THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 41
The movement in the Philippines alter-
nated rallies with strikes and boycotts; it
also drew the participation of a wide
array of civil-society leaders, including
clergy and teachers, many of whom even-
tually turned against the regime.) In the
database, Chenoweth and Stephan con-
densed each campaign’s months or years
of struggle into a binary line of code: vi-
olent or nonviolent, success or failure.
Chenoweth and Stephan selected only
“maximalist” resistance campaigns—big
movements, with a thousand or more
participants, that sought to fundamen-
tally alter a nation’s political order, either
by seceding or by overthrowing a for-
eign occupier or a head of state. The
American civil-rights movement of the
nineteen-sixties was not included in the
NAVCO data; although there were seces-
sionists and insurgents within the move-
ment, its main demands were reformist,
not revolutionary. Moreover, campaigns
were counted as successful only if their
goals were achieved within a year of peak
activity, without an unrelated interven-
tion. The Greek resistance to the Nazis
was coded as a failure, because although
the movement contributed to the Nazis’
retreat from Greece, Allied troops seemed
to contribute more. The Indian indepen-
dence movement, the popular archetype
of nonviolent insurrection, was classified
as a partial success—for one thing, the
British did eventually quit India, but not
within a year. Even taking these restric-
tions into account, more than half of the
civil-resistance campaigns in the NAVCO
data set were successes, a much starker
result than Chenoweth had anticipated.
Tom Hastings, a longtime activist and
scholar of nonviolence, told me, “I’ve
been at this since the sixties, and I can
break that time up into two periods: B.C.
and A.C., Before Chenoweth and After
Chenoweth. For a long time, there have
been those of us who had a philosoph-
ical commitment to nonviolence, or an
intuition that nonviolence puts you at a
strategic advantage. Erica and Maria took
that intuition and empirically proved it.”
Since 2011, Chenoweth has overseen
the expansion of the database, and pub-
lished dozens of journal articles, book
chapters, and monographs. (Chenoweth
and Stephan remain friends and occa-
sional collaborators, but Stephan worked
for several years at the United States In-
stitute of Peace, a nonpartisan body
founded by Congress, which limited
what she could say in public.) Many of
Chenoweth’s articles are quantitative
and technical, but the upshot is simple
enough: civil-resistance movements pre-
vail far more often than armed move-
ments do (about 1.95 times more often,
according to the most recent version of
the data). This seems to hold true across
decades and continents, in democracies
and autocracies, against weak regimes
and strong ones.
In September of 2000, Slobodan Mi-
losevic, who had been the dictator of Ser-
bia for more than a decade, attempted to
falsify election results in order to stay in
power. In response, a student-led move-
ment called Otpor coördinated a variety
of tactics—highway blockades, subver-
sive street theatre, a coal miners’ strike.
The resistance was widely perceived as
nonviolent and legitimate, and it grew
quickly, gaining support among Serbs of
every age and from all parts of the coun-
try. A Serbian policeman, ordered to shoot
into a crowd of protesters, held his fire;
he later told journalists that, given the
cross-section of people present, he couldn’t
rule out the possibility that one of them
was his child. By early October, Milose-
vic had no choice but to leave office. The
following year, he was brought to The
Hague and tried for war crimes. Ivan Ma-
rovic, who was one of the leaders of Otpor,
told me that, when he recounts the story
of the movement, people often argue that
its success must have been a fluke. Headded, “Now I can just show them Maria
and Erica’s book and say, ‘Don’t argue
with me, argue with the numbers.’”A
ndre Henry, the musician and or-
ganizer, has been active with sev-
eral groups in Pasadena, California, where
he lives. They include the local chapter
of Black Lives Matter, an interfaith group
called L.A. Voice, and the Jenga Club, a
name that refers to the goal of toppling
unjust social structures by removing pil-lars of support. In October, after a Pas-
adena police officer shot and killed a Black
man named Anthony McClain, Black
Lives Matter Pasadena wanted to pres-
sure the mayor into releasing the officer’s
body-camera footage. “Normally, we
would probably just do a march, but be-
cause of COVID we had to get creative,”
Henry told me. Someone remembered
No. 42 on Sharp’s list of nonviolent ac-
tions: motorcades. “We drove really slowly,
gaining more visibility the whole way,”
Henry said. “It became a big enough deal
that the mayor committed to releasing
the footage the next day.”
Henry and I were speaking, over
Zoom, shortly before Election Day. “I’m
talking to organizers about what they’ve
got planned if Trump uses outright Fas-
cist tactics to stay in power,” he said. “I
hear a lot of ‘We’ll stay in the streets
until our demands are met!’ To which I
go, ‘Yeah, getting in the streets is good,
and it looks good on Instagram. But it’s
not magic, where you chant “We don’t
like this” until the powers that be have
a change of heart. Who’s researching the
real points of economic and social lever-
age?’” Henry leaned out of the frame
for a moment. When he came back into
view, he was holding a short book, co-
authored by Sharp, that he was in the
process of rereading: “The Anti-Coup.”
Sharp, who died in 2018, was nomi-
nated several times for the Nobel Peace
Prize, and he had a research appointment
at Harvard, but his primary job was di-
rector of the Albert Einstein Institution,
a small nonprofit that he ran out of his
row house in East Boston. A pamphlet-
size précis of his findings, “From Dicta-
torship to Democracy,” was published in
1993 and circulated in Burma, Serbia,
Egypt, and several other countries on the
brink of revolution. In 2011, at the Oc-
cupy Wall Street encampment, in New
York, activists set up a community kitchen,
a library, and a media hub to disseminate
live streams generated by the movement—
all examples of what Sharp called “alter-
native social institutions.” If protests are
expressions of what a movement is against,
then alternative institutions can be man-
ifestations of what a movement is for, a
glimpse of how the world might look
once it has been transformed.
During the Egyptian Revolution,
activists occupied Tahrir Square, in
Cairo, staffing ad-hoc checkpoints and