
Abstract
Scholars argue that nonviolence is likelier to cause political change in comparison to other strategies, including violence. This study identifies issues throughout this literature ranging from coding procedures, observational sampling, to interpretations of phenomena. If unarmed violence, reactive violence, and omitted cases are analyzed, nonviolent success rates are worse than formerly considered. Inclusion of 19th century (1800–1900) cases and previously unanalyzed cases from the 20th century reveals that nonviolent campaigns experienced a 48% rate of success, whereas campaigns that adopted unarmed violence were 61% successful, campaigns utilizing reactive unarmed violence were 60% successful, and 30% of fully violent campaigns were successful. Nonviolence is not a causal determinant of political change, but rather, its implementation falls short of a probabilistic coin toss. There is reason to presume this literature is biased toward elite interests in similar ways to how scientific inquiry on dietary and substance guidelines has historically been skewed by corporatism.
Keywords protest, revolution, nonviolence, social movements, sociology, political science
After around a half decade of working with popular data on nonviolent civil resistance, I discovered a number of errors and discrepancies pertaining to “imprecise, and in some instances, blatantly erroneous measurements of empirical phenomena.”Widely utilized data that have been used to make generalizations do not represent an empirically valid sample of nonviolent and violent social movements/campaigns. - In this article I disaggregate the nonviolence/violence dichotomy, include more measurements of protest strategies as well a more complete sample of cases. In total, all regime-change seeking movements and revolutions from 1800-2006 are assessed.
The findings reveal the following rates of success:
Nonviolent campaign (N = 94) 48%
Unarmed violent campaign (N = 30) 61%
Reactive unarmed violence (N = 10) 60%
Violent campaign (N = 262) 30%
*There are plans for the print issue of this publication to feature a response from scholars that I critique as well as follow up response by me.