Erica Chenoweth

Well, the basic descriptive statistic that really jumped out is that the nonviolent campaigns

were twice as likely to have succeeded as their violent counterparts, and that the rates of success for nonviolent campaigns had actually increased over the latter half of the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st.

So, in other words, nonviolent resistance was working much more than skeptics like myself would have expected.

At the same time, that doesn't mean that it worked all the time.

We found basically that about around half of the cases that we studied had succeeded, and about 25% of the cases of armed resistance had succeeded.

And so, you know, we also would never argue that violent resistance never works, because clearly one out of four cases succeeded.

had succeeded as well.

So nevertheless, I at least was very surprised by the fact of this, and it definitely motivated us to continue trying to figure out why.

The first factor is mass participation.

So movements that win tend to be much larger and more diverse than movements that don't.

And nonviolent campaigns tend to be able to elicit much larger and more diverse participation than armed campaigns.

The second factor is the ability of the campaigns to divide and rule the opponent.

by shifting the loyalties of people within various pillars of support.

So the larger the base becomes for a movement, the more likely it is that participants in the movement will have direct ties to people in the opponent's pillars of support, like economic and business elites, important politicians, civil servants, state media.

different types of police or security forces or other authorities, local government and local authorities.

And, you know, the more those connections begin to be embedded within the movement, the more likely it is that the movement can maneuver in ways that begin to really shred the loyalties, you know, of people in those pillars of support.

The third factor is the ability of movements to tactically innovate, especially moving away from mass demonstrations, rallies,

protests and more into forms of non-cooperation, like strikes, stay at homes, and kind of undermining power for the opponent.

And that's really the main thing, is that these movements aren't out there to melt the heart of the dictator.

They're out there to remove the bases of the dictator's support.