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Transcriber: Víctor Cadenas
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
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I'd like you to imagine that you live
in a really repressive country.
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There are elections, but they're fake.
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The leader wins
100% of the vote each time.
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Security forces beat up
opposition leaders with impunity,
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and they harass everyone else.
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This is a country where being in this room
right now would get you on a list.
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Now let's say you've had enough,
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and so have many other people
that you talk with in low whispers.
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I'm not talking about The Hunger Games,
although that would be awesome!
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(Laughter)
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Unfortunately, I'm talking
about real world conditions
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that many people face right now.
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So assuming you've decided to act,
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what would be the best way
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for you to challenge the system
and create something new?
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My own answer to this question
has changed over the past few years.
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In 2006, I was a PhD student here
at CU Boulder, studying Political Science,
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and my dissertation was
on how and why people use violence
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to create political change
in their countries.
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As for the scenario I just described,
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back then I bought into the idea
that power flows from the barrel of a gun,
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and what I would have said was
that, although it was tragic,
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it was logical in such situations
for people to use violence
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to seek their change.
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But then I was invited
to an academic workshop
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put on by the International Center
on Nonviolent Conflict.
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They were giving a week-long primer
on nonviolent resistance
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to try to get people like me
to teach about it in our classes.
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My view of all of this at the time
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was that it was well-intentioned
but dangerously naive.
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I mean, the readings
they sent me in advance argued
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that the best way for people
to seek really difficult political changes
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was through nonviolent
or civil resistance.
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They described civil resistance
as an active form of conflict,
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where unarmed civilians would use tactics
like protests, boycotts, demonstrations,
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and lots of other forms
of mass non-cooperation
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to seek change.
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They brought up cases like Serbia,
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where a nonviolent revolution
toppled Slobodan Milošević,
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the Butcher of the Balkans,
in October 2000,
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and the Philippines,
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where the People Power Movement
ousted Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.
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At the workshop, I said stuff like,
"Well, those were probably exceptions.
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For every successful case
you guys bring up,
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I can think of a failed case
like Tienanmen Square.
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I can also think of plenty of cases
where violence worked pretty well
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like the Russian, French,
and Algerian revolutions.
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Maybe nonviolent resistance works
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if you're seeking environmental reforms,
gender rights, labor rights,
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but it can't work, generally,
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if you're trying to overthrow a dictator
or become a new country.
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And it definitely can't work
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if the authoritarian leader
you're facing is not incompetent,
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it's somebody who's
really brutal and ruthless."
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So by the end of the week,
as you can imagine, I wasn't very popular.
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(Laughter)
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But my soon to be co-author,
Maria Stephan, came up to me
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and said something like,
"If you're right, why don't you prove it?
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Are you curious enough to study this
in a serious way, empirically?"
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Believe it or not, nobody had
really done that before systematically,
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and although I was still skeptical,
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I was curious.
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I figured that if they were right,
and I was wrong, somebody better find out.
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So for the next two years,
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I collected data on all major
nonviolent and violent campaigns
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for the overthrow of a government
or a territorial liberation since 1900.
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The data covered the entire world
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and consisted of every known case
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where there were
at least 1,000 observed participants;
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this is hundreds of cases.
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Then I analyzed the data,
and the results blew me away.
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From 1900 to 2006,
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nonviolent campaigns worldwide
were twice as likely to succeed outright
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as violent insurgencies.
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And there's more.
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This trend has been increasing over time,
so that in the last 50 years,
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nonviolent campaigns are becoming
increasingly successful and common,
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whereas violent insurgencies are becoming
increasingly rare and unsuccessful.
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This is true even in those extremely
brutal, authoritarian conditions
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where I expected
nonviolent resistance to fail.
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So, why is civil resistance so much
more effective than armed struggle?
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The answer seems to lie
in people power itself.
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Researchers used to say
that no government could survive
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if just 5% of its population
rose up against it.
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Our data showed that the number
may be lower than that.
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No single campaign has failed
during that time period
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after they had achieved
the active and sustained participation
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of just 3.5% of the population.
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And lots of them succeeded
with far fewer than that.
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3.5% is nothing to sneeze at.
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In the U.S. today,
that's like 11 million people.
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But get this:
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every single campaign
that surpassed that 3.5%
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was a nonviolent one.
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In fact, the nonviolent campaigns
were on average
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four times larger
than the average violent campaigns,
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and they were often much more
inclusive and representative
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in terms of gender, age,
race, political party, class,
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and the urban-rural distinction.
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Civil resistance allows
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people of all different levels
of physical ability to participate,
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so this can include the elderly,
people with disabilities,
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women, children,
and anyone else who wants to.
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If you think about it,
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everyone is born with a natural
physical ability to resist nonviolently.
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Anyone here who has kids knows
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how hard it is to pick up a child
who doesn't want to move
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or to feed a child
who doesn't want to eat.
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Violent resistance, on the other hand,
is a little more physically demanding,
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and that makes it
a little bit more exclusive.
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In my case, when I was in college,
I was in Military Science classes
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because I planned
to go through the ROTC program
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and become an army officer.
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I really liked the rappelling,
the shooting at the range,
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the map reading, of course,
and the uniforms.
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But I wasn't stoked
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when they asked me to get up
in the wee hours of the morning
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and run until I vomited.
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So I quit and chose the far less
demanding career of a professor.
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(Laughter)
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Not everybody wants to take
the same chances in life,
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and many people won't turn up
unless they expect safety in numbers.
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The visibility of many civil resistance
tactics, like protests, allow them
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to draw these risk-averse people
into the fray.
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Put yourself back in that repressive
country for just a minute.
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Let's say your trusted friend
and neighbor comes to you and says,
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"I know you sympathize with our cause.
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We'll have a mass demonstration
down the street tonight at 8 o'clock.
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I hope to see you there."
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I don't know about you all,
but I am not the person
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who is going to show up
at 7:55 and see what's up.
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I'm probably going to look
outside my window at 8:30
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and see what's going on.
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If I see six people congregated there
in the square, I'll sit this one out.
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But if I see 6,000 and more coming
down the alleyway, I just might join in.
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My point here is that the visibility
of civil resistance actions allows them
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to attract more active
and diverse participation
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from these ambivalent people,
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and once they become involved,
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it's almost guaranteed that the movement
will then have links to security forces,
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civilian bureaucrats,
economic and business elites,
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educational elites, state media,
religious authorities, and the like,
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and those people start
to reevaluate their own allegiances.
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No regime loyalists, at any country,
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live entirely isolated
from the population itself.
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They have friends,
they have family members,
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they have existing relationships
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that they have to live with
in the long term,
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whether or not the leader stays or goes.
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In Serbia, when it became obvious
that hundreds of thousands of Serbs
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were descending on Belgrade
to demand that Milošević leave office,
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police officers started to disobey
the order to shoot on demonstrators.
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When one of them was asked
why he did so, he said simply,
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"I knew my kids would be in the crowd."
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Some of you are thinking,
"Is this person insane?
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I watch the news, and I see protesters
getting shot at all the time."
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And it's true.
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Sometimes, crackdowns do happen,
but even in those cases,
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the nonviolent campaigns were
outperforming the violent ones by 2 to 1.
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It turns out that when security forces
beat up, arrest, or even shoot
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unarmed activists,
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there is indeed safety in numbers.
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Large, well-coordinated
campaigns can shift
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between tactics that are concentrated,
like protests or demonstrations,
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to tactics of dispersion,
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where people stay away
from places they were expected to go.
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They do strikes, they bang
on pots and pans, they stay at home,
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they shut off their electricity
at a coordinated time of day.
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These tactics are much less risky,
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they're very hard, or at least
very costly to suppress,
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but the movement stays just as disruptive.
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What happens in these countries
once the dust settles?
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It turns out that the way you resist
matters in the long run too.
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Most strikingly, countries
in which people wage nonviolent struggle
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were way more likely to emerge
with democratic institutions
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than countries
in which they wage violent struggle.
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Those countries with nonviolent campaigns
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were 15% less likely
to relapse into civil war.
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The data are clear:
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when people rely on civil resistance,
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their size grows,
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and when large numbers of people
remove their cooperation
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from an oppressive system,
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the odds are ever in their favor.
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(Laughter)
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So, I and many others like me had ignored
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the millions of people worldwide
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who were skillfully using civil resistance
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in favor of studying
just things that blow up.
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I was left with a few questions
about the way I used to think.
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Why was it so easy and comfortable
for me to think that violence works?
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Why did I find it acceptable to assume
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that violence happens
almost automatically
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because of circumstances
or by necessity,
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that it's the only way out
of some situations?
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In a society that celebrates
battlefield heroes on national holidays,
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I guess it was natural
to grow up believing
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that violence and courage
are one and the same,
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and that true victories cannot come
without bloodshed on both sides.
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But the evidence I presented
here today suggests
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that for people
serious about seeking change,
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there are realistic alternatives.
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Imagine what our world
would look like now
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if we allowed ourselves
to develop some faith in them.
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What if our history courses emphasized
the decade of mass civil disobedience
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that came before
the Declaration of Independence
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rather than the war that came after?
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What if our social studies textbooks
emphasized Gandhi and King
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in the first chapter
rather than as an afterthought?
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And what if every child
left elementary school
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knowing more about the Suffragist Movement
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than they did
about the Battle of Bunker Hill?
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What if it became common knowledge
that when protest becomes too dangerous,
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there are many nonviolent
techniques of dispersion
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that might keep movement safe and active?
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So here we are, in 2013,
in Boulder, Colorado.
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Maybe some of you are thinking,
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"That's great that civil resistance works.
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What can I do?"
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Encourage your children to learn more
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about the nonviolent legacies
of the past 200 years
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and explore the potential of people power.
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Tell your elected representatives
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to stop perpetuating
the misguided view that violence pays
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by supporting the first groups
in a civil uprising who take up arms.
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Although civil resistance
cannot be exported or imported,
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it's time for our officials to embrace
a different way of thinking;
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that in both the short and longer term,
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civil resistance tends
to lead behind societies
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in which people can live more freely
and more peaceably together.
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Now that we know what we know
about the power of nonviolent conflict,
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I see it as our shared responsibility
to spread the word,
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so that future generations
don't fall for the myth
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that violence is their only way out.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
