How Strong Is the Evidence for Peaceful Resistance? Not Very.

Abstract

Are peaceful social movements really more effective than violent ones? Chenoweth and Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works argues that nonviolent resistance consistently outperforms violent resistance in achieving democratic outcomes. This conclusion has had enormous influence among academics, political actors, the media, and on-the-ground activists. We find that some results were misreported in ways that make the data appear to support civil resistance when they do not. Moreover, we find that the results are not robust to modest and reasonable changes in model specification, that they are sensitive to omitted variable bias, and that they rely on instrumental variable models with implausible assumptions that yield unstable estimates. Taken together, our replication and extension suggest that the available cross-national evidence provides no clear basis for the claim that nonviolent campaigns are substantially more effective than violent ones. This is not evidence that nonviolence backfires; it is evidence that the strong, unconditional advantage reported in Why Civil Resistance Works is not supported by the data. Our findings underscore the need for methodological re-examinations of foundational works.

Keywords: Civil Resistance, Peaceful Resistance, Democratic Success, Authoritarian Regimes, Nonviolent Protest, Spatiotemporal Heterogeneity, Replication