Date February 4, April 22, Recent research suggests that nonviolent civil resistance is far more successful in creating broad-based change than violent campaigns are, a somewhat surprising finding with a story behind it. When Erica Chenoweth started her predoctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in , she believed in the strategic logic of armed resistance.
She had studied terrorism, civil war, and major revolutions — Russian, French, Algerian, and American — and suspected that only violent force had achieved major social and political change. But then a workshop led her to consider proving that violent resistance was more successful than the nonviolent kind. Since the question had never been addressed systematically, she and colleague Maria J. Stephan began a research project. For the next two years, Chenoweth and Stephan collected data on all violent and nonviolent campaigns from to that resulted in the overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation.
They created a data set of mass actions. Chenoweth analyzed nearly variables related to success criteria, participant categories, state capacity, and more.
The results turned her earlier paradigm on its head — in the aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance was far more effective in producing change.
The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs WCFIA sat down with Chenoweth, a new faculty associate who returned to the Harvard Kennedy School this year as professor of public policy, and asked her to explain her findings and share her goals for future research. Chenoweth is also the Susan S. Nonviolent protest is just a tactic; a means to an end.
The ultimate goal of any protest is to force those in power to change, or go. They would have thanked Colin Kaepernick for the gentle reminder instead of denouncing him as a traitor and demanding the NFL drum those who followed his example out of the league. More importantly, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others would be alive today, along with tens of thousands of other African Americans whose lives have been disproportionately lost to COVID Sometimes nonviolent protest is the most effective way to achieve change.
The irony is that it is their intransigence—and ultimately their shamelessness—that could make a nonviolent response to the overwhelming violence of the state impossible. No one understood the uses of violence more than Mahatma Gandhi. He lived under the violence of British rule in South Africa and India, and developed his protest tactics in response.
They were not. His favorite method was to target an unjust law, break it in performative fashion, and dare the authorities to use violence to stop it. One thing Indians hated about British control was their tyrannical monopoly on the production of basic goods, including salt.
In , Gandhi led a protest to a traditional saltmaking town on the coast, where his Satyagrahis would break the law and make salt for themselves. Though he had informed the British viceroy, Lord Irwin, of the march in advance, the authorities did not interfere. But his goal was change. News of the salt protest spread civil disobedience across India. Faced with a real threat to their economic and political power, the British turned to their old standby: violence.
Tens of thousands of protesters were beaten and arrested—often by their fellow Indians, working as police and soldiers for the state. Over civilians were killed. Gandhi himself was arrested in May From jail, he informed Lord Irwin that his protesters would next conduct a raid on the government salt works at Dharasana. It would be nonviolent: a crime only against property, not people.
Interestingly, when the protests the survey asked about actually were violent — destroying police cars for example — there was essentially no difference in how white and Black violence was perceived. In fact, Israeli respondents saw Ethiopians destroying police cars as being less violent than white Jews doing so.
In a second set of surveys, which added a condition in which respondents were told if the protesters expressed a commitment to non-violence or not, the results were essentially the same.
Neither enacting non-violence nor publicly pledging to do so could make respondents perceive ethnic minority protesters as actually being non-violent. The non-violent advantage disappeared under the weight of ethnic prejudice. That finding is a depressing one for civil resistance advocates, but a clarifying one for activists. Clearly, the act of protest does not wipe away the prejudices that so often necessitate the protest in the first place.
Critical State is your weekly fix of foreign policy without all the stuff you don't need. Officials have no special moral status that immunizes them from defensive actions.
When they commit injustices of any sort, it is morally permissible for us, as private individuals, to treat them the same way we would treat private individuals committing those same injustices. Whatever we may do to private individuals, we may do to government officials.
We may respond to governmental injustice in exactly the same ways as private injustice. The Moral Parity Thesis has radical implications. It means you may assassinate leaders to stop them from launching unjust wars. You may fight back against a police officer who arrests you for something that shouldn't be a crime—e. You may escape from jail if mistakenly convicted or convicted of a bogus crime. Your business may lie about its compliance with an unfair regulation and evade excessive taxes.
A jury or judge may nullify an unjust statute by refusing to convict those who break it. The Moral Parity Thesis vindicates helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, who threatened to kill fellow American soldiers to stop them from killing civilians during the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
It vindicates Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden for sharing at least some state secrets. It vindicates government agents who sabotage unjust efforts from within. My basic argument is simple: By default, we should accept the Moral Parity Thesis, unless we can find some good reason to believe the Special Immunity Thesis instead. Upon inspection, though, the arguments for the Special Immunity Thesis fall flat. Governments and their agents aren't magic.
Some people think it's obvious why the government and its agents enjoy special immunity. They say that governments, or at least democratic governments, have a special moral power called authority.
Authority means that when the government issues certain commands, edicts, regulations, or laws, it thereby creates in the rest of us a moral duty to obey. To be clear, for a government to have authority, this means you must have a duty to obey its laws because they are the law, not simply because the laws happen to coincide with pre-existing obligations.
For instance, suppose I walk around downtown Washington, D. My "command" is morally inert. But most people think government commands are different. When the government commands you not to smoke pot, you thereby acquire a duty not to do so.
This argument—that governmental special immunity rests upon political authority—has two major problems. One is that there's little reason to think governments have authority, period. The other is that even if governments have some authority, there's little reason to think they have the authority to violate our rights, abuse their power, or cause us severe harm.
Does it make a difference if the murderer at the door is a lawfully appointed member of the U. Philosophers have spent 2, years trying, and failing, to justify the idea that governments have authority.
But—and this seems to be the consensus in philosophy today—none of the arguments really works. For instance, your sixth-grade civics teacher probably told you that government has authority because of a "social contract.
But the social contract metaphor falls apart. Contracts are voluntary, but you never consented to and have no right or opportunity to opt out of the "contract" with your government. Contracts require mutual exchange, but U. Plus, even if you were to agree to a social contract, you'd have no good reason to give up your right of self-defense against government abuse.
Even absolutist Leviathan author Thomas Hobbes thought such rights remain with the people. Other philosophers, such as H. Hart and John Rawls, say that government authority arises from a duty of fair play. They say your neighbors help provide beneficial public goods. When they do so, since you benefit, you should do your share. The fair play theory may explain why a person should pay taxes and serve on juries. But it would be bizarre to say, "You benefit from some of the public goods the state provides.
In order to avoid unfairly free riding on the efforts of others to provide those public goods, you must not only pay taxes, but you must allow the president to exterminate and forcibly relocate Native American tribes.
You must let police choke subdued and handcuffed men to death. You must allow Congress to wage war at will. You must allow the police to arrest you for smoking pot or selling Big Gulps.
Anyone who wants to defend the Special Immunity Thesis on the basis of government authority has a serious burden. It's not enough to justify a general kind of government authority.
One must instead explain why democratic officials have the specific authority to commit severe injustices—the kinds of injustices where it would be valid for us to use violence, subterfuge, or deception against civilians if the civilians were to try to commit them.
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