Erica Chenoweth

You know, most people, I think, wouldn't necessarily imagine that there's really anything about nonviolent resistance that could make it even compete with that.

Basically, my answer to Maria was how I would do it is I would collect data for a very long time period.

I would use every country in the world as the universe of potential cases.

And then I would look for comparable cases.

featuring primarily nonviolent resistance and violent resistance.

And by comparable cases, I mean cases that were seeking similar goals.

And I would apply a hard standard to that and look only at cases that were seeking radical revolutionary goals, not looking at, say, civil rights campaigns or different types of reform campaigns, but look at campaigns that

that were trying to overthrow the incumbent national government or campaigns that were trying to push for independence, either by expelling a foreign military occupation or colonial power or through secession.

Because those are the types of goals that most people associate in their minds with armed revolution.

And then let's apply a very strict definition of success, which is that the campaign had to have achieved its outcome within a year of the peak of its mobilization,

And it had to have had a decisive impact on the outcome and achieved what it said it wanted.

So in the case of independence campaigns, they can't just achieve autonomy.

It has to be de jure and de facto independence.

And the reason to set it up that way is because if you were a skeptic like me, you would want to compare the hard cases and you'd want to be able to come up with some kind of measure of the relative effectiveness given those very strict criteria.

Well, they were talking about Slobodan Milosevic.

One of his nicknames is the Butcher of the Balkans, who had stolen an election that had taken place in the previous weeks.

And the movement that organized in advance of the election had expected Milosevic to lie about the results of the election and had set up these parallel vote tabulation programs

and very well-organized kind of verification processes to demonstrate the fraud.

There's no doubt that Oatpour had a really important impact on opening people's minds to imagining a new future.

One of the long-term legacies of that campaign was the different types of tactical innovations that were experimented with there.