If you have been following this newsletter for any length of time, you have encountered Erica Chenoweth’s research, even if you haven’t always seen their name attached to it. The finding that nonviolent campaigns succeed at roughly twice the rate of violent ones. The evidence on labor participation, which finds that campaigns without labor rarely crack a 50 percent success rate, while campaigns that bring workers into active noncooperation succeed more than 80 percent of the time. That data is Chenoweth’s. It is the empirical foundation beneath a lot of what the anti-authoritarian resistance community is trying to build right now.
Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press, is where Chenoweth synthesizes that foundation into something accessible enough to hand to anyone, whether they be an organizer two weeks into her first campaign, a skeptic who still believes power only yields to power, a funder trying to understand why movement infrastructure matters, a movement veteran who knows the terrain but has never seen the data laid out this clearly. It is, as one reviewer put it, the user manual for the long and difficult struggle ahead. That is not an overstatement.
Nonviolent campaigns are not the soft alternative to serious politics. They are, by the evidence, the most effective form of serious politics available to people without state power.
The book is organized as a series of questions: what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how repression affects it, what happens when violence emerges within a movement, and what the long-term effects of civil resistance look like on the societies that practice it. This Q&A structure is deliberate and well-suited to the material: Chenoweth is answering, systematically, the objections and confusions that derail serious strategic thinking in resistance movements. Is nonviolent resistance only possible in liberal democracies? No, and the data show why. Does repression inevitably crush it? Not if the movement responds to repression the right way, and the book explains what the right way looks like. What about when a movement turns to violence? The research here is particularly important: campaigns that maintain nonviolent discipline dramatically outperform those that don’t, and the introduction of violence, even from a minority within a movement, tends to undercut the participation advantages that make civil resistance effective in the first place.
That last point deserves to be hammered home for any organizer working in this moment, when the temptation toward confrontational escalation is real and the frustration fueling it is legitimate. Chenoweth is not making a moral argument against violence - she is making a strategic one. The reason nonviolent campaigns outperform violent ones is not because the universe rewards virtue. It is because nonviolent campaigns generate mass participation, and mass participation - breadth, diversity, the involvement of unlikely actors including those within the regime’s own pillars of support - is the variable that most reliably predicts success. Violence narrows that participation. It makes it easier to delegitimize and isolate a movement. It shifts the terrain from one where the movement’s strengths are assets to one where the regime’s strengths are assets. This is not pacifism. It is political realism grounded in a hundred years of data.
The chapters on the long-term effects of civil resistance are ones I find myself returning to when the work feels interminable. Chenoweth shows that societies that win political change through mass nonviolent campaigns are significantly more likely to sustain democratic governance afterward than those that win through violent revolution or elite negotiation without popular mobilization. The way you win shapes what you build. A movement that achieves change by activating and coordinating broad civil society produces something different that is more durable, more democratic, and more genuinely transformative than a movement that wins through the force of a disciplined vanguard or the cleverness of a small leadership class. The participation is not just the means. It is also, in a real sense, the end.
The way you win shapes what you build. That may be the most important sentence in the book for anyone doing long-term resistance work right now.
A word about Chenoweth herself: she came to this research as a skeptic. By her own account, she entered the study of political conflict assuming what most scholars in her field assumed - that violence works, that nonviolence is for idealists, that the cases of successful civil resistance everyone could name were probably exceptions rather than a pattern. She was persuaded by the evidence. That arc matters. This is not a book written by someone whose commitment to nonviolence preceded their study of it and shaped what they were willing to find. It is a book written by someone whose study of the evidence led them somewhere they didn’t expect to go. The confidence it projects is earned confidence, the kind that holds up under pressure, which is the only kind that matters to people doing actual organizing in a dangerous moment.
We are living through exactly the kind of moment this book was written for. The question of whether civil resistance can work against an authoritarian consolidation project operating inside a formal democratic structure - using legal mechanisms, not just guns - is one Chenoweth addresses directly. The answer is yes, with specific conditions. This book explains what those conditions are, why they are achievable, and what the historical record looks like for movements that met them. That is information every person doing this work needs to have, and needs to be able to share with the people around them.
Read it. Then give a copy to the skeptic in your life who still thinks the only thing power understands is direct force. The data will do the arguing.
Erica Chenoweth, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press, 2021.
We are in a moment when the state has demonstrated its utter disregard for human life. They have and will kill, not someone else, but us. And they’ve prepared massive detention centers, as they call them. I see Chenowith’s approach, non-violent civil disobedience, as one major tool. I don’t for a moment think we’ll get through this without having to fight back. We may have to rely on the consciences of members of the military, current and retired.