MolecularCactus1324YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed
This is actually rewriting history.
The Philippines had multiple militant movements but notably the Reform the Armed Forces which had orchestrated and abandoned a coup that had popular support kicking off the protest movement.
Sudan was a military coup that overthrew bashir and then massacred protestors and was actually backed by American OSI NGOs.
Algiers street protests were illegal and they combined general strikes with police clashes and riots even though they were subjected to mass arrests.
For Ghandi MLK jr and others mentioned there were armed militant groups adding pressure. My take away is you need both approaches.
Without demonstrating the ability to defend your nonviolent protest with devastating results it just gets crushed. If you are militant with no populist public movement backing your ideals you get labeled as terrorists and assinated by the feds.
This is a really common misunderstanding of how nonviolent movements actually work, and frankly gets the causality backwards.
You’re right that successful movements often have both violent and nonviolent wings - but the nonviolent components don’t succeed because of the violent ones. They succeed despite them. The research is pretty clear on this: nonviolent campaigns are actually more likely to achieve their goals than violent ones, and they’re more likely to lead to stable democratic outcomes.
Nonviolent movements get labeled as extremist precisely when they’re associated with violence, not when they’re separate from it. The Civil Rights Movement’s greatest victories came when they maintained strict nonviolent discipline - Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington. Every time violence entered the picture, it gave opponents ammunition to dismiss the entire movement.
The “good cop/bad cop” theory sounds intuitive but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. What actually makes nonviolent resistance effective is mass participation, strategic planning, and moral leverage - not the threat of violence lurking in the background.
The research is pretty clear on this:
Lol. What was the methodology on this “research”?
The Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) Data Project is the world’s leading dataset on the characteristics and outcomes of nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns. The latest version covers 627 mass mobilizations in every country in the world from 1900-2021. The coverage is global but excludes maximalist campaigns (i.e. those seeking to overthrow an incumbent government, expel foreign military occupation, or secede).
Chenoweth and co-author Maria J. Stephan published their first analysis of the comparative outcomes of nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns in the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. In this book, the authors aggregated data from 1900–2006 and concluded that, overall, nonviolent civil resistance was more successful in achieving target outcomes than campaigns that use violence. The more recent dataset featured in the interactive tool confirms this trend and extends it into the past decade.
That didn’t remotely answer my question.
I directly answered you and provided sources and background.
Maybe try reading on your own without a mentor for granting you reading comprehension
OBJECTION!I think what they’re looking for in terms of methodology is what objective criteria they use to determine if a protest is violent or nonviolent, as well as what constitutes success or failure. These are not trivial questions, and there’s lots of debate surrounding virtually any given movement, so to make objective determinations about a large number of such movements raises the question of how they’re resolving all these questions and debates. Some might argue that such questions are inherently political and up to interpretation.
As another user in this thread pointed out, it may be a case of confusing correlation with causation: if a movement is popular, it may be more likely to succeed and more likely to be considered nonviolent, as compared to a less popular movement employing the exact same tactics.