Erica Chenoweth

You know, they don't think about it in terms of a strategy that's literally helped to shape the world we live in right now and that's available to anybody anywhere to a certain degree.

There's an interesting book called Recovering Nonviolent History that's edited by Maciej Barkowski.

And there's an opening chapter in there about the myth of violence and how sort of appealing it is and how we memorialize it and mythologize it and make it part of our national histories.

But that book is full of examples of nonviolent campaigns that were formative

in developing nations around the world, including in the United States.

So one of the chapters is actually a look at the American Revolution by Walter Kanzler.

And in it, he argues that actually the most important part of the American Revolution came in the 10 years before armed hostilities broke out, where colonists were effectively exterminated.

using all kinds of different forms of economic non-cooperation and the development of alternative institutions like alternative judicial institutions, political conventions, and other things that otherwise would not be really allowed in a monarchy.

And they effectively freed themselves, so to speak, before the hostilities broke out.

And in fact, if you tell the story that way, the war that took place between the colonists and the British was actually the counter-revolution.

It was the attempt by the British to seize back what they thought was rightfully theirs after the Declaration of Independence took place.

So in a way, there's a real need to, I think, recover some of the histories of nonviolent resistance that have defined our countries, our nations, our world, and that we're sort of the inheritors of, but don't know it.

I'm in Cambridge today.

I think the most relevant research here is about what is it that makes movements more likely to succeed or fail.

And I think the sort of synthesis I would offer from a huge range of research studies on this, my own and others, is that there are really four things that make movements more likely to succeed than others.

The first is very large and diverse participation that builds momentum.

The second is the ability to leverage that participation into creating defections within the opponent's pillars of support, whether those are the sort of political institutions, the social and cultural institutions, security forces, the business and economic elite that uphold

you know, a sort of authoritarian status quo, if you will.

The third is the ability to shift between methods of protest to methods of non-cooperation, like your campaign, and methods of alternative institutions or building mutual aid networks and things along those lines.

And then the fourth is the ability to maintain resilience and discipline, even as repression against the movement escalates.