Why Is the “Force More Powerful” More Powerful?
Why Is the “Force More Powerful” More Powerful?
by John M Repp
People coming to FORUSA’s one hundredth anniversary celebration at Seabeck, Washington, this coming July 1 through July 4, will get to hear Erica Chenoweth and Jamila Raqib, two of the most knowledgeable people on the planet on the subject of mass nonviolent civil resistance. http://forseabeck.org/
In 2006, Chenoweth was getting her PhD in political science, writing her dissertation on why and how people use violence to achieve political goals. Then she received an invitation to a week long workshop put on by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/ . She accepted the invitation as a challenge. At the workshop, she expressed scepticism, assuming violent methods of political struggle were the only viable ones. Nothing in her graduate study had contradicted that idea. In fact, until she attended the workshop she had never really heard much about nonviolent civil resistance. At the end of the workshop, Maria Stephan, soon to be Chenoweth’s co-author, approached her and suggested she study the question empirically. Again, Chenoweth accepted the challenge.
Chenoweth spent the next two years collecting data on all the major nonviolent and violent political campaigns since 1900 from all over the globe and then ran the statistical tests. Her results blew her away. From 1900 to 2006, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed than violent ones. She and Stephan published their results in a peer reviewed journal http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2008.33.1.7 and then they wrote a book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) Here is Chenoweth’s TED talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w&feature=youtu.be
What Chenoweth and Stephan did was to use the methods of contemporary social science, including regression analysis (finding out the relationship between variables/causes i.e, which is cause and which is effect and the weight of the different causes ) to empirically prove the following; 1) Mass civil resistance campaigns over the period 1900 to 2006 were twice as likely to achieve full or partial success than violent campaigns. 2) Mass civil resistance over the same time period has become progressively more successful while violent campaign’s success rate has declined. 3) After a successful mass civil resistance campaign, there is a better chance that democracy will be expanded compared to the case with violent campaigns.
The central argument (i.e. why the “force more powerful” (Gandhi’s phrase for nonviolent civil resistance) is more powerful) concerns the “challenge to participation”. With nonviolent campaigns the barriers to participation are much lower. 3.5 percent participation of the society virtually guarantees success. With nonviolent campaigns, more people, young, old, male, female can particpate. Young men usually dominate violent campaigns. With the higher participation comes more diversity of the participants, more resiliance of the campaign in the face of repression, greater tactical innovation, more disruption to the status quo, and the more likely there will be loyalty shifts in bureacrats and security forces, the endgame of civil resistence.
Chenoweth and Stephan expand our knowledge of strategy by explaining how methods of struggle or tactics can be classed in two ways: concentrated and dispersed. An example of “concentrated” would be a large demonstration or a building occupation, while a “dispersed” tactic would be a stay-at-home strike or a boycott. Repression works better against concentrated tactics, while dispersed tactics are more difficult to repress. A resilient campaign can alternate between the types of tactics to keep the opponent offguard. Keeping the initiative is very important strategically.
Chenoweth became a widely proclaimed academic after her work, but then she experienced threats against her. Why? I think because her work undercuts our government’s and the right-wing’s rationale for our regime changing wars like Afghanistan, Iraq, and many more over the years. We say we want to expand democracy when what really is going on is that our corporations want to expand their markets and their profits and the “security managers” (probably the niche Chenoweth was headed for had she not engaged with the history of civil resistance) want more control, aiming at hegemony
Chenoweth and Stephan acknowledge that Gene Sharp’s work on the theory of nonviolent struggle was seminal. Over 40 years ago Sharp published the same conclusions that Chenoweth and Stephan found. His 3 volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973) is a virtual handbook for nonviolent activists, with the famous 198 methods. Gandhi was a great practitioner of nonviolent action in the 20th century, but he was never able to systematize his insights. That is the niche Sharp occupied.
Sharp used old-fashioned historical analysis rather than the statistical methods of modern social science to prove the point. A part of Chenoweth and Stephan’s book contains what they call “case studies” i.e. historical narrative followed by analysis with which is more or less what Sharp has done all through his work.
Sharp wrote once that it is unfortunate that we use the word “nonviolence”’ to describe different concepts. He uses the word “principled nonviolence” to describe the deep moral beliefs, often anchored in religious principles, exemplified by people such as FOR members. “Nonviolent action” or “nonviolent struggle” is used to describe the mass actions that he and Chenoweth/Stephan describe. The mass of people participating may not have deep moral beliefs about nonviolence. They just want to achieve their political goals. Chenoweth and Stephan use the word “civil resistance” to describe the goal-directed political action outside the normal democratic channels of elections and lobbying (if that is allowed) but excluding violence. There is overlap between the two concepts signified by the word “nonviolence.” since people having deep principled nonviolent beliefs often lead mass nonviolent struggles. Gandhi and King are good examples.
Throughout their work, Sharp and Chenoweth/Stephan use words like “power”, “force”, ”conflict”, and “struggle” that many FOR members may find troubling. Chenoweth sees civil resistance as a form of unconventional warfare using different “weapons”, while FOR people often sing a popular peace song with the lyric “we will study war no more”.
Jamila Raqib will also be a keynote speaker at 2016 Seabeck. She is the Executive Director of the Albert Einstein Institution http://www.aeinstein.org/ , founded by Gene Sharp, which is dedicated to advancing “the worldwide study and strategic use of nonviolent action”. She explains very clearly how the power of nonviolence works in her TED talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJodZcGfTVE . Usually, we think “the power” is in the ruler’s hands. But it is also true that power requires the cooperation and assistance of people at all levels. Gandhi said: “the British have not taken India; we gave it to them”. Essentially, power is a relationship. This is the insight upon which nonviolent struggle is based. And, if the ruler or ruling institution abuses their position and becomes oppressive, the followers, helpers, and cooperators can withdraw their support and cooperation. This very human phenomenon has operated from time immemorial, but historians have downplayed it, maybe because “when it bleeds, it leads.”
Raqib collaborated with Sharp in the book Self-Liberation A Guide to Strategic Planning for Action to End a Dictatorship or Other Oppression (2010). FOR members can expect to be challenged at this point. We read in Self-Liberation: “In conflicts between a dictatorship, or other oppression, and a dominated population, it is necessary for the populace to determine whether they wish simply to condemn the oppression and protest against the system. Or, do they wish actually to end the oppression and replace it with a system of greater freedom, democracy, and justice? ….Many good people have assumed that if they denounce the oppression strongly enough, and protest long enough, the desired change will somehow happen. That assumption is an error.” Self-Liberation, page 1).
Sharp and Raqib maintain that the more knowledge people have about the history of nonviolent struggles all over the world and the more thoughtful the planning, the better the chances of success of the campaign or movement. Because we know oppressive governments and institutions also study nonviolent struggles in order to be able to defeat them, for the people to keep the initiative, it becomes even more important to study and plan campaigns and above all be creative in the use of the “force more powerful”.
In addition to her keynote address, Raqib will lead a workshop on civilian-based defense, a form of nonviolent action little known in the peace community. She will tell us, among other things, about how environmental activists fighting climate change have been applying civilian-based defense with great success. Chenoweth will lead a workshop on “violent flanks”, groups within a nonviolent movement that resort to violent tactics that can affect the outcome, and how to deal with them.