What is the Nonviolent Action Lab? Host Jay Ulfelder sits down with Professor Erica Chenoweth.
About This Week's Guest
Erica Chenoweth is the Academic Dean for Faculty Engagement and the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, Faculty Dean at Pforzheimer House at Harvard College, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. Chenoweth studies political violence and its alternatives. They have authored or edited nine other books and dozens of articles on mass movements, nonviolent resistance, terrorism, political violence, revolutions, and state repression, including the recent Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (2021) and On Revolutions (2022).
Chenoweth’s current book project, The End of People Power, investigates the puzzling decline in the success of civil resistance movements in the past decade, even as the technique has become more popular worldwide. Along with Zoe Marks, Chenoweth is also the author of the forthcoming book Bread and Roses: Women on the Frontlines of Revolution, which explores how women's participation impacts mass movements.
At Harvard, Chenoweth directs the Nonviolent Action Lab, an innovation hub that uses social science tools and evidence to support movement-led political transformation. There they maintain the NAVCO Data Project, one of the world’s leading datasets on historical and contemporary mass mobilizations around the globe; the Women in Resistance (WiRe) Dataset, which catalogues the gender composition of such movements (with Zoe Marks); and the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest and scholarly project that documents political mobilization in the US (with Jeremy Pressman).
At Harvard, Chenoweth is a Faculty Affiliate at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and Women in Public Policy Program. They are also a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where Chenoweth and Zoe Marks co-chair the Political Violence Workshop.
Before coming to Harvard, Chenoweth taught at the University of Denver and Wesleyan University. They hold a Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from the University of Colorado and a B.A. in political science and German from the University of Dayton.
Jay Ulfelder:
You are listening to the Nonviolent Action Lab podcast. I'm your host, Jay Ulfelder, he/him. Together with Harvard Kennedy School Professor Erica Chenoweth, and other members of the Nonviolent Action Lab team, each episode we bring you the latest research, insights, and ideas on how nonviolent action can, or sometimes fails to transform injustice.
Erica Chenoweth:
I am Erica Chenoweth, they/them. I am the director of the Nonviolent Action Lab and a professor at Harvard University.
Jay Ulfelder:
So what's the purpose of the Nonviolent Action Lab and how did it get started?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah. The purpose of the Nonviolent Action Lab is to serve as an innovation hub for scholars, activists, practitioners, and the public to learn more about effective nonviolent action to transform injustice and deepen democracy. So the primary work of the lab is to produce and disseminate up-to-date trends and interpretations of those trends on where nonviolent action is happening, to what effect, how or whether it's working or not, and really macro trends in the success and failure of mass movements. And part of the reason why this is important to know is because mass movements have been a primary driver of democratic transition around the world for at least the last a hundred and some years. And it really matters what the fates are of especially pro-democracy movements, but increasingly anti-democratic movements and determining the overall distribution of democracy and autocracy around the world.
And in turn, the distribution of autocracy and democracy around the world influences lots of other things that we care about, too, like peace or war, like pathways out of inequality, like cooperation on key issues of our time like climate change, like the sort of stability of the international financial system and economic cooperation to address shocks. So there are lots of things that are affected by the balance of power, as it were, between democracy and autocracy. And that's just at the global level, not to speak of what happens to people who live in countries that are democratic versus undemocratic, and how people are able to actually advocate for and achieve reform that improves their lives in those respective regime types. So I'm very interested in the ultimate outcomes here, but I'm also interested in the way that we shape those outcomes through nonviolent action.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah, got you. And when did the Lab get started? How'd this come about?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah. It really started when I became a professor at Wesleyan University way back in 2008. And then, it was more of a program and it was really oriented around a number of different projects that were focused on collecting data on nonviolent action, but also on counterterrorism and a variety of other state responses to armed resistance actually. And then over time, it's really become much more focused on trying to develop empirical baselines for understanding patterns and outcomes of nonviolent action exclusively, in part because that's my own interest and because there's a very high demand for thorough, rigorous, and up-to-date knowledge that can reach across outside of the ivory tower and inform the strategies and theories of change that many pro-democracy activists and practitioners are using.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. When you say reach outside the ivory tower, what are the specific constituencies you have in mind there?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah, so I think if you think about who the consumers of this material might be, it might be people who are very interested in understanding how the world works. So this could just be your average reader of major newspapers who want to make sense of what they're seeing in a particular case, vis-a-vis the overall trend lines. But it could also be people who are actively trying to promote democracy in really hard contexts, and they're trying to understand what we know about ways that people have effectively wielded nonviolent action to improve the democratic governance in their contexts. There are also, as we've talked about many times, a lot of activists who aren't really interested in democracy reform per se, but they're interested in a particular area that really depends on the proper functioning of democracy. So these can be various reform campaigns in any real sector.
And then, there are activists who are really interested in and concerned about big macro global issues, climate, the economy, global inequality, public health, all kinds of different issues. And there are big questions about what do we know about the most effective ways to organize and cooperate and build coalitions and then engage in different forms of nonviolent contentious action to achieve these changes. And so I think the more that there's an empirical baseline and an inventory of accessible knowledge for people to look to, it can inform how they think about these things. Now, the lab is never going to be directive. We know that no matter what's happened in the past, that doesn't mean we can predict the future. We don't have a crystal ball, nor do we have a linear roadmap to change. But there are different insights and principles and lessons that can emerge from historical data and from comparable cases that sometimes just really help people to think about their own context, their own agency, their options in ways that can be helpful and productive.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. You've alluded to this a bit, but maybe you can get more specific. What are the big projects that the Lab's working on now?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah, so at the moment we are working on, I'd say three big signature data collection projects. The first is the Crowd Counting Consortium, which is a project that aims to collect data on protest, counter protest, and police response on a daily basis in the United States. And this is a project that emerged in collaboration with Jeremy Pressman during the 2017 Women's March. And we've basically been building and expanding and continuing that project ever since. And Jay, you're a huge part of what keeps that project going. And Soha Hammam has now joined the team as well. And we have a variety of research assistants, and over the years have worked with dozens of both research assistants and volunteers to try to get a really good accounting of who's been doing what, where, and to what effect. And that project has a lot of different research projects that are associated with it, but the primary aim of the consortium is to produce high quality near real time data to give a picture of what the landscape looks like and that it's really a public interest project.
And it's been used a lot by journalists and scholars who've been trying to analyze social movement activity in the United States. The second signature project is the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes or NAVCO data project. And this project is one that is what I described as having started when I was an assistant professor at Wesleyan University and in collaboration with Maria Steffen, the first iteration of that project was just trying to count all of the different mass, primarily nonviolent mobilizations in the world since 1900 that were trying to dislodge authoritarian regimes or expel foreign occupiers or colonial powers. And the reason why it's focused on those so-called Maximalist outcomes is because most of the data we have on wars are quite comparable to that, like large scale mass violent mobilizations are typically about issues like that.
So we wanted to develop really the world's first data archive looking at comparable cases where people weren't armed. And so that's where NAVCO came from. And then over the years, we've expanded and updated that project to numerous other iterations, and now what it looks like is instead of 323 such violent and nonviolent campaigns, we have something close to 700 of those campaigns. So almost twice as many, which has really led to incredible insights about the scale and scope of the spread of unarmed mass mobilizations in this current century. So for example, we can say that in the last 24 years, there have been more of these mass unarmed Maximalist campaigns than there were in the entire 20th century, and that helps us to understand the stakes of collecting these data because it's the primary way by far that people organize and mobilize to achieve even very ambitious regime changing outcomes today.
And so it's really important to continually collect and update data so that we understand what's happening with those campaigns. Then the third big data collection project is an offshoot of NAVCO. It's a similar set of cases except that the WIR data, the Women in Resistance data, is focused much more on understanding the gendered composition of these Maximalist campaigns. That data informs an ongoing book project with Zoe Marks on the role of women's participation in the outcomes of these campaigns, which turns out to be very significant. So those are the three signature data collection projects that are ongoing, and that I think really inform a lot of what we can say about whether mass movements for democracy are winning or losing, and what that means going forward for needed adjustments in that space.
Jay Ulfelder:
What about, are there other projects that you'd like the lab to be doing but haven't had the resources, time, bandwidth, whatever it is to be able to do yet? Anything you're hoping to get started on?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah, I mean, I think we're always hoping to find ways to make the data more accessible that we've collected. And so right now, I'd say the data are highly accessible to scholars. It's all very open. We post the data, we post updates in all of our methods, very collaborative with other scholars, et cetera. But I'd like it to be more accessible to people who aren't using it for research purposes, but are using it for learning purposes. So to that end, a lot of the direction I'd like us to go is in more data visualization tools and ways to really learn from the data in a more accessible manner. The second thing is more about trying to build a broader set of tools to disseminate the information. So for example, I'm very interested in more executive education where we can bring together say, foreign service officers and find out what we're all learning about democracy promotion and authoritarian regimes today, and what recent research tells us about effective ways of promoting democracy in hard conditions.
I'd also to have more opportunities for activists to do horizontal learning amongst themselves, so more convenings and workshops. I think one space where there's a lot of room for us to contribute is in linking up lessons learned between US and non-US activists, of course, the non-US activists being the vast majority of the world. And so I think there's much that we can learn from one another based on very honestly similar patterns and trends and challenges that many of our movements are facing. And so I think more global minded convenings of people who are struggling with authoritarian challenges in their countries, and trying to understand how to update and upgrade their techniques of non-violent action to meet these challenges would be a huge contribution. And then the last thing I'll say is that there's a lot of scope for further research on many of the different issues that we've talked about.
And two of the issues that I'm the most excited about diving into, and that will be somewhat part of a book that I'm writing right now, relates to the issue of defections, which really is shorthand for getting more people who currently support the opponent to stop supporting the opponent. And defections, there's a huge set of question marks around how to make that happen and what sequence of tactics is effective, what messages are effective, what timing works best, how social networks interact with this, how social position or identity intersects with these questions. And so, there's a huge just open research field in that area that I hope gets a lot of attention and that we'd like the Lab to contribute to. And then, the second one is around technology and movements. So it's always true that movements appropriate whatever technology is characteristic of their time and often innovate.
So there was a lot of talk about how important social media was at the beginning, at least of the Arab spring. It's always a double-edged sword because of course, the government is the opponent and they have access to the technology too and can use it for their purposes, but the learning curve can be much quicker on that side because they've got more centralized and focused resources to bring to bear on figuring out how to use the technologies to suppress movements, for example, or at least sideline them politically. So one of the big questions now is around AI, and there's a lot of skepticism that I've heard in many movement and activist circles about AI, just suggesting it's the Panopticon or it's like there's just so many issues with it that it's something to just critique and be pessimistic about. But with any technology, it's also a tool. And I'm really interested in and curious about ways that movements can actually use AI to help themselves.
So there's been some suggestion among the research assistants and the Lab at least, that if we even put into ChatGPT the question of, "How can AI help movements," it actually spits out some pretty interesting ideas that make a lot of sense. Things like help with strategic thinking, help with some information gathering or intelligence gathering that would be too hard for people to do themselves. And I think that it's an interesting question. Obviously, there's a lot to it. There's a lot of ethical questions, but I think we should ask them and we should explore what's possible and what's helpful. And I'd like the Lab to be looking into those questions as well.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah, a little technological Judo.
Erica Chenoweth:
Right.
Jay Ulfelder:
You've also alluded to this a bit, but I'm wondering, you've been working at the intersection of academia and practice in this area for a while now, and I'm wondering what you think academic research can bring to political activism and what are the big challenges to making that happen?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah, I mean, I would say that political activism I think works well when the people who are leading and organizing movements have a theory of change that meets the current challenges and the current moment that they're in. And so, academic research often can help to assess both the moment that we're in, the scale and scope of the challenges, comparable challenges or situations from before, and also the intellectual or research-oriented theories that might be helpful and making sense of how you get from A to B.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth:
So, that's not always true. A lot of academic research is not written to be prescriptive necessarily. A lot of it is written to be descriptive or explanatory, but it might have implications or applications that could be useful. And in any case, we know that governments actually read this research and they evaluate the theories of change that might be used to destabilize them, and they do take it as prescriptive and they respond. So I think that having some capacity for learning within movements is always helpful. And I actually think there's a lot that academic research can do to help to inspire and give people hope. There's some interesting research out there about the emotions that are required for long-term engagement in activism.
And hope is like... Feelings of hope are really, really important because when people feel feelings of resignation, it's totally demobilizing, right? But feelings of hope and agency are really important. And one of the most effective tools I've ever seen in supporting those experiences is learning from cases where people rose above something that looked impossible or dire, and being able to really relate and identify with one's current circumstances. A really powerful example of this was the way that learning among black activists in the United States in the middle of the 20th century from Gandhi's campaigns in India, informed whole networks of activists and organizers, especially in the South, but not just in the South, to mobilize against Jim Crow. And they took a really educational approach to trying to transmit what they learned. So there were lots of sessions where people would relate what they had learned by even visiting India and visiting Gandhi's Ashram and having the experience of learning about the Salt March and other things, and then coming back and transmitting that information to small groups of activists in the United States.
And so, I really do think it's meaningful when there are those interchanges and that it really informs people's own sense of self-advocacy. The last thing I'll say is that universities and student life in general do have a high association with the organizing of protests. So Sirianne Dahlum, a Norwegian scholar, has written a lot about this, that she's used some of the NAVCO data and other data on protest patterns and geolocated data with the origins of those campaigns and universities that were in those places. There's just a high correlation between the sort of genesis of mass movements and it being a college town or university town. And so that shouldn't be too surprising because of the role of intellectuals in mass movements over the millennia. But in this instance, I think it really points strongly to the importance of education, especially political education, and the way that movements develop and operate.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah, and this comes back to what you were saying earlier about the desire to looking ahead with what the Lab's doing to a crucial thing being, making all this material more accessible. I mean, you could have the most detailed catalog of movements and events, but if people can't see it, find it, interact with it, it's not going to serve that function.
Erica Chenoweth:
Absolutely.
Jay Ulfelder:
So what about the other direction? What do you think academics gain from exposure to or involvement in activism? Are there ways you think that makes their scholarly work better?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah, I mean, certainly exposure to activism has been really important in helping me identify what kind of problems I want to solve through my research. I think some of the most interesting research ideas that I've gotten have come from conversations with activists where they had a question that I didn't think our field had an answer to. And so I think it's incredibly generative. I also think that in terms of the question of involvement in activism, I don't know that involvement in activism is necessary to gain really rigorous insights into how activists think and how their movements unfold and things like that. And there's a school of thought that a healthy distance from that type of activity in one's own personal life can actually make people more impartial or dispassionate observers of the phenomenon, and then there's another camp that suggests that participation in movements might yield intuitions and experiences that actually better inform your ability to observe that in others.
So whether that's having a particular emotional experience when something goes down at a protest, or whether it's sitting in a meeting hashing out or watching arguments take place about different tactical or strategic questions, the experience of that in one school of thought really does help to make you a better researcher. I'm kind of agnostic to be honest about which of those perspectives is right, but I'll say that engaging with people who are putting the ideas into action one way or the other is really important to becoming at least somebody who's studying questions that are relevant. So if you're trying to make an impact, you can't really do it without talking to people for whom the impacts are real. And that, I think, is true one way or the other.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah, 2024 looks like a crucial year in American politics, that's maybe putting it lightly.
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah.
Jay Ulfelder:
And I know you are open about the Lab's and your own desire to try to defend and deepen democracy in the US and elsewhere. Are there any lessons from academic research or your own experience that you think are especially relevant as we're heading into and through this fall's elections in the US?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah, I mean, I think about this a lot from the perspective of just trying to understand what a civil society needs to both prevent the electoral success of authoritarianism and also what a civil society needs to do to prepare in case it can't prevent that electoral success. So Zoe, Marks and I wrote a working paper that was published a little over a year ago now, which was a strategic assessment of pro-democracy organizing in the United States. And my overall take from it, which is of course informed by a lot of research on this topic, is that what's really needed is the building of a really large pro-democracy coalition that's difficult to break. So fragmentation and the anti-authoritarian coalition is the biggest threat to success. So the coalition has to be united. Even if there's not a lot of conformity within it, it has to be united around the commitment to advancing and promoting democracy.
The second thing is that the movements do need to be able to initiate and illicit defections, which means that they need to get people to not support the authoritarian movement, especially during the prevention phase, but if that fails in the response phase, so that's getting people to not cooperate with or go along with, especially institutional changes that make the country more authoritarian. And then, the third thing that they need to do is basically not rely exclusively on street protest as the primary lever that they pull every time something happens that's objectionable. And the reason is because there are actually many reasons for this, but it's important for movements to be able to develop different types of techniques that are nonviolent, but also that if they're needed, can actually apply more political or economic pressure. So this is the ability to have strikes, even a general strike if needed.
And then the fourth thing that movements have done in the past is that they've developed a resilience to repression. So this is basically figuring out what kind of infrastructure the movement would need to survive, even if repression really escalated against people who are seen to be affiliated with the movement, or it became more indiscriminate even than that. And so these are just things that countries that have collapsed into authoritarianism have had to deal with. And the fates of the pro-democracy project in those countries has really, I think, depended on how prepared the civil society was to meet those four different key movement challenges. And so I think that the key lesson is that in the United States, we don't necessarily need to wait to find out the outcome of the election to have serious conversations about what those four things would require and what they would look like.
So that's the point that we make in our paper. And the, I think, main takeaway is... Or, the main recommendation is that anybody who even conceives of themselves somewhat as being involved in the project of defending and improving American democracy should be having very rigorous and sustained conversations with one another right now about how they're going to cooperate going forward. And if there's no kind of acute moment in which democracy is really under threat in the United States, it will just have made our democratic muscles stronger for those people to be convening and cooperating with one another. And if they are called upon, they will not have to be building the ship as they're flying it. They will already have had some established relationships, trust will have already been built, and that fragmentation that's so endemic to American civil society will be slightly less than it was a year ago, hopefully. So that's, I think, from the civil resistance, civil society perspective, what I would say about it.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. And what's your sense of where that network building project is now, if you were reading or assessing?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah, it's a good... I haven't, because I was in a position to do a bit of a more thorough assessment at that time in the summer and fall before that paper came out, I haven't done a similar thorough assessment, so I don't have as good an answer to your question right now as I wish I could. But I would simply say that there's never too much and I'd like to see more.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. This is kind of expanding the similar question to a global level. Last week I know that Stanford professor, Larry Diamond spoke at the Ash Center about the ongoing global democratic recession, which you've also referred to. I know that neither you nor I was able to be at that event, but I gather that your work came up in the conversation, and specifically that Larry affirmed yours and others' findings on the power of nonviolent resistance, but that he also talked about Myanmar as a case that shows how violent resistance can also be effective, I think referring to the ongoing civil war there and the progress being made on the rebel side. Given the topicality of these issues, I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about your own ongoing work on the global democratic recession. I know you mentioned the book you're working on that topic. And more broadly, on long-term trends in the efficacy of nonviolent and violent resistance. Are those trends changing? Where do things stand now?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah, so I think that the long-term trends in the efficacy of nonviolent and violent resistance are that we're in a historical low point for the success of either type of resistance. And the fact that we're in a historical low point and the efficacy of both nonviolent and violent resistance is kind of what motivated my next book, which is called The End of People Power. And maybe there should be a question mark after that title. There will be a subtitle, I'm sure that will maybe hedge that a little bit. But the overall point is that we're at a historic low point because the governments that these movements have facing have become so much better at maintaining their power in the face of these challenges than they were 20, 30, 50 years ago. And so there's a big question about why that's the case. Why are authoritarian regimes more durable right now than they used to be and more safe from popular challenges of any kind?
And so that book will explore that question, and it will also provide some potential insights into what we've learned from some ongoing movements that have seen some success about what types of adaptations are needed to the 20th century playbook of mass movements in order to confront this adaptive autocratic coalition. So that's what that book is about. I'll say on the issue of Myanmar, I'd say two things about that. The first is that it's true that the armed struggle in Myanmar has proved more resilient and potentially more destabilizing and threatening to the junta there than previous armed movements have in Burma. That's definitely true. However, they haven't won. They have not actually led to a huge breakthrough where the junta has collapsed and the revolutionary groups have taken power. And so it's an ongoing conflict. And because of that, I think it's too early to say that it's proven that armed resistance is more effective.
The second thing I'll say about it is that the way that these movements tend to fight strongly impacts, at least in historical data, the types of countries that emerge in the aftermath. There are almost no cases where the primary mode of resistance was armed struggle in a civil conflict, and the country eventually became a democracy within the next five to 10 years. One of the few cases where that happened is Costa Rica where a civil war there ended and the country transitioned to democracy, but in that case, they literally abolished the military. So you weren't going to see... That was a very unique case. But other than that, basically countries that emerge from civil conflicts and transition to democratic countries are almost uniformly anti-colonial movements that have sometimes a quite long and bumpy road to democratic governance, or they are primarily nonviolent resistance movements.
So what that says about cases like Myanmar or say Kosovo, or other cases where there was violent resistance that worked is that that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work to create a functioning democracy. And that's just something to say, just to maybe address some of the expectations that people might have for what Myanmar might look like even if this armed movement does have the breakthrough it seeks against the junta.
Jay Ulfelder:
And it seems like a really important point, or part of what you're saying here is that even a long-term trend of declining efficacy and nonviolent resistance does not automatically imply that violent or armed resistance is a better alternative. It's not a zero sum thing here. What you've been seeing is a decline in the efficacy of both. So-
Erica Chenoweth:
Yep.
Jay Ulfelder:
... frustration with the lack of success of recent movements should not necessarily make the prospect of armed resistance more appealing as clearly what you're trying to do in your work is turn the question towards how do we make nonviolent resistance, civil resistance more effective under these circumstances because we continue to see that violent resistance is very rarely effective at accomplishing those goals. And to the point you're making about Myanmar, tends to on average, lead to worse post-movement outcomes as well. Is that a fair assessment?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah, I think that's right. And I also think that the other thing is is it's incredibly costly. So this is the thing, when people look at a nonviolent movement and say, "Oh my God, I can't believe almost a thousand people have died in this nonviolent movement, clearly nonviolent resistance doesn't work." What they miss is compared to what alternatives, so if people are using armed and unarmed resistance or they're using armed resistance, we know from our data that the fatality rates skyrocket. In my paper with Chris Shea on when we were releasing the 2.1 version of NAVCO a couple of years ago, what we found is that there's a 23 to one difference in the fatality rates of the average armed campaign to the average nonviolent campaign.
Jay Ulfelder:
Wow.
Erica Chenoweth:
So it's a really significant difference, and there are lots of maybe obvious in some counterintuitive political reasons why that's the case in many of these contexts, but the main thing to say is that the places where Maximalist campaigns are going on are countries where other institutional channels of affecting change are either not available or have been closed down or have totally failed. And so what you're seeing is mobilization in really hard places, really repressive places one way or the other. And so given any type of resistance, the research shows us over and over that unarmed resistance is the less costly type of resistance for the large majority of people. That doesn't mean it's costless.
Jay Ulfelder:
Right.
Erica Chenoweth:
And so I think part of what people think of when they think of nonviolent resistance is also that it's going to be costless or that people won't get hurt or something like that, or that success requires no one to get hurt, or something like that. And I think that that's just a function of a failure on our part to better educate and popularize the theories of nonviolent action in historical cases that show the political and strategic dynamics of nonviolent action in the face of armed repression.
Jay Ulfelder:
Right. And to acknowledge the complexity of many of those cases rather than certainly in the American version, a tendency to smooth over and simplify those movements from a historical perspective, at least in popular education around them.
Erica Chenoweth:
Absolutely.
Jay Ulfelder:
I'm wondering about you personally. So how'd you get started in this field? What got you interested in studying civil resistance in particular?
Erica Chenoweth:
Yeah. I was working on my doctorate, which was on actually trying to understand why terrorism happens so much in democracies where there are so many other ways that people can express their political views and try to make change, and I ended up going to a workshop that was about trying to encourage people who were teaching security related classes to teach about nonviolent conflict. This was a pedagogical workshop put on by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. And it's really such an important pivotal moment in my research interests and career trajectory because that's where I first met Maria Steffen and Hardy Merriman, and so many of the people that I would come to see as valued colleagues and collaborators in this research. But basically at that workshop, they were expressing all of these ideas about nonviolent resistance as being potentially as effective or more effective than armed struggle. I was quite dubious about those claims. I wondered whether there was very strong empirical support for them.
And that's when Maria and I paired up and decided together to undertake some research and build the first NAVCO dataset. And that's what actually proved the civil resistance optimists, I think, that we're onto something, and that my skepticism had been somewhat misplaced. I think that as we've just been talking about, new research suggests that there might be some important variation in time, and as to how durable that finding is when there is an emerging authoritarian coalition in the world that is very committed to suppressing those movements, but needless to say that the research goes on because it's absolutely fascinating. I think it's really important, and I think that like I alluded to earlier, it's very inspiring. It helps one understand the things that can be changed and how we might work together to change them. And there are historical cases that are absolutely pivotal in the trajectory of world history that I think don't get enough credit. So I'd like to be one of the many people out there in the world that's helping to amplify them.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. Yeah. This is the, I don't know whether to call it the joy or the curse of social science, somebody studying a system that is itself constantly evolving and changing as well. So as you learn a set of lessons from one state of the system, it moves on. You have to try to move with it.
Erica Chenoweth:
I think that's true, but I think that's a really important point. I think this isn't, maybe to one of your earlier questions, something that the scientific disciplines can bring to the study and practice of civil resistance is the constant willingness to subject our prior assumptions and our prior understandings of something to rigorous empirical tests with new evidence.
Jay Ulfelder:
Right.
Erica Chenoweth:
And I think that's really important because the stakes are really high, and it's really easy to also become wedded to particular ideas that don't work anymore. And so I think if a person has the capacity to collect evidence and try to refresh what we think we know about these things, then that can itself be a contribution to the body of knowledge and work around both research and practice and these things. That's a bit removed from the high stakes political conversations around these things.
Jay Ulfelder:
Right. I'll ask you this last question. If you feel like answering it, go for it. I'm wondering if you suddenly had to do something completely different, you've put so much time and energy into this work for so many years, what would that be? What else excites you or interest you in the world?
Erica Chenoweth:
I think I might really give it a go trying to be a full-time farmer, but that's a scary thing to say because that's a... Speaking of AI, there was a story in Washington Post about a year ago, maybe a year and a half, where it was talking about the most vulnerable sectors to the development of AI. And in it, it said that academics and people in the professional jobs were the most at risk, whereas people who worked in agriculture, farmers, foresters, people like that were the least at risk. So it got me-
Jay Ulfelder:
The electricians and plumbers, too.
Erica Chenoweth:
Exactly. Exactly. But my partner and I do have a small family farm that we have been lovingly tending to, and I think if I wasn't doing this for some reason or another, we'd be doing that more and in earnest, and seeing what we could contribute to our communities that way.
Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, thanks so much for making the time, and yeah, I always learn a lot talking to you. So...
Erica Chenoweth:
Likewise.
Jay Ulfelder:
Thank you for listening to the Nonviolent Action Lab podcast, hosted by me, Jay Ulfelder, and produced at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. Please rate and review us wherever you listen. You can find more information about the Nonviolent Action Lab and links to our work in the show notes below. See you next time.