Erica Chenoweth

3.5% of the population actively mobilized in a sort of peak period are extremely unlikely to lose.

But that could be because they have already elicited like 90% of the population's support or, you know, something along those lines.

So the way that I think about the 3.5% rule is really more of a rule of thumb rather than an iron law.

So those are the unknowns that make me cautious about kind of over-interpreting the rule.

Yeah, I mean, I think one helpful way to think about this is to think about tactical effects versus strategic outcomes.

So if you think about that event that took place in Spain with the 15M movement, the short-term effects of those types of events are often really obvious.

It's things like greater media coverage.

Like maybe they wound up on the front page rather than on the 20th page or something of the newspaper.

Maybe, you know, there was a self-defense justification.

And so somebody was able to get away from that event who otherwise would have been beaten up by someone.

You know, there are, you know, short-term tactical reasons why people often say, see, that violence helped.

But then if you look at the long-term strategic outcomes, it also has really important after effects.

For example, the expansion of repression against people who were involved in the movement or their family members, whether they participated in the violence or not.

It often has the effect of then expanding government powers of surveillance and infiltration and other types of things that actually are really challenging for movements to manage.

And then, you know, sometimes it alienates would-be supporters and often creates a sense of unity and camaraderie among security forces, for example, rather than encouraging them to take a moment and think about what they think is going on in the country.

So yeah, I mean, I think most of what we know about incidents of violence is that it does harden the opposition.

rather than kind of softening the opposition and allowing it to fracture.

This is part of why a lot of the research, for example, on the impacts of terrorism on a political system are that it's very polarizing, but it generally leads the population to embrace more right-wing political beliefs about what the government ought to be able to do to restore public order.

Yeah, I think part of it is just basic misconceptions and myths about what nonviolent resistance is.

For example, when people use the term nonviolence, I think that they often just associate that with a moral position, and they think of it as something that's potentially noble but extremely naive.