Iranians had neutral or positive views of the US, seeing them as well intentioned, if naive, not understanding how long the Iranians had been struggling against British colonialism. All of these perceptions were proven completely wrong, because, rather than backing them up, Eisenhower agreed to use the CIA to overthrow Mossadegh to protect BP’s profits and to ensure British cooperation with NATO and the Korean War. This was the first of the CIA’s coups of democratic governments.
A stark example of this betrayal is that, the day before the coup, a US ambassador called Mossadegh and fed him a false story about how his supporters had been calling the embassy with death threats, and he was afraid he’d have to shut it down. Mossadegh - who had refused to crack down on (CIA funded) protests, or censor the (CIA controlled) press, or seek aid from the Soviets, or otherwise do anything to disrupt the infiltration out of concern for principles and respecting dissent -then issued as public statement calling for his supporters to cool it and stay off the streets. When his residence was attacked, no one was on the streets to come to his aid. He lived out the rest of his life under house arrest, while the shah used his absolute power to hunt down and exterminated the Iranian left - until he finally crossed the US and was himself overthrown by the current government.
When the stakes were low (from a geopolitical perspective), like, some poor tobacco farmers trying to maintain their (still quite poor) lifestyle, nonviolence worked. When the stakes were higher, like, changing the whole structure of the government, nonviolence worked better than one might expect, but generally encountered violent resistance and counter-revolution and fell apart. When the stakes were very high, like, trying to get a world-spanning empire to stop stealing the resource it needed to dominate the world, nonviolence was not very effective at all.
Being in Iran’s position, it really wouldn’t matter what they did to try to appease Westerners, so long as they assert control over their natural resources - so they don’t really bother. The goal of nonviolence is to be “in the right” but Iran’s history proves that you can be 100% “in the right” and still lose because foreigners don’t know/care about what’s being done to you, or are propagandized to side with the oppressor.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to protests in the US, but it can. If you’re a nonthreatening old white lady and your goals are not too disruptive to the empire, then sure, do nonviolence. But if you’re someone who the news could villainize, who people will assume the worst of just because of your race or religion, then they’re probably going to characterize you as violent whether you are or not. And if your goals are something that would disrupt the ruling class’s hold on power, then understand that the only reason they aren’t gunning you down is that they aren’t afraid of you - the real dangerous part about nonviolence is that it can be effective, and if power is threatened it will respond with force.
The research is pretty clear on this:
Lol. What was the methodology on this “research”?
The Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) Data Project is the world’s leading dataset on the characteristics and outcomes of nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns. The latest version covers 627 mass mobilizations in every country in the world from 1900-2021. The coverage is global but excludes maximalist campaigns (i.e. those seeking to overthrow an incumbent government, expel foreign military occupation, or secede).
Chenoweth and co-author Maria J. Stephan published their first analysis of the comparative outcomes of nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns in the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. In this book, the authors aggregated data from 1900–2006 and concluded that, overall, nonviolent civil resistance was more successful in achieving target outcomes than campaigns that use violence. The more recent dataset featured in the interactive tool confirms this trend and extends it into the past decade.
That didn’t remotely answer my question.
I directly answered you and provided sources and background.
Maybe try reading on your own without a mentor for granting you reading comprehension
No you didn’t. I asked for the methodology, you didn’t even remotely answer that.
Maybe try not lying about things that are easy to check.
I think what they’re looking for in terms of methodology is what objective criteria they use to determine if a protest is violent or nonviolent, as well as what constitutes success or failure. These are not trivial questions, and there’s lots of debate surrounding virtually any given movement, so to make objective determinations about a large number of such movements raises the question of how they’re resolving all these questions and debates. Some might argue that such questions are inherently political and up to interpretation.
As another user in this thread pointed out, it may be a case of confusing correlation with causation: if a movement is popular, it may be more likely to succeed and more likely to be considered nonviolent, as compared to a less popular movement employing the exact same tactics.
It did give the info needed to find this.
Violent campaigns on the other hand were defined as follows: “Violent resistance […] involves the use of force to physically harm or threaten to harm the opponent.” (Chenoweth/Shay 2020: 5). Violent campaign data was primarily collected from different databases including: The UCDP Armed Conflict Database, the Correlates of War database on intra-state wars (COW), Clodfelter’s encyclopedia of armed conflict (2002), and Kalev Sepp’s list of major counterinsurgency operations (2005) (Chenoweth/Shay 2020: 5). To note is that should a campaign at some point during its lifespan shift from a non-violent campaign to a violent one or vice versa, that this campaign is then coded as two separate campaigns (Chenoweth/Shay 2020: 7).
This led me to believe they are analysing in a vacuum but that would only really be true for the Philippines example.
This review is a fantastic in depth analysis of the data and outcomes when violent flanks (apparently the research term describing the parallel movements that are not nonviolent) are included.
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051421-124128#f1
Two tables analyse the purported and contradictory outcomes of the flanks in different research projects and papers. The authors conclusions are interesting to me in that he or she believes them to reduce long term success and increase short and mid terms, and also poiints out other factors in table 3 that affect the outcomes. One thing eluded to is that the societies perception of the movements being majority violent or non violent is actually the determining factor in the outcome and that I agree with in societies that presuppose nonviolence as a determining factor for success. I imagine nonviolence is a lit less important when you see yourself as occupied by an external force.
Thanks! That’s very comprehensive.
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Okay but who’s the one defining a protest as violent? You get enough people together and you’re going to have some aseholes that damage property but are the minority. If chocolate can have 5% bugs, then protests should be able to have 5% violence and still be called peaceful.
Or heck, if people react when police instigate, should that be called a violent protest?
Okay but who’s the one defining a protest as violent?
I’ll give you a hint, it rhymes with cocks
Socks?
Rocks.
Docks!
And Birkenstocks
Rocks?
The guys with Glocks? Agreed.
Cops are great at making any protest violent.
This is an important question. I believe the research in question defined movements by the predominant tactic used, even if there was a small amount of violence.
So protests like the anti-ICE ones in LA would probably count as non-violent in the research.
Edit: Here is a more recent work by the same author that more directly engages with some of the questions and criticisms that emerged from their initial work the BBC article is discussing.
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051421-124128
Okay but who’s the one defining a protest as violent?
The same people who write the history books. History is written by the winners, and when they write those books the protests that led to them winning are written up as being non-violent. It’s like “terrorists” vs. “freedom fighters”. If they succeed, they get to write the history books and they’re freedom fighters. If they lose, the other side writes the history books and they’re terrorists.
We can have a little violence. As a treat!
Are you arguing “it’s just a few bad apples” in defense of protests?
This is awkward.
I assume you’re comparing this to rhetoric around cops. Cops are ideologically and organizationally unified with top down command structure and they protect one another even in cases of wrongdoing or violence.
Most modern protests are just random people who chose to show up. These are totally different situations.
Of course they’re totally different. But it’s a funny comparison since the two groups are so related.
You’re right. We should fire the bad protestors.
And end qualified protestor immunity!
Bravo. I laughed. I just thought the initial comparison was silly.
Soros HR is no joke!
/s
What is awkward is how you failed to realize how insanely dumb and context-free your logic is to come to such an assinine conclusion…
Or how you presume there’s any conclusion or point. Just a silly observation. The two groups, protectors amd cops, are very related. It’s just a silly comparison. I’m not arguing any actual point.
Sensitive bunch. I’ve literally agreed with ACAB for a long time.
Is this why the opposition always tries to escalate the peaceful movement into a violent one?
No, it’s because the opposition is the establishment, and violence is a tool the establishment uses to… well, stay established.
American Revolution. French Revolution. Iranian Revolution.
Just a few very violent, and successful, revolutions.
Who’s going to fight in your violent revolution? You? We couldn’t even get all the people who voted for Biden to Vote for Kamala. Right now a large portion of African Americans are refusing to join the protest movement against encroaching fascism because Trump is somehow a “white people problem.” How do you think a revolutionary army or even an insurrection of sufficient strength to challenge the United States Government would ever take hold when there is zero solidarity among the left? We can’t even get people to vote in their own interest, let alone support a violent revolution. This is pure fantasy.
