Chapter 1: What does Erica Chenoweth say about the effectiveness of violence in producing change?
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Chapter 2: How did Erica's early experiences shape her research interests?
I'm Shankar Vedantam. To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace. Those are the words of the first U.S. President, George Washington, in his inaugural State of the Union address. George Washington knew a thing or two about war. Over four decades of military service, he took part in a number of bloody battles.
Among them was the Battle of Trenton, in which American colonists battled German soldiers paid to fight for the British. The battle was depicted in the 2000 film, The Crossing. In scene after scene, the Americans thrust their bayonets into the Germans. They kill others with cannon and musket fire.
Chapter 3: What key arguments were made about nonviolent resistance at the workshop Erica attended?
Their enemies repeatedly try to regroup, but are forced to flee. Finally, the Germans, realizing they cannot win, kneel in surrender. These scenes, like many depictions of war, can be hard to watch. But they also force us to face uncomfortable questions.
Doesn't Washington's war, and countless others like it, prove that the realists are right, that violence is the most effective means to change, that power does flow from the barrel of a gun? This week on Hidden Brain, the surprising truth about what actually produces radical change and the profound implications for individuals and nations.
Many of us watch movies depicting war or TV shows where detectives save the day by bursting in on the bad guys, guns blazing. These sorts of stories are based on an assumption. Using force might be unpleasant. It might even be immoral.
Chapter 4: What surprising findings did Erica and Maria discover about nonviolent vs violent movements?
But it's highly effective, the surest way to get what you want. At Harvard University, political scientist Erika Chenoweth studies whether this common assumption is true when it comes to mass movements for change. Erika Chenoweth, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much, Shankar.
Erika, I want to look at your own journey into this area of research. When you were a kid, your mom bought you a book called Zlata's Diary. You were enthralled by this book. What was it about?
Basically, this is the story written by Zlata Filipowicz about what it was like living as a child under siege during the siege of Sarajevo. As a 13-year-old kid, I couldn't help but be moved by the experiences of being a kid that were not going to be available to her or her friends and others because of the war.
Chapter 5: What examples of successful nonviolent movements did Erica discuss?
I mean, in many ways, it's like the fascination that many people have had over the years with, you know, the Diary of Anne Frank. It gives you a window into what it's like to go through the experience of war.
Later on, I understand you became really interested in the history of World War I. You'd go to the public library with your family and you loved a book about World War I Medal of Honor winners. What was the appeal of the book?
Well, I think I was always really fascinated with World War I. I can't actually remember the origins of the fascination, to be honest, but from the time I can remember, I was looking at military history books, and one that really caught my eye was the one about Medal of Honor winners, in part because it described these
situations of heroism and courage, but also these situations of just horrific wartime conditions, trench warfare and the types of experiences that people had just serving in the war on and off the battlefield.
As an undergrad, I understand you took a military science class. So it sounds like you were developing a real interest here in military history.
Yes, I was interested in potentially serving in the Army after graduating from college. And they had an ROTC program, which I didn't eventually enroll in, but I did take the military science course to find out whether it was a path for me.
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Chapter 6: How does the context influence acts of courage according to Ranjay Gulati?
The September 11th terrorist attacks took place during Erica's senior year in college. They prompted Erica to go to graduate school to better understand the nature of terrorism.
And there was a really influential article and later book published by a scholar named Robert Pape, who's at the University of Chicago. And he basically argued that suicide terrorism was on the increase because it was a remarkably effective technique. And, you know, there was a debate about this and another really important article and set of arguments was emerging from a fellow named Max Abrams.
And he was arguing that actually suicide looking beyond just suicide terrorism, if you look at terrorist events and you look at sort of campaigns of terrorism or terrorist groups, and you look at how many of those groups have actually achieved what they said they wanted, it's a remarkably low number. And so he was saying that terrorism was not effective.
And then there was this other political scientist saying that suicide terrorism in particular is very effective. So there was sort of a vibrant debate happening in the field.
Chapter 7: What psychological factors contribute to our ability to act bravely?
And my research was really on the question of why it is that people use terrorism in democracies, specifically where there are so many other methods of political expression that are available. So that's sort of where I was in the mid-2000s as well.
Would it be fair to say that your broad belief at this point was that power indeed does flow from the barrel of a gun, from your interest in military history and your knowledge of wars past and present?
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think I would qualify it somewhat just by saying that it flows from the barrel of many guns.
So, you know, and I think there are a lot of people that would make a similar assumption, that when violence failed, it was more a question of capacity, that rebel groups or terrorist groups were using violence but didn't have really the capacity to back up their political might.
I just want to stop for a second to note that the intuition that you had is I feel like an intuition that many people have in the culture, right? When we think about what succeeds in terms of bringing about change, whether that's change on an individual level or a group level or a political level, We see lots of examples.
We see movies and books which are all about the use of violence and war that basically achieve people's ends.
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Chapter 8: How can individuals cultivate courage in their everyday lives?
And in some ways, it feels like that intuition sort of flows through our lives in a way that's often not questioned.
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.
Yeah.
So in June 2006, you were, I believe, working on your dissertation and you were attending an academic workshop. But some of what you heard at this workshop made you skeptical. What was the workshop and what were people saying?
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.
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