Erica Chenoweth

I think that's true.

I mean, I think from a very early time in life, at least in the United States, many children are encountering war stories.

And whether that's about the founding of the country, whether it's about the Civil War, the Vietnam War, we encounter these fairly early on.

They're sort of memorialized and mythologized in ways.

And to me, I guess I grew up with a sense that war was awful but necessary sometimes or inevitable because of the nature of humanity.

And yeah, I think you're right that as a political culture, there's little questioning of the utility of violence.

It was a workshop that was put on by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which is an educational foundation based in DC.

The thing that was really surprising about it was that the content was all totally new to me.

And the basic claim, I would say, running through all of the content was that nonviolent resistance, when unarmed civilians use protests, boycotts, strikes, stay-aways, other forms of non-cooperation, that they can actually engage in collective action in a way that's as effective or even more effective

than when they use armed insurgency.

And the first thing that occurred to me is that when people would refer to particular cases like the People Power Movement in the Philippines, or the Solidarity Movement in Poland, or the Anti-Pinochet Movement in Chile,

My immediate response was, those are very interesting cases.

I hadn't really thought about them in terms of nonviolent collective action winning compared to armed insurrection.

But for any example that someone brought up, I could think of a counterexample of where an armed revolution had succeeded.

Well, you know, there's certainly plenty of examples more recently.

The one that springs to mind immediately is the Syrian revolution.

But, you know, that's another example of where, you know, you have a sustained mobilization that is up against a regime that effectively decided that it could roll the dice and use extreme brutality and suppress the movement effectively.

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, start with the Haitian Revolution and the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution.

So we have many different examples that leap immediately to mind.