42 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
cratic moments and contexts,” Roma-
now, of Momentum, told me. “It’s not a
coincidence that Black Americans have
led when it came to bringing civil-resis-
tance tactics into American organizing,
because Black Americans have not been
living in a democracy for four hundred
years.” Romanow and I were speaking
in late October. “Many people now rightly
think that, if things go off the rails dur-
ing or after this election, the institutions
alone might not necessarily save us,” she
continued. “Once you realize that, you
can go pretty quickly from despair to ex-
hilaration: the institutions can’t save us,
but maybe we can save ourselves.”L
ike many academics, Chenoweth is
wary of being prescriptive. “I don’t
think it’s my job to tell people how to
liberate themselves,” Chenoweth told
me. “I do, however, think it can be use-
ful to document patterns.” Sometimes
the task is as simple as highlighting
tactics that have been successful in the
past, enabling future activists to think
more creatively. During a recent lecture
at Wellesley, Chenoweth described an
anecdote relayed by a colleague, Ste-
phen Zunes, about an action under-
taken by a group of dissidents advocat-
ing for the autonomy of Western Sahara,
a territory occupied by Morocco. Under
Moroccan law, it is illegal to fly the flag
of Western Sahara. To protest this law,
instead of engaging in civil disobedi-
ence directly dissidents tied flags to the
tails of dozens of feral cats. Chenoweth
called this “a dilemma action,” because
the government troops had to “either
chase cats around the alleyways or let
the flag fly. It’s a terrible set of choices
for the opponent, and it’s humiliating.”
The first version of the NAVCO data
set, now known as NAVCO 1.0, was, in
Chenoweth’s words, “chunky data.” Sub-
sequent iterations have yielded more gran-
ular findings. For example, when a civil-
resistance campaign does succeed in
overthrowing an oppressive government,
the new government it installs is far more
likely to remain stable and democratic.
The data also yielded a pattern so sim-
ple and catchy that Chenoweth revealed
it, in 2013, in the form of a TED talk—
the 3.5 Percent Rule, which states that in
every case where a mass-resistance cam-
paign has attracted the “active and sus-
tained participation” of at least three andbuilding a stage with a professional-
grade sound system. Musicians held con-
certs in the square, helping to sustain a
festive atmosphere and attract a wide
cross-section of visitors, some of whom
became active in the struggle. Cheno-
weth told me, “If I had to pick one char-
acteristic that correlates with a move-
ment’s success, it’s the extent to which
everyone in society—children, disabled
people, grandmas—feels that they can
either actively or passively participate.”
While at the University of Oslo, in
the nineteen-fifties, Sharp crossed paths
with George Lakey, another American
activist and student of nonviolence. Lakey
went on to work as a civil-rights orga-
nizer during the Freedom Summer Proj-
ect of 1964, as a blockade-runner during
the Vietnam War, as an environmental
organizer fighting mountaintop removal,
and, in 2020, as a democracy activist ad-
vising Americans on how to forestall a
potential coup. In the two-thousands,
Lakey taught at Swarthmore, where he
and several students started the Global
Nonviolent Action Database, a list of ac-
tivist campaigns throughout history.
“Sharp’s oldest example, in ‘The Politics
of Nonviolent Action,’ was the plebeian
uprising in ancient Rome, 494 B.C.E.,”
Lakey told me. “Imagine how thrilled
one of my grad students was when he
found one that was centuries older”—a
strike among Egyptian laborers building
a tomb for Ramesses III, in 1170 B.C.E.
Throughout history there have been wars,
and, at least since Herodotus, there have
been military historians. Likewise, Lakey
pointed out, “nonviolent struggle has al-
ways been with us, but for a long time,
as a species, we’ve been blind to it.”
Some American historians argue that
the Revolutionary War was only the vi-
olent culmination of a longer and more
consequential nonviolent struggle. “What
do we mean by the revolution?” John
Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in
- “The war? That was no part of the
revolution; it was only an effect and a
consequence of it.” Adams went on to
refer to a period of “fifteen years, before
a drop of blood was shed at Lexington,”
during which the colonists boycotted
British goods, destroyed British prop-
erty, distributed illegal pamphlets, and
set up alternative institutions such as the
Constitutional Convention. “Civil resis-
tance repeatedly shows up in undemo-
a half per cent of the country’s popula-
tion, the campaign has achieved its goal.
The 3.5 Percent Rule is meant to be
descriptive, not predictive, a caveat that
Chenoweth often repeats but that activ-
ists do not always hear. Since the talk,
Chenoweth has become aware of two
campaigns, in Brunei and Bahrain, that
failed despite engaging more than three
and a half per cent of the country’s pop-
ulation. Although civil-resistance cam-
paigns in the past decade have contin-
ued to succeed more often than the armed
ones, the success rate of all maximalist
campaigns is dropping, as regimes be-
come more proficient at surveilling and
subduing rebellions. “I really blame the
Internet,” Chenoweth said recently on a
podcast. Although the Internet is good
at “getting people to the streets quickly,
in large numbers,” its costs to movements
may outweigh its benefits. Also, momen-
tum can be difficult to sustain without
the more painstaking work of person-
to-person organizing.
One of Chenoweth’s side projects,
the Crowd Counting Consortium, at-
tempts to quantify, in close to real time,
the depth and breadth of the American
protest movement, including both anti-
Trump and pro-Trump demonstrations.
Without such a count, if the anti-Trump
resistance did reach the three-and-a-
half-per-cent threshold—about eleven
and a half million people—how would
anyone know? The project is a collab-
oration between Chenoweth; Jeremy
Pressman, a political scientist at the Uni-
versity of Connecticut; and a rotating
crew of volunteers who verify reports of
protests, in the press or on social media,
and convert them into raw data. One
of the most diligent volunteers is Zoe
Marks, a scholar of African politics at
the Kennedy School, who happens to be
Chenoweth’s partner. “A lot of our date
nights involve spreadsheets,” Chenoweth
told me, a bit bashfully.
According to the Crowd Counting
data, 97.7 per cent of Black Lives Matter
protests this past summer were free of
violence, with no injuries reported by
protesters, police, or bystanders. “These
figures should correct the narrative that
the protests were overtaken by rioting,”
Chenoweth and Pressman wrote in a re-
cent Washington Post article. Of course,
in a world that includes social media and
Rupert Murdoch, the narrative that should