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I'd like you to imagine that you live in a really repressive country
there are elections... but they're fake
The leader wins a hundred per cent of the vote each time
security forces dub opposition leaders with impunity and they harass everyone else
this is a country where being in this room right now would get you on a list...
Now let's say you had enough...
And so have many other people that you talk with in low whispers
Now, I'm not talking about The Hunger Games although that would be awesome
Unfortunately I'm talking about real... world... conditions
That many people face... right now
So, assuming you've decided to act
What would be the best way for you to challenge the system and create something new?
My own answer to this question has changed over the past few years
In 2006 I was a Ph. D student here at CU Boulder studying political science
And my dissertation was on how and why people use violence
to create political change in their countries
As for the scenario I've just described
Well, back then I bought into the idea that power flows from the barrel of a gun
And what I would have said was that although it was tragic
It was logical in such situations for people to use violence
to seek their change
But then I was invited to an academic workshop
put on by the International Center on Non-Violent Conflict
They were giving a week-long primer on Non-Violent Resistance
to try to get people like me to teach about it in our classes
Now... My view of all this at the time was that it was well-intentioned but dangerously naive
I mean... the readings they sent me in advance argued that
the best way for people to seek really difficult political changes
was through non-violent or civil resistance
They described civil resistance as an active form of conflict
where unarmed civilians would use tactics like protests, boycotts, demonstrations
and lots of other forms of mass non-cooperation to see change
They brought up pieces like Serbia where a non-violent revolution
toppled Slobodan Milošević "The Butcher of the Balkans"
In October 2000
And The Philippines where "The People Power Movement" ousted Ferdinand Marcos in 1986
At the Workshop I said stuff like:
"Well... those were probably exceptions"
For every successful case you guys bring up
I can think of a failed case like "Tian'anmen Square"
I can also think of plenty of cases where violence worked pretty well...
Like the Russian, French and Algerian Revolutions
Maybe Non-violent resistance works if you're seeking environmental reforms,
gender rights, labor rights but it can't work generally
if you're trying to overthrow a dictator or become a new country
and it definitely can't work if the authoritarian leader you're facing
is not incompetent and it's somebody who is just really brutal and ruthless
so, by the end of the week, as you can imagine, I wasn't very popular
But my soon-to-be co-author Maria Stephan came up to me and said something like:
"If you're right, why don't you prove it?"
"Are you curious enough to study this in a serious way empirically?"
Now, believe it or not, nobody had really done that before systematically
and although I was still skeptical... I was curious
I figured that if they were right and I was wrong... Somebody better find out...
So for the next 2 years I collected data on all major
non-violent and violent campaigns for the overthrow of a government
or territorial liberation since 1900
The data covered the entire world and consisted of every known case
where there were at least a thousand observed participants
this is hundreds of cases...
Then I analyzed the data and the results blew me away
from 1900 to 2006 non-violent campaigns worldwide
were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies
and there's more... this trend has been increasing over time
so that in the last 50 years non-violent campaigns are becoming increasingly
successful and common...
whereas violent insurgencies are becoming incresingly rare and unsuccesful
this is true even in those extremely brutal authoritarian conditions
where I expected non-violent resistance to fail
So why is civil resistance so much more effective than armed struggle?
the answer seems to lie in people power itself
Researchers used to say that no government could survive
if just 5% of its population rose up against it
our data showed that the number may be lower than that
No single campaigns failed during that time period
after they'd achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3,5% of the population
and lots of them succeeded with far fewer than that
now, 3,5% is nothing to sneeze at
in the US today that's like 11 million people
but get this... every single campaign that surpased that 3,5% was a non-violent one
In fact, the non-violent campaigns were on average
4 times larger than the average violent campaigns
and they were often much more inclusive and representative
in terms of gender, age, race, political party, class and the urban role distinction
civil resistance allows people of all different
levels of physical ability to participate...
so this can include the elderly, people with dissabilities,
women, children and anyone else who wants to
if you think about it... everyone is born with a natural physical ability to resist non violently
anyone here who has kids knows how hard it is
to pick up a child who doesn't wanna move
or to feed a child who doesn't wanna eat
violent resistance, on the other hand, is a little more physically demanding
and that makes it a little bit more exclusive
In my case when I was in college
I was in military science classes 'cause I planned to
go through the ROTC program and become an army officer
now, I really liked the rappelling, the shooting at the range,
the map reading, of course, and the uniforms...
but I wasn't stoked when they asked me to get up in the wee hours of the morning
and run until I vomited
so I quit and chose the far less demanding career of professor
Not everybody wants to take the same chances in life and many people won't turn up
unless they expect safety in numbers
the visibility of many civil resistance tactics like protests
allow them to draw these risk-averse people into the fray
put yourself back in that repressive country for just a minute
let's say your trusted friend and neighbor comes to you and says:
"I know you sympathize with our cause, we are gonna have a mass demonstration
down the street tonight at eight o'clock, I hope to see you there"
Now, I don't know about you all but I am not the person who's gonna show up at 7:55 and see what's up
I'm probably going to look outside my window at 8:30 and see what's going on
If I see 6 people congregated there in the square... I'm gonna sit this one out...
but if I see six thousand and more coming down the alleyway...
I just might join in...
My point here is that... the visibility of civil resistance's actions
allows them to attract more active and diverse participation from these ambivalent people...
and once THEY become involved is almost guaranteed
that the movement will then have links to security forces,
civilian bureaucrats, economic and business elites,
educational elites, state media,
religious authorities and the like and those people start to reevaluate their own allegiances
No regime loyalist... in any country lives entirely isolated from the population itself...
they have friends, they have family members,
they have existing relationships that they have to live with in the long term
whether or not the leader stays or goes
In Serbia... when it became obvious that hundreds of thousands of serbs
were descending on Belgrade to demand that Milošević leave office
police officers started to disobey the order to shoot on demonstrators
when one of them was asked why he did so
he said simply "I knew my kids would be in the crowd"
Some of you are thinking "Is this person insane?
I watch the news and I see protestors getting shot at all the time"
And it's true, sometimes crackdowns do happen
but even in those cases, the non-violent campaigns
were outperforming the violent ones by 2 to one
it turns out that when security forces beat up, arrest
or even shoot unarmed activists, there is indeed safety in numbers
Large, well coordinated campaigns can shift between tactics that are concentrated
like protests and demonstrations
to tactics of dispersion where people stay away from places they were expected to go
they do strikes, they *** on pots and pans, they stay at home,
they shut off their electricity at a coordinated time of day
these tactics are much less risky
they are very hard or at least very costly to suppress
but the movement stays just as disruptive
What happens in these countries once the dust settles?
well, it turns out that the way you resist matters in the long run too
most strikingly,
countries in which people waged non-violent struggle
were way more likely to emerge with democratic institutions
than countries in which they waged violent struggle
and, those countries with non-violent campaigns
were 15% less likely to relapse into civil war
The data is clear...
when people rely on civil resistance... their size grows
and when large numbers of people remove their cooperation from an oppressive system
the odds are ever in their favor
So...
I, and many others like me
had ignored the millions of people worldwide
who were skillfully using civil resistance in favor of studying just things that blow up
I was left with a few questions about the way I used to think
Why was it so easy and confortable for me to think that violence works
and why did I find it acceptable to assume
that violence happens almost automatically
because of circumstances or by neccessity that it's the only way out of some situations
and as a society that celebrates battlefield heroes on national holidays
I guess it was natural to grow up believing that violence and courage are one and the same
and that true victories cannot come without bloodshed on both sides...
but the evidence I presented here today suggest that
for people serious about seeking change...
there are realistic alternatives
Imagine what our world would look like now if we allowed ourselves to develop some faith in that
What if our history courses emphasized the decade of mass civil disobedience
that came before the declaration of Independence
rather than the war that came after?
What if our Social Studies textbooks
emphasized Ghandi and King in the first chapter
rather that as an afterthought?
And what if every child left elementary school knowing more about the suffragist movement
than they did about the battle of Bunker Hill?
What if it became common knowledge that when protest becomes too dangerous...
there are many non-violent techniques of dispersion
that might keep movements safe and active?
ok... so here we are... 2013 at Boulder, Colorado
maybe some of you are thinking:
"that's great that civil resistance works and what can I do?"
Encourage your children to learn more about the non-violent legacies of the past 200 years
and explore the potential of people power
Tell your elected representatives to stop perpetuating the misguided view that violence pays
by supporting the first groups in a civil uprising to take up arms
Although civil resistance cannot be exported or imported...
it's time for our officials to embrace a different way of thinking
that in both the short and longer term...
civil resistance tends to leave behind societies
in which people can live more freely and more peacefully together...
Now that we know what we know about the power of non-violent conflict...
I see it as our shared responsibility to spread the word...
so that future generations don't fall for the myth
that violence is their only way out... Thank you!