In the past I have written about the importance and power of nonviolence from a religious perspective. Jesus Christ never engaged in violence Himself, has directly forbidden His followers form killing others while warning that eternal damnation await those who do, and has commanded His disciples to actively live what we today would call a life based on social and political nonviolence. I have even written about some ways to do this today. But it isn’t just the religious perspective that makes nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience the most powerful tools of positive economic, social, and political transform ever discovered or revealed.
The secular data is in and it proves without a doubt the overwhelming superiority of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to violence of any sort as the means by which to change the world. And not just in secular democracies, but, as Dr. Erica Chenoweth makes clear in her article The Future of Nonviolent Resistance, nonviolence and civil disobedience are the most effective tools for overthrowing the most tyrannical and abusive governments in history. And not just for overthrowing them, nonviolence and civil disobedience are the most likely forms of resistance to lead to the establishment of stable, peaceful governments after the ouster of former authoritarian regimes.
The following evidence, all taken from Chenoweth’s The Future of Nonviolent Resistance, demonstrate authoritatively the failures of violence to bring meaningful and peaceful change, the growing use of nonviolence and civil disobedience as tools of countering social and political injustice, the astounding success of nonviolence and civil disobedience -far out performing violent forms of resistance, and the future of nonviolence and civil disobedience to continue to bring about true and lasting positive social and political change, liberty, and peace.
A Record of Success
Chenoweth starts by defining what nonviolence and civil disobedience mean:
Nonviolent resistance is a method of struggle in which unarmed people confront an adversary by using collective action—including protests, demonstrations, strikes, and noncooperation—to build power and achieve political goals. Sometimes called civil resistance, people power, unarmed struggle, or nonviolent action, nonviolent resistance has become a mainstay of political action across the globe. Armed struggle used to be the primary way in which movements fought for change from outside the political system. Today, campaigns in which people rely overwhelmingly on nonviolent resistance have replaced armed struggle as the most common approach to contentious action worldwide.
The Future of Nonviolent Resistance
This chart comparing the use of violent and nonviolent forms of resistance across the world for the 20th century will show us just how much of a “mainstay” nonviolent resistance has become.
Though people often think of revolutions as being guys with guns and bombs blowing up buildings and shooting bureaucrats, the reality is far different. Not only has nonviolence grown as the means of resisting tyranny and oppression, it is today the most used set of tools for resisting and defeating tyranny and oppression.
How successful have these efforts been? After all, it is conceivable that even if someone is using a specific tool more that the person sees more failure than success. A screwdriver will never replace a hammer as a tool for hammering nails, for example. So, as people increasingly turning to nonviolence and civil disobedience are they finding more or less success?
As you can see here, the success of both violent and nonviolent forms of resistance fluctuated throughout the 20th century, but by and large nonviolent forms of resistance have always been more successful than violent ones. The only exception to this fact is from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, i.e. during World War II when most of the world was consumed by the brutality of total war. My personal favorite is the skyrocketing of successful nonviolent resistance campaigns during the late 1980s and early 1990s. This corresponds with collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (a.k.a. the Soviet Union.) Why is this my personals favorites?
Because people always argue in opposition to nonviolent resistance by saying things like, “Yeah, that works in liberal democracies where people care at least a little bit about human rights and governments answer to the people to some degree, but in totalitarian dictatorships where the government rules through brutal violence and mass oppression nonviolent resistance is only going to get good people slaughtered. You can only get rid of dictatorships with violence.”
But the fall of the Soviet Union, one of the most brutal, violent, and oppressive regimes in all of human history, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people with one of the largest systems of slavery ever in human history, with one of the largest militaries in human history, with one of the largest nuclear arsenals in human history, this leviathan of absolute government power and crushing jackboot violence completely vanished from the Earth. Not because of a violent revolution, uprising, or civil war. No, this government every bit as horrific, brutal, oppressive, and vile as the Nazis, were not defeated through a world war.
The Soviet Union was slain by a wave of nonviolent resistance movements which spread throughout the Warsaw Pact in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nonviolent resistance tactics empowered the people by engaging in mass civil disobedience. This stripped the ruling Socialist governments of their power and simultaneously created new governments to act as representatives of the masses. And while the details of these movements are too numerous to be detailed here, I do suggest you read about Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution and the final collapse of the Soviet government in Russia, both carried out through mass civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance even the face of grave military threat.
These examples and many more prove that nonviolent resistance movements are powerful, more powerful in fact than violent resistance movements.
Why Nonviolent Resistance is So Successful
The fact that nonviolent resistance campaigns are four times as likely to be successful as violent resistance campaigns begs the question of why nonviolent resistance is so successful. What about it creates that 4 to 1 success ratio? Dr. Chenoweth explains:
This holds true even when nonviolent campaigns faced down brutal autocrats. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the case that nonviolent campaigns emerge or win out mainly when the regimes they confront are politically weak, incompetent, or unwilling to employ mass violence. Once a mass movement arises and unsettles the status quo, most regimes confront unarmed protesters with brute force, only to see even larger numbers of demonstrators turn out to protest the brutality. Besides, even when regime type, government repression, and military capacity are taken into account, nonviolent campaigns are still far more likely to succeed than violent resistance. This is because they tend to be larger, more cross-cutting, and therefore more politically representative than armed movements.
This provides numerous openings through which they can bring about defections, pulling the regime’s pillars of support out from under it at decisive moments. This happens when security forces refuse to follow orders to shoot at demonstrators, as in Serbia in 2000. Or it can happen when business or economic elites start responding to public pressure by voicing support for the movement, as numerous white business owners did in South Africa following waves of Black-led strikes, boycotts, and global sanctions initiated in support of the anti-apartheid movement. …And nonviolent movements have the capacity to expand participation in ways that armed groups cannot. The widespread view that only violent action can be strong and effective is deeply mistaken.
The Future of Nonviolent Resistance, paragraphization added
Nonviolent resistance campaigns work because so many people of differing ages, sexes, and abilities can take part in them at any given moment. Quadriplegics may be unable to take part in a violent uprising against a tyrannical government, but they can engage in tax resistance and refuse to give the regime the money it needs to operate. Children cannot lead armed forces into battle, but they can take part in boycotts designed to cripple flow of money to a corrupt government and its allies in the economic elites. Women are not allowed to join battle in many cultures, but they can organize protest movements and break the law. As a result, nonviolent resistance campaigns have far more utility, versatility, and ability to effectively organize the actions of the masses to accomplish specific political, social, and economic goals. More people means more power and nothing organizes more people like nonviolent resistance.
How many people do nonviolent resistance campaigns need to be successful? Dr. Chenoweth’s work has discovered that there is a threshold which, if achieved, nonviolent resistance campaigns are almost always successful:
Researchers used to say that no government could survive if five percent of its population mobilized against it. But our data reveal that the threshold is probably lower. In fact, no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that. Now, 3.5% is nothing to sneeze at. In the U.S. today, this means almost 11 million people.
But get this: Every single campaign that did surpass that 3.5% threshold was a nonviolent one. In fact, campaigns that relied solely on nonviolent methods were on average four times larger than the average violent campaign. And they were often much more representative in terms of gender, age, race, political party, class, and urban-rural distinctions.
The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance
It is worth noting that she isn’t just talking about protest movements or marches. She is talking about active, organized, structured, and targeted nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns. Just because there were mass protests somewhere doesn’t mean anything if there were no organized campaigns to actually achieve the goals of the protest. In that case what you have is just a bunch of people blowing off steam, not a nonviolent resistance campaign. Now, as Chenoweth says, 3.5% of a population is no small matter, especially for larger nations. And this isn’t an “ironclad law of history,” such things do not exist. But a historical study of the 20th century shows that it is generally true, so much so that of the 350 cases that Dr. Chenoweth studied, only two violated the statistic.
The Outcomes of Resistance
Dr. King once explained the different outcomes of violent resistance and nonviolent resistance thusly:
It’s necessary to boycott sometimes, but the nonviolent resistor realizes that a boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor, but the end is reconciliation. The end is redemption. So the aftermath of violence is bitterness, but the aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community. The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption and reconciliation. This is a method that seeks to transform and to redeem and win the friendship of the opponent, and make it possible for men to live together as brothers in a community and not continually live with bitterness and friction.
Justice Without Violence, emphasis added
The study Do Revolutions Create Bad Regimes? by Dr. Ronald A. Francisco of the University of Kansas explains why violent revolutions lead to more hate, more violence, more oppression, more bitterness:
Bad outcomes stem mostly from the fact that only one or two percent of the populations acts in revolutions. …[T]he main reason that revolutions prove disastrous for citizens is that only a small minority of the population is involved in the revolt. These activists do not have the median citizen in mind when they implement institutional design. Moreover, the probability of achieving democracy in any regime transition from dictatorship or autocracy is small. Liberal democracy is just one of many possible outcomes of revolution. Alas, it is the least probable choice after a regime transition.
Do Revolutions Create Bad Regimes? pgs. 1, 25
The vast majority of violent revolutions are carried out generally by the few against a government that threatens their interests. Once these elites have overthrown the current ruling classes the elites do not look to instituting government reforms that will decrease their power. Instead, the revolutionary elites merely seek to take the place of the former rulers at the top of the pyramid of power. As a result, violent revolutions more often harm the people more than help them as the violence and destruction of the revolution only culminate in a new abusive elite taking power and ruling through pure terror.
Compare this to the outcomes of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns:
I’ll bet some of you are thinking, “Is she insane? I watch the news, and I see protestors getting shot at in the streets all the time!” Sometimes crackdowns do happen. But even in these cases, nonviolent campaigns outperformed violent ones by two-to-one. When security forces beat up, arrest, or even shoot unarmed activists, there is, indeed, safety in numbers. Large and well-coordinated campaigns can switch from concentrated methods (like protests) to dispersed methods, where people stay away from places they were expected to go. …What happens in these countries once the dust settles? It turns out, the way you resist matters in the long run too. Most strikingly, nonviolent campaigns were far more likely to usher in democratic institutions than violent insurgencies. And countries where people waged nonviolent struggle were 15% less likely to relapse into civil war.
The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance
Because nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns are organized and expansive, incorporating as many people in the region/nation/province/etc. as possible, nonviolent resistance campaigns give voice to the greatest amount of people possible and generate within them a larger sense of community. The values and ethics the nonviolent resistance campaign is built upon appeal to the masses who have a sense of buy-in, wanting the new government(s) to succeed and those who end up in positions of power are chosen because of how the values and ethics of the general population. Simultaneously, those in power realize that their positions are fragile. They know the people have the ability to oust them and act accordingly. The result of this is an increase in democracy and social harmony in places where nonviolent resistance campaigns are successful. Long time readers will know that I well understand the dangers of democracy, but I also understand that a liberal democracy with a high rate of social harmony is better than an authoritarian or totalitarian regime. The transition from the latter to the former is always a good.
As Dr. R.J. Rummel once said, “One of freedom’s desirable consequences is to promote unrivaled wealth and prosperity; it is an unbeatable engine of technological and economic growth. ” It is this truth that lies at the heart of success for nonviolent resistance campaigns. The increase in social harmony and decrease in tyranny leads to greater amounts of liberty for people formerly subjected to oppression. And these free people set their skills to work producing the things their societies need to make the lives of everyone better. Even a limited growth in the market leads to a cascade increase in wealth society wide for peoples and places formerly under to jackboot of tyranny. It happens everywhere, at every level of society, benefitting commoner and elite alike.
The twin growth in liberty and prosperity has far ranging consequences for humanity. Take, for example, the increases in lifespans in places where nonviolent resistance campaigns were waged successfully versus places where violent conflicts were waged successfully. This information comes from a study done by Dr. Judith Stoddard:
By ten years after the campaign ended states that experienced a successful nonviolent campaign again performed the best in growth of life expectancy. For these states life expectancy increased from 2.47 years five years after the end of the campaign to 4.54 years, by ten years after, moving slightly ahead of the world average. So, these states not only recovered from the campaign but caught up and moved ahead of where they would have been, had there not been any campaign. This positive effect points to the value of waging nonviolent campaigns over violent ones. This indicates that the states in our study made positive advances in the component areas that effect life expectancy as compared to those that experienced a violent campaign.
…The regression analysis revealed that successful violent campaigns also saw gains, as these states’ predicted life expectancy improved from -3.19 years which was measured five years after the campaign end, to -2.59 years ten years out; although, this was the least improvement in growth of all four types of campaigns and the only one still behind comparatively to where the state was before the campaign began. The new regimes that violent campaigns ushered into office, continued to make changes which held their state back in the areas that promote growth in life expectancy confirming hypothesis 3.
…States that experienced nonviolent campaigns that were successful saw the greatest improvements in life expectancy. By ten years after the campaign ended, these states had recovered from all of the effects of the campaign and moved ahead of world averages, showing that these states were better off because of the campaign. It does take a long time but the gains are clear.
States that experienced successful violent campaigns saw the most decline in predicted life expectancy at birth, leaving these states worse off for having experienced the campaign, while all other types of campaigns saw improvements. Even ten years after the campaign ended these states were still struggling to bring their life expectancy up to where it had been before the campaign began. This should inform future campaign organizers, and the governments that support them, to think seriously about other options and other means of waging campaigns if they have the well-being of the state’s people in mind.
How do Major, Violent and Nonviolent Opposition Campaigns, Impact Predicted Life Expectancy at Birth?
While an increase in social harmony, liberty, and life itself may not be the creation of the Beloved Community as Dr. King imagined it, nevertheless all of these are certainly massive leaps in the right direction. And all of them are achieved more through nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience than through any other measures and means. If you value human liberty, equality, and prosperity then you must value nonviolence and civil disobedience because they are the means by which liberty, equality, and prosperity are best achieved.
Final Thoughts
I’ll give the last word to Dr. Chenoweth.
Maybe some of you are thinking, “OK, I get that civil resistance is the best bet, but what can I do?”
Encourage your children to learn about the nonviolent legacies of the past two hundred years and explore the potential of people power. Tell your elected representatives to stop perpetuating the misguided view that violence pays by supporting the first groups in a civil uprising to take up arms. Although nonviolent campaigns can’t be exported or imported, it’s time for our officials to embrace a different way of thinking—that in the short and long term, civil resistance tends to leave behind societies in which people are able to live more freely and more peaceably together.
Now that we know what we know about the power of nonviolent conflict, I see it as our shared responsibility to spread the word so that future generations don’t fall for the myth that violence is their only way out.
The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance