A non-violent 'toolkit' for change

Non-violent campaigns led to regime change more than twice as often - that is, 53 per cent of the time compared to 26 per cent for violent campaigns, according to a study

Non-violence versus violence: Which form of civil resistance against an oppressive regime is more likely to result in regime change?  What are the tipping points in campaigns to unseat authoritarian governments?

The answers have very high relevance. The last 10 years have seen racist, xenophobic authoritarian politicians achieve power in many nations by winning elections. These wannabe dictators have tightened their grip on power by legislating harsh laws that violate fundamental rights and then selectively applying those laws to target political opponents.

Things have gone from bad to worse during the pandemic as authoritarians used the crisis as an excuse to increase surveillance. The Democracy Index 2020, which is run by the Economist Intelligence Unit, claims just 8.4 per cent of the world population now lives in a full democracy, which has high scores across 60-odd indicators measuring pluralism, civil liberties and political culture. Out of a total of 167 nations covered by the index, 116 recorded declining democracy scores in 2020.

Harvard academic Erica Chenoweth is probably the theoretician who has worked hardest to find quantifiable answers to the above questions. An expert on domestic terrorism, Dr Chenoweth co-authored a study Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-Violent Conflict, with another political scientist Maria J Stephan.

In the mid-2000s, when she was doing her PhD, Dr Chenoweth discovered nobody had compared the success rates of non-violent versus violent protests. So Dr Chenoweth and Dr Stephan looked at 323 different movements that attempted regime change in various places, between 1900 and 2006.

They set hard criteria. A movement was considered a success if it fully achieved the goal of regime change within a year of peak engagement, and as a direct result of its activities. Regime change driven by foreign military intervention was not considered a success. 

A campaign was considered violent, if it involved bombings, kidnappings, destruction of infrastructure, or physical harm to people or property. (The Indian Independence movement did not qualify as a success by their standards, because the UK was critically weakened by World War II).

Their conclusions were interesting. Non-violent campaigns led to regime change more than twice as often — that is, 53 per cent of the time compared to 26 per cent for violent campaigns. Out of the 25 largest campaigns they studied, 20 were non-violent and 14 were fully successful in toppling an authoritarian regime.

Delving deeper into the data, they came to an explanation for this difference and evolved an interesting rule of thumb. Civil resistance movements need numbers to succeed, and numbers are more likely to be sustainable for a non-violent movement. Violent movements tend to alienate potential supporters who may not necessarily support the regime.

Non-violent movements can draw from a wider demographic and allow for the participation of every age-cohort. An 80-year-old grandmother, or somebody who is differently abled or beset with health issues, can participate in a non-violent movement, even lead it, whereas violent insurrections only recruit the young and fit. Moreover, non-violent campaigns can lead to open discourse — reaching, and possibly converting, wider audiences.

The heuristic they derived is that movements tend to succeed when active participation hits the admittedly high barrier of 3.5 per cent of the population. According to Dr Chenoweth and Dr Stephan, every movement that has achieved 3.5 per cent has been successful. Among the more recent ones, they cite the Filipino People Power Movement, the Velvet Revolution (former Czechoslovakia), the Rose Revolution (Georgia).

Non-violent movements do carry their share of risk since authoritarian regimes instinctively respond with violent repression. Jallianwala Bagh, Tiananmen Square, and Black Lives Matter are just some examples of regimes unleashing bloodbaths.

That 3.5 per cent threshold is interesting. To take a random example, India has a population of roughly 1.2 billion. So the threshold would be roughly 45 million. 

It so happens that around 42 per cent of India’s workforce is deployed in agriculture — that would be about 200 million people. Around 57 per cent of Indians derive “some” of their income from farming (this includes Sachin Tendulkar). That’s 700 million or so. Do the findings of Dr Chenoweth and Dr Stephan provide a toolkit for regime change?