Our website sections about Transforming Initiatives and Peacemaker Bios are full of examples of nonviolent action. But in spite of all this there is a pervasive belief that is most cases and especially in cases of exceptional brutality that violence is the only way to deal with an oppressive situation. Is this belief valid, or is it a popular myth?
Erica Chenoweth, who once was preparing to become an Army officer before she shifted to a career as a political science professor, began her doctoral studies about violent revolutions. She was challenged to prove her thesis in the face of many stories about nonviolent campaigns. As she engaged in a rigorous research of global movements from 1900 to 2006, she discovered that the reality was the opposite of the myth. Nonviolent movements for change are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent movements. Furthermore, in recent years nonviolent movements have grown both in frequency and success while violent movements have become less frequent and less successful. There are many reasons for this which Chenoweth goes into in great detail in her research.
Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution has engaged in similar research, but Chenoweth brings the story of her academic conversion from the opposite viewpoint as well as a rigorous comprehensive research. There is a reason why we tell these stories in the Transforming Initiatives and Peacemaker Bios section of this website–they are the stories we need to educate ourselves about because they are more in touch with the reality of what is happening globally than most of what we find in our history textbooks and our media!
To order Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, click here.
Here is the TEDx Talk Chenoweth gave in Boulder, Colorado where she is a professor: