chloe kaczenski humbert

The success of nonviolent civil resistance: Erica Chenoweth at TEDxBoulder TEDx Talks Nov 4, 2013 “Sometimes, crackdowns do happen, but even in those cases, the nonviolent campaigns were outperforming the violent ones by 2 to 1. 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 or demonstrations, to tactics of dispersion, where people stay away from places they were expected to go. They do strikes, they bang 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’re 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? It turns out that the way you resist matters in the long run too. Most strikingly, countries in which people wage nonviolent struggle were way more likely to emerge with democratic institutions than countries in which they wage violent struggle.” – Erica Chenoweth