Since 2011, Chenoweth has overseen the expansion of the database, and published dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and monographs. (Chenoweth and Stephan remain friends and occasional collaborators, but Stephan worked for several years at the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan body founded by Congress, which limited what she could say in public.) Many of Chenoweth’s articles are quantitative and technical, but the upshot is simple enough: civil-resistance movements prevail far more often than armed movements do (about 1.95 times more often, according to the most recent version of the data). This seems to hold true across decades and continents, in democracies and autocracies, against weak regimes and strong ones.
In September of 2000, Slobodan Milosevic, who had been the dictator of Serbia for more than a decade, attempted to falsify election results in order to stay in power. In response, a student-led movement called Otpor coördinated a variety of tactics—highway blockades, subversive street theatre, a coal miners’ strike. The resistance was widely perceived as nonviolent and legitimate, and it grew quickly, gaining support among Serbs of every age and from all parts of the country. A Serbian policeman, ordered to shoot into a crowd of protesters, held his fire; he later told journalists that, given the cross-section of people present, he couldn’t rule out the possibility that one of them was his child. By early October, Milosevic had no choice but to leave office. The following year, he was brought to The Hague and tried for war crimes. Ivan Marovic, who was one of the leaders of Otpor, told me that, when he recounts the story of the movement, people often argue that its success must have been a fluke. He added, “Now I can just show them Maria and Erica’s book and say, ‘Don’t argue with me, argue with the numbers.’ ”
Andre Henry, the musician and organizer, has been active with several groups in Pasadena, California, where he lives. They include the local chapter of Black Lives Matter, an interfaith group called L.A. Voice, and the Jenga Club, a name that refers to the goal of toppling unjust social structures by removing pillars of support. In October, after a Pasadena police officer shot and killed a Black man named Anthony McClain, Black Lives Matter Pasadena wanted to pressure the mayor into releasing the officer’s body-camera footage. “Normally, we would probably just do a march, but because of COVID we had to get creative,” Henry told me. Someone remembered No. 42 on Sharp’s list of nonviolent actions: motorcades. “We drove really slowly, gaining more visibility the whole way,” Henry said. “It became a big enough deal that the mayor committed to releasing the footage the next day.”
Henry and I were speaking, over Zoom, shortly before Election Day. “I’m talking to organizers about what they’ve got planned if Trump uses outright Fascist tactics to stay in power,” he said. “I hear a lot of ‘We’ll stay in the streets until our demands are met!’ To which I go, ‘Yeah, getting in the streets is good, and it looks good on Instagram. But it’s not magic, where you chant “We don’t like this” until the powers that be have a change of heart. Who’s researching the real points of economic and social leverage?’ ” Henry leaned out of the frame for a moment. When he came back into view, he was holding a short book, co-authored by Sharp, that he was in the process of rereading: “The Anti-Coup.”
Sharp, who died in 2018, was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and he had a research appointment at Harvard, but his primary job was director of the Albert Einstein Institution, a small nonprofit that he ran out of his row house in East Boston. A pamphlet-size précis of his findings, “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” was published in 1993 and circulated in Burma, Serbia, Egypt, and several other countries on the brink of revolution. In 2011, at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, in New York, activists set up a community kitchen, a library, and a media hub to disseminate live streams generated by the movement—all examples of what Sharp called “alternative social institutions.” If protests are expressions of what a movement is against, then alternative institutions can be manifestations of what a movement is for, a glimpse of how the world might look once it has been transformed.
During the Egyptian Revolution, activists occupied Tahrir Square, in Cairo, staffing ad-hoc checkpoints and building a stage with a professional-grade sound system. Musicians held concerts in the square, helping to sustain a festive atmosphere and attract a wide cross-section of visitors, some of whom became active in the struggle. Chenoweth told me, “If I had to pick one characteristic that correlates with a movement’s success, it’s the extent to which everyone in society—children, disabled people, grandmas—feels that they can either actively or passively participate.”
While at the University of Oslo, in the nineteen-fifties, Sharp crossed paths with George Lakey, another American activist and student of nonviolence. Lakey went on to work as a civil-rights organizer during the Freedom Summer Project of 1964, as a blockade-runner during the Vietnam War, as an environmental organizer fighting mountaintop removal, and, in 2020, as a democracy activist advising Americans on how to forestall a potential coup. In the two-thousands, Lakey taught at Swarthmore, where he and several students started the Global Nonviolent Action Database, a list of activist campaigns throughout history. “Sharp’s oldest example, in ‘The Politics of Nonviolent Action,’ was the plebeian uprising in ancient Rome, 494 B.C.E.,” Lakey told me. “Imagine how thrilled one of my grad students was when he found one that was centuries older”—a strike among Egyptian laborers building a tomb for Ramesses III, in 1170 B.C.E. Throughout history there have been wars, and, at least since Herodotus, there have been military historians. Likewise, Lakey pointed out, “nonviolent struggle has always been with us, but for a long time, as a species, we’ve been blind to it.”
Some American historians argue that the Revolutionary War was only the violent culmination of a longer and more consequential nonviolent struggle. “What do we mean by the revolution?” John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1815. “The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and a consequence of it.” Adams went on to refer to a period of “fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington,” during which the colonists boycotted British goods, destroyed British property, distributed illegal pamphlets, and set up alternative institutions such as the Constitutional Convention. “Civil resistance repeatedly shows up in undemocratic moments and contexts,” Romanow, of Momentum, told me. “It’s not a coincidence that Black Americans have led when it came to bringing civil-resistance tactics into American organizing, because Black Americans have not been living in a democracy for four hundred years.” Romanow and I were speaking in late October. “Many people now rightly think that, if things go off the rails during or after this election, the institutions alone might not necessarily save us,” she continued. “Once you realize that, you can go pretty quickly from despair to exhilaration: the institutions can’t save us, but maybe we can save ourselves.”
Like many academics, Chenoweth is wary of being prescriptive. “I don’t think it’s my job to tell people how to liberate themselves,” Chenoweth told me. “I do, however, think it can be useful to document patterns.” Sometimes the task is as simple as highlighting tactics that have been successful in the past, enabling future activists to think more creatively. During a recent lecture at Wellesley, Chenoweth described an anecdote relayed by a colleague, Stephen Zunes, about an action undertaken by a group of dissidents advocating for the autonomy of Western Sahara, a territory occupied by Morocco. Under Moroccan law, it is illegal to fly the flag of Western Sahara. To protest this law, instead of engaging in civil disobedience directly dissidents tied flags to the tails of dozens of feral cats. Chenoweth called this “a dilemma action,” because the government troops had to “either chase cats around the alleyways or let the flag fly. It’s a terrible set of choices for the opponent, and it’s humiliating.”
The first version of the NAVCO data set, now known as NAVCO 1.0, was, in Chenoweth’s words, “chunky data.” Subsequent iterations have yielded more granular findings. For example, when a civil-resistance campaign does succeed in overthrowing an oppressive government, the new government it installs is far more likely to remain stable and democratic. The data also yielded a pattern so simple and catchy that Chenoweth revealed it, in 2013, in the form of a TED talk—the 3.5 Percent Rule, which states that in every case where a mass-resistance campaign has attracted the “active and sustained participation” of at least three and a half per cent of the country’s population, the campaign has achieved its goal.
The 3.5 Percent Rule is meant to be descriptive, not predictive, a caveat that Chenoweth often repeats but that activists do not always hear. Since the talk, Chenoweth has become aware of two campaigns, in Brunei and Bahrain, that failed despite engaging more than three and a half per cent of the country’s population. Although civil-resistance campaigns in the past decade have continued to succeed more often than the armed ones, the success rate of all maximalist campaigns is dropping, as regimes become more proficient at surveilling and subduing rebellions. “I really blame the Internet,” Chenoweth said recently on a podcast. Although the Internet is good at “getting people to the streets quickly, in large numbers,” its costs to movements may outweigh its benefits. Also, momentum can be difficult to sustain without the more painstaking work of person-to-person organizing.
One of Chenoweth’s side projects, the Crowd Counting Consortium, attempts to quantify, in close to real time, the depth and breadth of the American protest movement, including both anti-Trump and pro-Trump demonstrations. Without such a count, if the anti-Trump resistance did reach the three-and-a-half-per-cent threshold—about eleven and a half million people—how would anyone know? The project is a collaboration between Chenoweth; Jeremy Pressman, a political scientist at the University of Connecticut; and a rotating crew of volunteers who verify reports of protests, in the press or on social media, and convert them into raw data. One of the most diligent volunteers is Zoe Marks, a scholar of African politics at the Kennedy School, who happens to be Chenoweth’s partner. “A lot of our date nights involve spreadsheets,” Chenoweth told me, a bit bashfully.
According to the Crowd Counting data, 97.7 per cent of Black Lives Matter protests this past summer were free of violence, with no injuries reported by protesters, police, or bystanders. “These figures should correct the narrative that the protests were overtaken by rioting,” Chenoweth and Pressman wrote in a recent Washington Post article. Of course, in a world that includes social media and Rupert Murdoch, the narrative that should prevail is not always the narrative that does. At pivotal moments, such as after a police shooting or during an attempted authoritarian power grab, organizers may find themselves facing a paradox. If nobody mobilizes in response to egregious abuses by the state, the abuses may appear to go unanswered. If people do mobilize, and if a tiny minority of protesters initiate violence, then that violence can be used, cynically or otherwise, to cast the movement as illegitimate, making it more likely to lose. There is no consensus, either among academics or among activists, on what constitutes violence—some disavow property damage, others argue that a few smashed windows can sometimes help the cause. Under normal circumstances, an image of a protester throwing a rock could go viral, prompting a negative press cycle. In a volatile post-election moment, a single violent incident might give a flailing autocrat a pretext to ramp up repression by police, or even to declare emergency powers. Shortly after the 2020 election, as armed militias, white nationalists, and other Trump supporters planned a march in Washington, D.C., Lakey’s group, Choose Democracy, wrote an e-mail to its network of volunteers. “We don’t believe this is the moment for activation in the streets,” it read. “Let’s keep breathing, staying attentive, and be ready for action if things escalate.”
NAVCO 1.0 counted three hundred and twenty-three maximalist campaigns that occurred up to 2006. The list has been updated continually since then, and now comprises six hundred and twenty-seven examples—including, for the first time, an American campaign. In the prepublication copy of “Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know” that I received in October, the campaigns were laid out chronologically in a table at the back of the book. Appearing shortly after “Anti-Gnassingbé,” a campaign in Togo, and shortly before the “Yellow Vests,” a movement in France, was the “Anti-Trump resistance.” Under “Primary method,” it was coded as nonviolent. Under “Outcome,” instead of “success” or “failure,” was the word “ongoing.”
In September, 2017, Merriman, of the I.C.N.C., wrote a blog post recommending more investment in what he called “democracy insurance.” Just as American taxpayers keep the Federal Emergency Management Agency staffed in case of natural disaster, he argued, so should nongovernmental organizations in free societies fund “civil resistance capacity” in case of a lurch toward authoritarianism. This argument was impossible to separate from Merriman’s interests—he was, after all, the president of an organization that specialized in building such capacity—but it was also substantiated by robust evidence. In his blog post, Merriman wrote that “democracies in many countries are backsliding, such as in Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States.” He wanted to insure that, should this backsliding continue, the people would be ready to mobilize.
In late May, a video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck set off a wave of protests around the country. On June 1st, near the White House, federal agents pepper-sprayed peaceful protesters, clearing the way for President Trump to pose for a photo op; a few weeks later, federal agents drove through Portland, Oregon, in unmarked vans, snatching protesters off the streets without warning. It seemed that the slide toward autocracy was rapidly accelerating. Merriman, who lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., expressed his concerns to Romanow, who introduced him to three activists who specialize in digital organizing: Ankur Asthana, in Hoboken, New Jersey; Marium Navid, in Los Angeles; and Kifah Shah, in New York City. “Hardy has been immersed in civil-resistance theory for years,” Shah said. “Marium, Ankur, and I know how to get that information out to people and train them on how to use it.”
The four activists met on Zoom throughout July and August, whenever all of them could spare time from their day jobs. By the end of August, they had put together a fifty-five-page document called “Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy.” The guide established a few “red lines” (“Trump may declare victory even if the election day results are ambiguous”) and proposed some collective responses in the event that those lines were crossed—a combination of standard methods, such as calling elected officials to ask that they respect the democratic process, and Sharpian methods, such as boycotts and civil disobedience. One section, written primarily by Merriman, was a crash course in the consent theory of power which cited several experts in the field, including Chenoweth and Stephan. The rest of the guide was studded with worksheets and sample meeting agendas. (The title page included a disclaimer: “The views expressed here are solely personal to the authors and do not represent the views of any employer.”) In October, the organizers began hosting Zoom trainings, encouraging volunteers to form local Hold the Line groups. By the end of the month, each session was attracting hundreds of people.
