Erica Chenoweth

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Kennedy School

Over the past two decades, there has been growing scholarly interest in nonviolent resistance—a method of conflict in which unarmed people mobilize collective protests, strikes, and boycotts in a coordinated way. Mass movements that rely overwhelmingly on nonviolent resistance sometimes feature unarmed collective violence, fringe violence, or even...

In the past decade, myriad studies have explored the effects of nonviolent resistance (NR) on outcomes including revolutionary success (short-term and long-term) and democratization, and how nonviolent mobilization can play a similar role to violence in affecting social change in some settings. This special issue seeks to advance our understanding...

In this article, we introduce an updated version of the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes dataset (NAVCO 2.1), which compiles annual data on 389 nonviolent and violent mass movements for regime change, anti-occupation, and secession from 1945 to 2013. This version of the dataset corrects known coding errors in NAVCO 2.0, adds news cases...

Why have some nonviolent revolutions succeeded even with modest participation numbers, while others have failed despite massive mobilization? We develop an agent-based model that predicts the outcomes of three well-known activism strategies. The first rapidly recruits a wide number of activists, which overwhelms the opponent’s support network and e...

Chapter 8 addresses issues of ethics in revolutions research. As revolutionary actors and scholars interact, the dichotomy between revolutionary insiders and outsiders appears to be not as firm as some may have assumed. What are scholars’ ethical responsibilities? While each situation raises its own ethical considerations, this chapter provides som...

This chapter challenges the domestic-international dichotomy. Many established theories of revolutionary emergence focus on domestic factors such as economic downturns, elite conflict and defection from the state, and the mobilizing capacity of opposition forces. This dichotomy makes the international influence on all of these domestic factors opaq...

Chapter 6 argues that political theory can help explain emergent properties of revolutionary struggles that are unfolding now. Hannah Arendt’s book, On Revolution, departs from the social science model that seeks to generate empirically verifiable propositions about causal dynamics. She asserts the normativity of revolution and embraces “the politi...

The book ends with a chapter that poses new questions and arguments that aim to move the field of revolution studies forward. It asks three main questions: What is the relationship between revolution and liberalism? What is the relationship between revolution and terrorism? What is the normative content of revolutions? The chapter discusses how the...

This chapter explores a common tension in research methodology. Much research in revolution studies is comparative, focused on cases and a qualitative understanding of particular events through reference to other events. However, recent work has challenged case-specific knowledge of revolutions by demonstrating its shortcomings and the potential of...

Chapter 2 takes on the debate surrounding the relative importance of structural conditions versus human agency in revolutions. There is a tendency among scholars of revolution to see the relationship between structural factors and revolutionary agents as a theoretical zero-sum game that must be resolved before a theoretical contribution can be made...

Chapter 3 argues that the violence-nonviolence dichotomy is problematic for two reasons. First, many revolutionary movements make strategic shifts over time. It is not uncommon for an unarmed movement to take up weapons against the state, just as it is not uncommon for armed guerrillas to lay down their weapons to embark on civil resistance campaig...

On Revolutions integrates insights from diverse fields—civil resistance studies, international relations, social movements, terrorism—to offes new ways of thinking about the study of revolution. Conventional lines of thought draw on a number of categorical distinctions: social versus political revolutions, structure versus agency, violent versus no...

This chapter explores the dichotomy of successful versus failed revolutionary outcomes by examining the 1989 revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. Initially, these revolutions were declared a success as Soviet-style regimes were toppled and democratization programs implemented. However, weak democratic institutions failed to achieve revolution...

Chapter 1 challenges the dichotomous categorizing of revolutions as either social or political. This is a long-standing practice within the field but it is problematic because it conceals other possible outcomes. For instance, many movements are able to oust existing regime leaders but are not able to fully transform rules of governance or institut...

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on the scene, the near-universal imposition of lockdowns and public health restrictions prompted many human rights advocates to sound the alarm regarding freedoms of assembly, expression, privacy, and movement. Even though they have not yet appeared to reduce the occurrence of protests in many countries, such rest...

The Trump presidency featured a high volume of contentious mobilization. We describe the collection and aggregation of protest mobilization data from 2017 to 2021 and offer five observations. First, the protests were sustained at a high level throughout the Trump presidency, with the largest subset of protests positioned against Trump and the admin...

Cooperation among militant organizations contributes to capability but also presents security risks. This is particularly the case when organizations face substantial repression from the state. As a consequence, for cooperation to emerge and persist when it is most valuable, militant groups must have means of committing to cooperation even when the...

This chapter dives deeper into the core concepts or basics of civil resistance. It determines which methods count as civil resistance and which methods do not, and how pragmatic uses of civil resistance intersect with moral claims. It also reviews the definition of civil resistance, which is a form of struggle in which unarmed people coordinate a v...

This book provides a basic empirical introduction to what everyone should know about civil resistance, discussing patterns of civil resistance in fairly general terms. It focuses on global trends, patterns, and dynamics rather than in- depth accounts of specific historical examples of nonviolent resistance. It also uses examples of civil resistance...

This chapter discusses the long-term effects of civil resistance on different societies, noting whether successful civil resistance campaigns tend to leave societies better or worse off. It explores how civil resistance campaigns have changed over the past decade, particularly with the emergence of digital activism. It also considers how movements...

This chapter looks at myths and realities of civil resistance against brutal opponents. It examines the ways in which civil resistance campaigns have succeeded in spite of episodes of extreme brutality and the options available to movements fighting against racist regimes. It explains why many people do not believe that civil resistance defeats a t...

This chapter considers civil resistance as a form of collective action that seeks to affect the political, social, or economic status quo without using violence or the threat of violence against people to do so. It describes civil resistance as organized, public, and explicitly nonviolent in its means and ends. It also outlines some of the main tak...

This chapter takes on the complicated question of violence from within a movement. It reviews recent research findings that address how fringe violence from within a movement affects the political situation for those pushing for change. It also determines whether civil resistance movements win more quickly and decisively if, on their fringes, some...

This chapter addresses the question of how people build social and political power from below, how civil resistance succeeds, and whether there are conditions under which civil resistance is impossible. It emphasizes the crucial point that civil resistance campaigns succeed when they become large and diverse enough to reflect a serious challenge to...

How do expressions of support or opposition by the U.S. federal government, influence violent hate crimes against specific racial and ethnic minorities? In this article, we test two hypotheses derived from Blalock's (1967) conceptualization of intergroup power contests. The political threat hypothesis predicts that positive government attention tow...

In recent years, scholars have developed a number of new databases with which to measure protest. Although these databases have distinct coding rules, all attempt to capture incidents of social conflict. We argue, however, that due to a variety of sources of measurement error, subjective coding decisions, and operational specifications, no single i...

As the Journal of Global Security Studies’ first editorial team prepares to turn the reins over to the next, we bring together our final issue—on exclusion and inclusion in global security studies. We first present a special section consisting of six research articles and a forum, all of which resulted from our 2017 call for proposals. Inspired to...

This chapter synthesizes what we have learned from our case studies about civil action and how it intersects with various ongoing concerns in the field. It begins by offering a series of propositions and questions to prompt further research on civil action, its causes, and its effects. It then turns to examine how the book’s analysis intersects wit...

This chapter introduces the concept of civil action. Beginning with an explanation of its roots in the literature on civility, it moves on to demonstrate how civil action fits logically with analyses of microdynamics and contentious politics. Civil action can be undertaken by a wide variety of social actors, and the chapter charts those actors and...

How do ‘people power’ movements succeed when modest proportions of the population participate? Here we propose that the effects of social movements increase as they gain momentum. We approximate a simple law drawn from physics: momentum equals mass times velocity (p = mv). We propose that the momentum of dissent is a product of participation (mass)...

This, our team's penultimate issue of the Journal of Global Security Studies, demonstrates the big tent we hoped for from the journal's start. It is big in both its demonstration of our growing backlog (we are trying to pack in as much as we can to give our successors a little more editing space) and in its showcasing of our substantive, methodolog...

Since the inauguration of Donald Trump, there has been substantial and ongoing protest against the Administration. Street demonstrations are some of the most visible forms of opposition to the Administration and its policies. This article reviews the two most central methods for studying street protest on a large scale: building comprehensive event...

The central goal of The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism is to systematically introduce scholars and practitioners to state-of-the-art approaches, methods, and issues in studying this vital phenomenon. This Handbook attempts to give structure and direction to the fast-growing but somewhat disjointed field of terrorism studies. The volume locates terror...

Previous research by Goldstone et al. (2010) generated a highly accurate predictive model of state-level political instability. Notably, this model identifies political institutions – and partial democracy with factionalism, specifically – as the most compelling factors explaining when and where instability events are likely to occur. This article...

Scholarship on civil war is overwhelmingly preoccupied with armed activity. Data collection efforts on actors in civil wars tend to reflect this emphasis, with most studies focusing on the identities, attributes, and violent behavior of armed actors. Yet various actors also use nonviolent methods to shape the intensity and variation of violence as...

This chapter examines the organizational tributaries that produced a tidal wave of support for the Women’s March on Washington. Ostensibly the result of a new eponymous organization, the 2017 Women’s March actually represented the sustained work of many well-established activist organizations and interest groups that spread the word and mobilized a...

Although political violence has proven to be difficult for governments to manage, predict or control, previous research on the impact of relevant federal government actions and US presidential rhetoric on terrorist attacks and hate crimes demonstrates that what the US government does matters in ways that are both expected and unexpected. In the US,...

Although the empirical study of strategic nonviolent action has expanded in recent years, no current dataset provides detailed accounts of the day-to-day methods and tactics used by various nonviolent and violent actors seeking political change. We introduce the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) version 3.0 dataset, which assemb...

Contentious Politics in the Trump Era - Charles Crabtree, Christian Davenport, Erica Chenoweth, Dana M. Moss, Jennifer Earl, Emily Hencken Ritter, Christopher Sullivan

In this article, we review decades of research on state repression and nonviolent resistance. We argue that these two research programs have converged around six consensus findings. We also highlight several areas of divergence, where greater synthesis between the research on state repression and nonviolent resistance might prove useful. We draw at...

In his seminal book Power Kills, Rummel (1997) summarizes decades of research on the democratic peace to make a single, pointed argument: that the worst kinds of violence—mass killings carried out by governments—are entirely explained by the tyrannical nature of the regime that commit such crimes.

Nonviolent mass movements are the primary challengers to governments today. This represents a pronounced shift in the global landscape of dissent. Through 2010, such movements tended to be surprisingly effective in removing incumbent leaders from power, even when they experienced some repression from the government. But from 2010 through May 2016,...

How does Canada fight terrorism, and to what effect? In this article, we introduce an original data set of all reported actions taken by the Canadian government in relation to both domestic and international terror groups between 1985 and 2013. Data include conciliatory and repressive, verbal and physical, and discriminate and indiscriminate action...

Insurgency is the use of irregular tactics by a weaker foe seeking to impose military costs upon a stronger armed incumbent government or occupying power. Insurgencies have been ubiquitous in the twentieth century, with well over 200 new insurgencies emerging. Although insurgency has been a fairly popular method of conflict, it has not been particu...

Civil resistance is a powerful strategy for promoting major social and political change, yet no study has systematically evaluated the effects of simultaneous armed resistance on the success rates of unarmed resistance campaigns. Using the Nonviolent and Violent Conflict Outcomes (NAVCO 1.1) data set, which includes aggregate data on 106 primarily...

We review the current literature on why democracies experience terrorist attacks. Noting that most of these studies were based on data that ended in 2004, we update the data and analyze regime type and terrorist attacks through 2012. We identify a key trend: 2009 appears to have been a watershed year, where terrorist attacks began to occur more oft...

Despite the prevalence of nonviolent uprisings in recent history, no existing scholarship has produced a generalized explanation of when and where such uprisings are most likely to occur. Our primary aim in this article is to evaluate whether different available models—namely, grievance approaches, modernization theory, resource mobilization theory...

The U.S. civil rights movement was perhaps the most politically and symbolically important American social movement of the 20th century. And Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was a central text of the movement, and arguably one of the most important political texts of the century. Jonathan Rieder’s Gospel of Freedom:...

While several existing datasets can help to address pressing questions on nonviolent resistance, data collection on nonviolent conflict involves several distinct challenges, including (1) conceptual distinctions between the absence of violence, non-violent behavior, and nonviolent direct action; (2) a systematic violence bias in mainstream news rep...

With the persistent alarm being raised about terrorist violence by the media and government officials it is unsurprising that scholarship in this area has grown well beyond its traditional disciplinary boundaries (i.e., political science and international relations). As scholars from disciplines such as criminology [27, 30], computer science [11, 1...

From 1968 to 1997, wealthy, advanced democracies generally did not suffer from high levels of chronic terrorism, with two exceptions: (a) advanced democracies that interfered in other countries' affairs through military intervention or occupations were frequent targets of transnational terrorism, and (b) poor democracies with territorial conflicts...

The events of the Arab Spring of 2011 have made clear the importance and potential efficacy of nonviolent resistance, as well as the field’s inability to explain the onset and outcome of major nonviolent uprisings. Until recently, conflict scholars have largely ignored nonviolent resistance. This issue features new theoretical and empirical explora...

Recent studies indicate that strategic nonviolent campaigns have been more successful over time in achieving their political objectives than violent insurgencies. But additional research has been limited by a lack of time-series data on nonviolent and violent campaigns, as well as a lack of more nuanced and detailed data on the attributes of the ca...

In recent years, multiple studies have confirmed that terrorism occurs in democracies more often than in nondemocratic regimes. There are five primary groups of explanations for this phenomenon, including the openness of democratic systems, organizational pressures resulting from democratic competition, the problem of underreporting in authoritaria...

Rational choice approaches to reducing terrorist violence would suggest raising the costs of terrorism through punishment, thereby reducing the overall expected utility of terrorism. In this article, we argue that states should also consider raising the expected utility of abstaining from terrorism through rewards. We test effects of repressive (or...

The Sociology of War and Violence. By MaleševićSiniša. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 376p. $95.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. - Volume 10 Issue 1 - Erica Chenoweth

This chapter discusses theory-building and establishes the fact that reliance on a specific set of resistance tactics, violent or nonviolent, helps to determine campaign success. Nonviolent resistance mobilizes a greater number of diverse participants than violent campaigns and increased participation helps nonviolent resistance to fulfil the desir...

An original argument about the causes and consequences of political violence and the range of strategies employed. States, nationalist movements, and ethnic groups in conflict with one another often face a choice between violent and nonviolent strategies. Although major wars between sovereign states have become rare, contemporary world politics has...

How effective is repression relative to more conciliatory counterterrorist policies? The literature on counterterrorism identifies multiple different expectations about the relationship between repression and terrorist attacks. On the one hand, some scholars argue that repression reduces terrorism. Others argue that repressive policies exacerbate g...

Why is terrorist activity more prevalent in democracies than in nondemocracies? I argue that the main motivation for terrorist attacks in democracies is intergroup dynamics, with terrorist groups of various ideologies competing with one another for limited political influence. I conduct a cross-national, longitudinal analysis of 119 countries for t...

This paper uses asymmetric access to information to test if an insurgency is factionalized. If it is factionalized, regional variation in information should influence attack levels as groups use violence to compete over visibility, resources and support. Using plausibly exogenous variation in satellite access, we show that attacks increased after t...

Why are terrorist groups more prevalent in democracies than in nondemocracies? Why do individuals and groups resort to terrorist violence rather than using legal channels through which to express their grievances? Two different theoretical arguments in the literature argue different interactions between democracy and terrorism. One theoretical pers...

This article examines the conditions under which local jurisdictions make effective use of U.S. homeland security resources. It analyzes how resources, institutional context, and governance influence local performance on one homeland security policy dimension-communications interoperability. Governance maturity, nested institutions, and the existen...

Max Abrahms’s article “What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy” is a welcome critique of the many points taken for granted by rational choice interpretations of terrorist group behavior.1 His systematic review of the observable implications of rational choice perspectives on terrorism reveals some of the importa...

The historical record indicates that nonviolent campaigns have been more successful than armed campaigns in achieving ultimate goals in political struggles, even when used against similar opponents and in the face of repression. Nonviolent campaigns are more likely to win legitimacy, attract widespread domestic and international support, neutralize...

Terrorism is defined as a premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. There are alternative ways to conceive terrorist typologies or the classification of terrorist groups for analysis and response. Cluster analysis prov...

Paradoxically, the greater the national security threats, the more important the role of local policy in the United States. In this article we examine homeland security initiatives-particularly the tension between risk and vulnerability-and the governance dilemmas they pose for local communities. In contrast to the usual emphasis on coordination an...

How effective is repression relative to more conciliatory counterterrorist policies? The literature on counterterrorism identifies multiple different expectations about the relationship between repression and terrorist attacks. On the one hand, some scholars argue that repression reduces terrorism. Others argue that repressive policies exacerbate g...

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