Name: Why civil resistance works
ISBN: 9780231156820

Why civil resistance works

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war.

What Hacker News says

iandanforthJun 2026

Ah, ok. There's a whole body of literature here that I think divides our opinions. I would recommend "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare)" to start. The history of effective change in the face of organizations acting in bad faith may not be what you think it is.

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throw0101aMay 2022

> […] protect themselves from the country (ie government).

Non-violent civil resistance has greater odds of working than violent resistance.

Over the last century movements that used violence only succeeded about 25% of the time, and generally resulted in autocratic regimes when they did. Non-violent movements succeeded about twice as often, and generally resulted in non-autocratic systems afterwards (main exception probably being Iran).

See the book Why civil resistance works by Chenoweth which does a review of the literature.

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tunesmithJan 2017

I'm really tired of the "virtue signaling" meme. Yeah, there are some people out there that don't really care about their cause and only want to look good. But really, the vast majority of protesters out there are not in that category. They are alarmed, they know they only have partial information but that's part of what they are alarmed about, they know they don't have a lot of power to do anything other than "call their representatives", and still just want to do something.

Nonviolent protest is an effective tool. There are academic studies done on it [1] and how it is actually more effective than violent protest - it has real efficacy. It's not merely "virtue signaling".

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent...

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JumpCrisscrossSep 2025

> study appears to be comparing violent protests to non-violent protests

No. The 3.5% figure specifically refers to nonviolent resistance [1].

Would note that “new research suggests that one nonviolent movement, Bahrain in 2011-2014, appears to have decisively failed despite achieving over 6% popular participation at its peak” [2]. But the fact remains that it’s harder to identify ineffective mass protests than effective ones.

> which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win

This assumes a lot more rationality than violent resistance (and corrupt governments) tend to have.

Instead, the evidence is that violent resistance fails more often than nonviolent resistance. In part because violent resistance helps the government consolidate power over its own violence apparatus in a way nonviolent protest inhibits.

[1] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/978...

[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/questi...

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NicoJuicyMar 2025

It only takes 3,5 % of people to overthrow a dictator

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35...

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/978...

Trump cutting the military and changing sides + reducing pensions for people should be enough by rough calculations ( 1 million active and 3,5 million active in 1968 ) is more than 3,5%.

I don't know how the mood currently is in the US though, but I would think most people find it insane.

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throw0101bNov 2024

> Not putting too fine a point on it, but Gandhi's non-violent resistance worked in the India of his time, because the British wanted both the labor and the natural resources, and killing all the former would simply have cost them.

Also worked in Poland with Solidarity against the Communists. Also worked in the Philippines with People Power:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Power_Revolution

Etc:

> They focused on cases of “nonviolent mass mobilization featuring at least one thousand observed participants seeking maximalist (country level) goals [such as the overthrow of a government or territorial independence, (see p.13] from 1900 to 2006 [now updated to 2019]. We did not count smaller campaigns, or reform movements” (p. xx). It took them two years to put the data set together, but it was well worth it – after analyzing those data, in 2011 they published their results in their highly acclaimed book, Why Civil Resistance Works, which received the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Prize of the American Political Science Association. Chenoweth and Stephan found that “[m]ore than half of the campaigns that relied primarily on nonviolent resistance succeeded, whereas only about a quarter of the violent ones did” (p. xx).

* https://www.peacejusticestudies.org/chronicle/review-of-civi...

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