Peaceful works best when protesting

Five months is a long time, but some of us still remember why Trump declared war on Iran. “All I want is freedom for the people,” he announced hours after the first strikes. He’d thought if he took out the leadership, Iran’s regime would collapse. But regime change is a lot harder than most people imagine, especially when attempted with force. And the evidence has been around for 15 years now, ever since Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan published their research in Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic Of Nonviolent Conflict.

Now, this is not intuitive at all. If you ask around, most people would say violence is the surer way to topple a regime. Chenoweth herself, as a PhD scholar 20 years ago, subscribed to this view. But that was before she started looking into the data of independence movements. To get a clear picture, the authors decided to dig up a century’s worth of data on people’s struggles, from 1900 to 2000. It took them two years to compile and analyse all the information, and the results were a revelation.

Chenoweth and Stephan found that over the 20th century – on average – nonviolent struggles had been twice as likely to succeed as violent struggles. But when they went over the numbers decade by decade, it turned out that the success rate of peaceful struggles had been increasing steadily. In 1940-50, when India won independence, violent struggles actually had a slightly higher success rate, but then the trend changed dramatically. And by 2000-2006 – the last dataset they looked at – nonviolence’s success rate had risen to 70%, while that of violence had crashed to 15%.

The authors made another equally stunning discovery – that for civil disobedience to work, you don’t need to mobilise the whole population. No, not even half, or a fourth, or even a tenth. The data is very clear that no civil disobedience movement in the past 100 years has failed when 3.5% of the population – less than 1 in 25 persons – has joined it, although “lots of them succeeded with far fewer”.

How is it possible for unarmed protesters to succeed where guns have failed? Again, data analysis helped Chenoweth and Stephan find a convincing explanation. They say violent struggles tend to be exclusive. Since they require above-average physical fitness, and many sacrifices, their recruits are mostly young men. But a nonviolent movement attracts everyone – young and old, men and women, sick and healthy, urban and rural. It’s natural for people to feel safety in numbers, so when fence-sitters see 5,000 people protesting peacefully in a park, they are also tempted to join.

But sheer numbers are only half the story. “Once ambivalent people get involved, it’s almost guaranteed that the movement will then have links to security forces, bureaucrats, economic and business elites…No regime loyalists in any country live isolated from the population itself.” Basically, peaceful movements influence the entire population to “reevaluate their own allegiances”.And countries that become independent after an unarmed struggle – like India – are better off in one important way. They produce democratic institutions and are 15% less likely to “relapse into civil war”. So, Mahatma Gandhi did well to keep us on the nonviolent path, and if Trump still secretly hopes to see regime change in Iran, he should stop trying to bring it about with bombs.

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