Decompiling Oppression #154
Sam McVeety
I had written most of the following entry before an ICE agent murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis (on top of the 32 people who died in ICE custody over the course of 2025). If anything, it feels even more important now to share, as we process the grief and fury of these events.
Over the winter vacation, I got around to reading Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works, and it immediately struck me as one of the most important books of our current time. Chenoweth is getting a lot of attention for the "3.5% Rule" (perhaps a topic for a future issue), but that story seems distantly secondary behind the core finding of this book, which is that, since 1900, civil/nonviolent resistance campaigns to authoritarian regimes are significantly more likely (as in, nearly twice as likely) to succeed than violent ones.
While some readers might feel this is an obvious result, it's important to realize that it ran completely counter to the prevailing wisdom in academic and statecraft circles. Prior to their publication in 2011, it was commonly held that nonviolent campaigns are only used when moral considerations forbid the use of violence, or the means of engaging in violent conflict are unavailable. Yes, there was research into how to best run a nonviolent campaign, assuming that you had already settled on nonviolence, but there was no substantial research that directly compared the effects of violent and nonviolent campaigns.
To briefly cover terminology here: the authors prefer the term "civil resistance" to "nonviolent" in part because they want to emphasize that moral ideologies like pacifism are by no means a requirement to engage in civil resistance. Their framing of civil resistance is exclusively focused on the strategic outcomes of such an approach, rather than a moral stance. This strategic framing isn't new, though it is seemingly obscured in many histories: I recall many twentieth century liberation struggles being presented as purely moral commitments to nonviolence, when in reality, leaders like Mahatma Gandhi framed their work as both strategic and moral.
It's worth noting that the historical elision of the strategic considerations of civil resistance reeks of paternalism. Rather than recognize movement leaders as strategic thinkers in their own right (who defeated various world powers in their time), they are instead relegated to being perhaps-exceptional-and-fortunate moral figures, whose victories were historical accidents and a reflection of a sympathetic public. In this light, it's perhaps not surprising that nonviolence continued to be viewed as an inferior approach among so many institutions.
Importantly, Chenoweth and Stephan aren't just content with presenting the topline finding as-is; they meticulously examine possible counterarguments. For example, what about repressive regimes: is it harder for civil resistance campaigns to succeed? Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is no; there is no substantial correlation between campaign success and regime type. Similarly, they examine whether civil resistance campaigns are simply opportunistic, springing up when regimes are already crumbling (again: no).
Naturally, the next question is: "why?". While these results are generalized across a dataset of 300+ examples, the authors also provide case studies to help build intuition for these findings. Iran and the Philippines provide examples of opposition struggles that went through both violent and nonviolent phases, allowing for a closer comparison of relative efficacy within the same local context. These case studies also illustrate the importance of a wide array of tactics in various liberation struggles, from mass demonstrations to election monitoring.
There are a few findings that feel particularly relevant to the present moment. One is that civil resistance campaigns are typically accessible to a wider base of participants, leading to greater participation. While not exclusively a numbers game, having a larger, more diverse group of participants creates the conditions for a higher level of strategic innovation and developing a diversity of tactics, which makes regime suppression more difficult to sustain.
Having a wider participant base also facilitates another key factor in successful campaigns, which is the presence of regime defections, particularly from security forces. Basically, the more people you have, the more likely they are to have social ties to members of the regime, which can mean everything from security forces being less likely to shoot at you to being more likely to actively oppose the regime. When regimes respond to explicitly nonviolent actions with violence, those actions are more likely to backfire and inspire further defections. Conversely, violent resistance campaigns tend to cause security forces to close ranks.
None of this is to say that civil resistance is easy. The moral asymmetry of people literally getting away with murder is tremendously difficult to sit with. Nonviolence requires a high degree of discipline and vigilance, and we need spaces to process the emotions that naturally arise from these grievous harms. And, if we truly want to move towards a more just world, one where there is justice for people from George Floyd to Renee Nicole Good, we owe it to each other to embrace the practice of civil resistance.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Which of the 198 ways of nonviolent action resonate most with you?
Communal: Who in your community can you depend on to join you in actions like these?
Solidarity: Support Unidos MN and their work to provide resources like the Monarca rapid response line.
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