church basements and sparsely attended
Webinars. “A decade ago, if you’d asked
me to list the major experts working in
this field I could have named them all
off the top of my head,” Merriman went
on. “Now I can’t, because the mainstream
is finally taking it seriously.”
As the subdiscipline has crept to-
ward the center of academic discourse,
it has also been recast as a science. One
of Chenoweth’s projects at Harvard is
called the Nonviolent Action Lab. Last
year, in the online journal Nature Human
Behaviour, Chenoweth and the inter-
national-relations scholar Margherita
Belgioioso published a paper titled “The
Physics of Dissent and the Effects of
Movement Momentum,” which com-
pares the properties of social unrest to
the laws of Newtonian mechanics. “We
propose that the momentum of dissent
is a product of participation (mass) and
the number of protest events in a week
(velocity),” Chenoweth and Belgioioso
write. They even include some back-
of-the-envelope equations that dissi-
dents can use, in the heat of nonviolent
battle, to “easily quantify their coercive
potential.”
In “Civil Resistance: What Everyone
Needs to Know,” Chenoweth describes
the standard, top-down theory of power,
which “focuses on the near-invincibility
of entrenched power and implies that
only militant and violent action can chal-
lenge the system.” Chenoweth and other
civil-resistance scholars propose an al-
ternative theory, one in which “political
power comes from the ability to elicit
others’ voluntary obedience.” (As Fred-
erick Douglass put it, “The limits of ty-
rants are prescribed by the endurance of
those whom they oppress.”) According
to this view, even totalitarian states rely
on the consent of their citizens, espe-
cially those who make up the regime’s
“pillars of support”—bureaucrats, busi-
ness leaders, loyalist media, and so on.
When those pillars erode—when tax
collectors stop filling the government’s
coffers; when soldiers disobey orders, or
simply call in sick; when formerly tri-
umphalist opinion columnists and TV
broadcasters start to waver—the colos-
sus of state power can collapse, some-
times within a matter of days. The study
of civil resistance, then, is in large part
the study of how movements can win
“defections”—how they can turn obedi-
ent subjects of the regime into allies of
the disobedient majority.
In the mid-nineteen-fifties, James
Lawson, a Methodist deacon from Ohio,
travelled to India to study with Gandhi’s
disciples. When Lawson returned to the
United States, he became a close asso-
ciate of Martin Luther King, Jr., who
called him “the leading theorist and strat-
egist of nonviolence in the world.” In
1959, Lawson planned and led the lunch-
counter sit-ins in Nashville, the remark-
ably successful desegregation campaign
that became a template for many of the
future actions of the civil-rights movement.
Just as the Indian independence move-
ment had wielded economic power—for
example, by boycotting British salt and
textiles—Lawson targeted white-owned
department stores. “At the beginning of
1960, I would guess we had only ten or
fifteen per cent of the local Black popu-
lation on our side, and far less, obviously,
of the white population,” Lawson told
me recently. “People said, ‘Reverend Law-
son, it’s not enough.’ I said, ‘We stay dis-
ciplined, and we stick to the plan.’ By
May 10, 1960, the ‘Whites Only’ and ‘Col-
ored Only’ signs started to fall.”
Now ninety-two, Lawson teaches
workshops on civil resistance at the
University of California, Los Angeles,
and at an independent retreat called the
James Lawson Institute, which has been
held in various cities in the past six years.
(Chenoweth, who has spoken at the re-
treat several times, refers to Lawson asa mentor.) In the summer of 2014, soon
after the shooting of Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Missouri, a young organizer
named Nicole Carty attended the James
Lawson Institute in Nashville. “A few
hours away, protests were popping off in
Ferguson,” Carty told me. “Getting to
sit with James Lawson and pick his brain
in that moment, it transformed my think-
ing about what I should do next.” The
following year, after a Minneapolis po-
lice officer shot a Black man named Jamar
Clarke, Carty helped organizers there
plan their next series of tactics, which
included an occupation of the Fourth
Precinct that lasted more than two weeks
and protests that shut down the security
line at the Minneapolis airport. A few
weeks later, the county prosecutor an-
nounced that he would no longer use
grand juries in police-shooting cases, a
decision that drew praise from activists.
“It’s easy to be reactive—something bad
happens, you take to the streets,” Carty
said. “The real craft is in the planning,
the strategizing. Having an entire se-
quence of tactics in mind—if I do this,
then this, how do I ultimately win?”
In 1973, the political scientist Gene
Sharp published “The Politics of Non-
violent Action,” a three-volume work
based on his Oxford University doctoral
thesis. The second volume was a sweep-
ing taxonomy—an attempt to do for civil-
resistance theory what Linnaeus had done
for biology. Drawing on centuries of ex-
amples, Sharp identified a hundred and“It’s getting serious—he left his stuff.”