“My biggest objection to violence stems from the fact that it simply doesn’t work, or doesn’t work nearly as well as nonviolent resistance.” (Srdja Popovic)
| This post is part of a reading series on Blueprint for Revolution, by Srdja Popovic. To quickly access all chapters, open the book title tab on the Authors & Books page. Disclaimer: This chapter summary is personal work and an invitation to read the book itself for a detailed view of all the authors’ ideas. |
“In a stellar book titled Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, two brilliant young American academics, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, did something that no scholar before them had done: they looked at every conflict they could find between 1900 and 2006, 323 in total, and analyzed them carefully to see which succeeded, which failed, and why. Their findings were astonishing. ‘Nonviolent resistance campaigns,’ they discovered, ‘were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts.’”
It also appears that armed movements are usually limited to around 50,000 participants, regardless of the cause’s nobility. By contrast, “when the movement is about having fun, being creative, and using hope to crush fear, you can expect your numbers to swell faster than you can count.”